The technology that we make use of every day has become such an integral part of our daily lives that we often take it for granted. Modern technology allows us access to the total sum of human knowledge, instant global communication, and even the ability to do our jobs without having to leave our homes. Tech has changed in countless ways over the last few decades, and much of it would not have been possible without the innovations by these industry leaders.

 

Douglas Engelbart

Douglas Engelbart is most well-known for creating the modern iteration of the mouse that we all know and use every single day. His invention came at a time when we didn’t have a universal way of moving a cursor on a screen, and his small but advanced invention changed how we interacted with computers forever.

But this was only a small part of a much larger project that he had been working on, and would go on to release a number of others that we use every day, such as hyperlinks and text editing.

Norman Abramson

Abramson is a Hawaiian native that’s known for giving rise to the powerful wireless LAN technologies that are quickly becoming the standard for most modern networking. His achievement started with the world’s first wireless local area network, which was known as ALOHAnet.

Abramson designed the technology at the University of Hawaii, and it was the first time that a person was able to transmit data using only radio signals, which would later lead to Wi-Fi technology becoming an important way of transmitting data in the average household, from YouTube videos to horse betting sites in NZ. In fact, his innovation was necessary, as the many universities in Hawaii are located on different islands, but they all needed a way to communicate and transmit data among one another.

Marty Cooper

The smartphones that we have today are a far cry from the world’s first mobile phones that were invented in the 1970s; but without those very early devices, we would never have the incredible mobile technology that we have today, and much of it can be linked to Marty Cooper.

Cooper was part of a team at Motorola that were tasked with taking all the technology of the time and somehow putting it into a single device and making it all work together, and they somehow managed to pull it off, unveiling the now famous DynaTAC that was only able to work for around 35 minutes, but would be enough of a breakthrough that it garnered in an entire new age of mobile technology.

Tim Berners-Lee

Often heralded as the father of the internet, Berners-Lee and his team are responsible for creating the World Wide Web, an invention so profound that it would ultimate change the human race forever.

The World Wide Web is the information superhighway that we use when we navigate around a browser. Along with this, he is also credited with designing hypertext markup language, as well as hypertext transfer protocol, two of the most basic aspects of the internet.