Science Week: Invention which helps work
Posted on November 16, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Technology.
Today’s Science Week Question is an easy one “Which invention has helped you most with your working life?“. Of course it is the internet. The highlights of my history with it are as follows:
- 1990: Learned it existed when I started Masters in UCD
- 1991: Figured out email, Usenet news, Gopher. Discovered ftp.funet.fi and the world of shareware
- 1992: First job in S3. Email only. Figured out ftpmail to download programs overnight on 14.4k modem
- 1994: Found out about the web. Used Mosaic for the first time
- 1995: Discovered Free software, FSF, GPL, Open Source OS called RTEMS and GCC.Yahoo, Excite, Altavista, Lycos
- 1996-2000: Web developed and so did I. Online purchasing, Google, Yahoo mail, IOL, indigo, eircom.net, ISDN, Netscape, Mozilla, Internet Explorer, Geocities, homepages, animated gifs
- 2001-2003: Startup with ISDN only. Discovered SEO, dmoz, blogging, RSS
- 2003-now: Live it and breath it 16 hours a day. DSL, mobile, ATOM, Reviews, Semantic Web, Web 2.0, Social Networking, IM, Skype, Firefox, Widgets, Flash
The greatest invention in my lifetime and my job would not exist without it.
4 Replies to "Science Week: Invention which helps work"
Damien Mulley » Blog Archive » Science Week Ireland blogging competition Day 4 - Which invention has helped you most with your working life? on November 17, 2007
[...] says Tea! Conor says the Internet. Digg it! | Reddit | Del.icio.us | Stumble Upon | [...]
JD on November 21, 2007
Tough one to narrow down but I think in my job the access to mobile email is my biggest weapon. I have an original-of-the-species RIM Blackberry 7290 and it is a trusted friend. I however do not use it as a mobile phone as that is overkill. With Push Mail it allows me to receive direct emails, emails from the company website (and this allows for Immediate confirmation of an enquiry and I can’t stress how much confidence this gives a potential customer/ client), and it pretty much has allowed me to be more productive. Simple item but I don’t think I can operate without it.
conor on November 21, 2007
I really think we are only scratching the surface of what’s possible with mobile internet. The Crackberry was one of the first killer applications. I’d love to see lots more.
Elson Silva, Ph. D. on November 17, 2007
Well, with internet I opened a company in the US and I have three issued patents about a sort of ’scientific discovry’ called ‘Tubarc’ defining new conceptions in hydrodynamis (US pat. 6,766,817).
Every week online I can read about 3,000 neww issued patents and 7,000 new patent applications and do a constant survey on my project. I found out a huge gap in Hydrology in the patenting affairs. Heat/thermal conductivity is discussed in about 66,000 issued patents while Hydraulic conductivity in just 450 patents, but Unsaturated Hydraulic Flow (wick/wicking) in only 18 and 3 of them are mine. There is no wick/wicking in Hydrogeology literature to portray fluids moving through porosity because it is a lay people terminology.