Top 25 Inventions in the Last 25 Years, My Ass

From StoneHome

Sigh.

CNN's getting sloppy again. This time, it's the top 25 non-medical inventions in the last 25 years. Shall we have a go?

Addendum: this list appears to have actually been chosen by a committee (the Lemelson-MIT program) at some invention promotion group within MIT, where there are people which should know better; hell, one of the legitimate inventors overlooked by the list discussed himself is at MIT both now and at the time of invention. This is disheartening: if it were just CNN I would understand the continued inability to just do some goddamned research, but I know there's a copy of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, and therefore this article, available at the Institute. I mean, with the exceptions of things beneath that list's radar, every discussed date here is correct within that list, though I didn't find it until I was done, so none of my examples actually point there. You'd think they - the authors, the editors, the person who came up with this boneheaded article in the first place, whoever - could just check their facts once in a blue moon.

I mean, seriously. You've got a whole group of MIT people sitting on a board, a technology reporter, a newspaper editor, and probably a bunch of PR and relations people inbetween which had a chance to read this before it went out the door. I mean, some of these I could understand: many people misreport the birthday of email as the destruction of the bang path and have no idea about the Victorian or Vannevar Bushian systems; nanotech doesn't work well yet and it's still in the paper suit at the lab stage, so it's natural to assume it's new; most people don't know that the Space Shuttle was a ripoff, and if it weren't it'd be in the window; laptops are an arguable case. But, come on. The hybrid car? Disk storage? Cellular Phones, the airbag, PCs? Short range radio ? The birthdates of these things are well known and well documented. The hybrid car is a hundred years old, disk storage almost 2500 years old, the airbag fifty. Then, there are three different kinds of screen, none of them revolutionary, and two things which aren't inventions at all.

Quality control? The hell is that?

Obvious problems

Cellular Phones 

The cellular phone can arguably trace its roots back into the late 1800s. However, because that's a difficult argument to win, I'm just going to point out that AT&T lobbied the FCC for wireless phone bands in 1947. It seems not unlikely that someone will pretend that it's simply the cellular system, rather than wireless city-or-larger portable phones being discussed; if so, consider that the term "cellular" was adopted after Bell Labs' 1968 deployment proposal coined the term. Misses the 25 year mark by at least 33 years (hell, this one wouldn't fit in a last 50 years list.)

Personal Computers 

Most people quote either the Altair or the Mark 8 as being the first computers available for consumers back in 1974. I tend to see the Intel 4004, a programmable CPU available to consumers in the form of a calculator, as the first back in 1971. At any rate, by the magazine's self imposed cutoff date in 1980, VisiCalc was three years old and WordStar two, and everyone's favorite early PC, the Apple ][, was almost four. This also misses the 25 year cutoff.

Fiber Optics 

Sam DiVita began to see successful transmission down his fiber optic lines at the Corning research in the third year of work - 1965. This misses the cutoff by 15 years.

Electronic Mail 

If you're not willing to accept Alexander Graham Bell's Telegraph system as the first form of electronic mail, which I would think silly (I'm not alone), then you'll have to go with the more commonly remembered first mail sent by Ray Tomlinson back in 1971. This misses the cutoff by nine years.

Commercialization of GPS 

Ridiculous. Even if commercializing an existing governmental system were somehow an invention, there are dozens of better examples in the last 25 years of far more significance, including the internet, the postal system, telecomm and bank regulation, and so on. If you want to make a list of inventions, try including things which were invented. Bob Dylan's up for a Nobel prize in literature for songs which, while admittedly beautiful, still aren't literature by definition. Does the reader think the authors of this list feel the same shame as the Nobel committee, or is ignorance a sufficient defense?

Memory Storage Discs 

I'm sorry, but the advantages of rotating disk storage were understood by the Ancient Greeks ; read more about the Antikythera Mechanism, upon which a good page I cannot find (it seems these are all based on the shitty History Channel special.) It was more than a solar calendar gearbox: it also recorded positions on recording discs. Archimedes also used positioned discs with slotted balls to time the release of ballista (a modification of his distance counting mechanism,) and the benefits of disc storage over linear storage for music staff recording have been known in music boxes for so long that we're not really sure when it was figured out. Of course, it will soon be suggested that axial reading of data is superior to linear reading in some way which doesn't map to the reading of data from holes in a metal plate (apparently paper and metal just work differently;) tracking down the invention of the rotating disk drive for electronic storage is hard, but here's a rotating disc drive from 1966. Drum seek memory goes back into some point in the 1950s. (Modern discs are simply shorter drums with the random-access data on the caps instead of the sides.) Now, if we want to pretend that the removable disc was the big deal, which would be silly considering that removable storage predates drum entirely in the form of paper and magnetic tape, then you have to go to IBM's 2310, whose marketing documentation discusses it as inventing the removable disk drive in 1965. It is worth noting that some of us remember 8" disks, which were already out of use in 1979 before this chart's 1980 cutoff; extremely old people will remember that 8" discs were a post-dominant competing standard, like VHS, CD, DVD-RW, MPEG and MP3; there were other disk formats which had also been discarded before this chart even begins. So, even discarding the legitimate 2000 year miss on this one, the item's still almost 15 years off.

Consumer Digital Cameras 

Let me get this straight. In this age of genetically modified foods, statistical synthesis methods, nanofactories, quantum computing, autonomous vehicles, sonoluminescence and so forth, you guys think that a digicam is a world changing invention? The only advantage a digital camera has over 1950s' polaroid is that the storage medium is slightly more convenient and slightly less subject to degredation. Don't be horse's asses.

MEMS 

Well, the devices were speculated about by the Akkadians as part of the programming of simple things by gods, sort of micronaut field tillers; conceptually reducing them to sizes invisible and beyond belongs to the 1700s in Germany; actually getting them up and working hasn't happened yet. Though the terms nanotechnology and MEMS were both coined in the early 1980s, one by Eric Drexler and the other by an unknown scientist in Salt Lake City, the real basis of these systems was laid out in a speech given in 1959 to the American Physical Society by Richard Feynman, and was already underway by Finne and Klien with ansiotropically etched silicon as early as 1967. Missed by at least 13 years.

Airbag 

One of the great shames of the automotive industry is that the airbag, invented in 1952 by John Hetrick, was not deployed for over 20 years - first in governmental Chevy Tornadoes in 1973, then in consumer Cadillacs, Oldsmobiles and Buicks in the very beginning of 1975, a full five years before the cutoff. This one's off by 28 years.

The ATM 

Well, I'm not honestly sure how this got into the list in the first place, but as long as it's here, we should point out that the first ATM patents were applied for in 1939 by one Luther George Simjian. The concept of depositing accreditation slips into a reading machine which then dispenses an appropriate compensation for the credit goes back to Korea in the 1500s. The modern electronic machine as we know it was invented by Don Wetzel in 1968, who had a prototype working within a year, and a patent and the first installation (at a New York branch of Chemical Bank) in 1973. So, depending on your definitions, this was missed by 7, 13, 41 or 500 years.

Advanced Batteries 

What the hell are advanced batteries? We had real battery use in Egypt, so we'll start by assuming that the users knew about electricity and flow, which comes from Volta in the early 1800s. William Cruickshank made the first mass producable battery in 1802, which is pretty much the same as today's batteries, other than the chemical composite. The primary cell (Daniel cell) was invented in 1836. The primary cell was replaced by the rechargable battery by Gaston Plante in 1859 with the lead acid battery, which you probably still have in your car today. Gassner made a dry cell in 1888. Junger found nickel cadmium in 1899. Edison discovered nickel-iron in 1901. Sintered polar plates are from the early 30s. Nickel cadmium batteries were usable in real life by 1947. Alkalines were invented at Union Carbide in 1961. So, unless one's referring to using a hydride salt of iron instead of raw iron, or talking about polymer embedding to reduce memory stress, one's off by at least 33 years, and most probably by more like 80. Battery technology has been at roughly a standstill other than with regards to safety since 1901. In the meantime, the last 25 years have seen not one but two potential replacements for batteries for local power storage, something which is without precedent in the history of mankind: fuel cells and near-room-temperature superconducting coils. This is just embarrassing to read: the authors finally stumble onto a topic which really does fall into their time range, there happen to be two good new inventions, they're the only two there have been since the stone age, and still the authors somehow manage to miss both of them.

Hybrid Car 

Admittedly, the hybrid car was originally developed for different reasons, but electric/combustion vehicles are nothing new. It helps to remember that electric vehicles predate combustion vehicles by almost ten years. H. Piper filed the first hybrid patent in 1905, but depending on opinion implementation may have been that year or five years later; that year the Woods company created an electric-driven car which had a second, swappable gas engine in the trunk, and in 1910, the truck company Commercial developed a hybrid truck which was built for nine years. In 1913 the self-starter pretty much wiped electric cars from the map, but in 1969 GM among others was still experimenting with consumer-grade hybrids, notably the GM 512; after the Arab oil embargo in 1973, another such vehicle, the Volkswagon VW Taxi, was also under heavy consideration. In 1975, AM General was selling hybrid vans to the US Postal Service in small numbers. In 1976, a federal law promoted the reengagement of hybrid research. By the mid 70s, the issue was so little technological and so much about convenience that amateurs were building hybrids, of which the canonical example is Dave Arthurs' converted Opel GL, which got about 75 MPG on a lawnmower engine. So, given that amateurs had hybrids on the road with better fuel efficiency than Honda's current top of the line a full year before your cutoff date, I presume I don't need to bring up that each the first patent for and the first commercially produced hybrid vehicle designs will be coming up for their hundred year anniversaries over the next few months? That's seventy five years past your mark, an overshot of 300%. I'd make fun of you for that except that I'm still laughing at the Antikythera thing.

OLEDs (#17), "Display Panels" (#18), and HDTV (#19) 

Oy. So, three of the top 25 are simple display technologies. One isn't actually deployed yet, one is so vague it doesn't mean anything, and one is ... well, it's just a screen resolution and signalling standard. I'm not sure what exactly about HDTV is an invention, per se; it's a standard, instead. This seems like calling the governmental adoption of the telephone numbering system, grounded distribution or the light rail gauge an invention: no, everything in there was already invented; people were just choosing which of the existing inventions was best, most general, or would cost least to replace. HDTV is a middle-of-the-road compromise between manufacturers attempting to balance features and profit with competitive edges. Everything involved in HDTV was already invented by the time of CGA almost 10 years before the list cutoff, and arguably much earlier. Display panels? Well, that doesn't seem to actually mean anything concrete, so it's hard to criticize; still, there were panels displaying things electronically as early as the 1940s, so until they can nail that one down a little more tightly (or discuss it at all) then I'm not going to do it the justice of pointing out how wrong it is. From the text this appears to be about plasma displays, which I had on a luggable in 1978; apparently the authors don't realize that gas plasma displays were the very first attempt to subpass the size of vacuum tubes. OLEDs? Well sure, they're relatively recent. However, I'm not sure how increasing the brightness of a flat panel display by 20% and dropping its power consumption by 30% qualifies as one of the twenty five most important inventions since we got rid of disco. This one I'd love to hear a justification of. The real invention there, liquid crystal displays, begin in 1970.

The Space Shuttle 

The reason most great invention lists discuss the topic and method rather than the implementation becomes briskly obvious here. What exactly was the innovation of the space shuttle? The shuttle isn't fully reusable, and isn't the first largely re-usable vehicle, nor the first to take winged shape - in fact it is a direct response to, and in some ways a copy of, the earlier Soviet Buran program, when Nixon's acceptance of the 1969 Space Task Program's reusable vehicle recommendation began to lag. NASA first began discussing and designing a reusable craft during the Apollo program in the early 1960s. So, remind me. What is the invention here?

Nanotechnology 

This is why the science ignorant shouldn't write papers about inventions. MEMS is simply nanotechnology at a less ridiculously small scale; the two are also referred to as NEMS. This is much like calling hammers and sledgehammers different conceptual inventions. No, just a different scale. Carry on.

Voice Mail 

Gordon Matthews invented voice mail in 1978, missing your cutoff by two years, though he's commonly misreported as having invented it in 1979, missing your cutoff by one year. It simply took him a year to raise the capital for a proper patent search. Either way, voicemail is more than 25 years old. But really: voicemail? One of the great inventions of the last 25 years? This is the best you can do?

Modern Hearing Aids 

Dodging that one of the original qualifications of this list was that a device be non-medical in nature, let's pretend for a moment that debility-assist devices are non-medical. A hearing aid? We've got implants bringing sight to the blind, devices walking paraplegics up stairs, robot bodies, surgical implants to halt seizures, robot companions to keep the elderly company, even the Segway, and you guys think that one of the top 25 inventions in the last quarter century is making a more comfortable hearing aid?

Short Range High Frequency Radio 

This one immediately changes its mind and says it's talking about WiFi. So, we'll attack both. Short range high frequency radio was experimented with by Marconi, Tesla, Semming and Hertz. Because the discussed invention is so spectacularly badly defined, I have to give a range of firsts to take it apart. Short range has been applied as a terminology to radio many times. The best candidates are city-wide (arguably 1899's Navy adoption of signalling or 1901's Hawaiian radio communication system or Lee DeForest's wireless phone system), domicile-wide (Farnsworth's conceptual 1922 TV, Jenkins' block-wide 1923 TV, or Ernst Alexanderson's 1926 Schenectady broadcast TV,) or neighborhood-wide (tesla's 1910s electrical distribution experiments.) Still, things like walkie talkies and cellular phones have had two-mile radius since the 1940s, just like two of the three currently dominant WiFi standards. The enabler for portable wifi hasn't been limited range or high frequency, but rather batteries. This is just made up. (Presumably soon it'll be argued that the issue is really about portable data receivers. Problematically, machines in the 1960s were hooked up to CB and FM to transmit data over the same kind of accoustic couplers which later became doughnut modems and then normal modems; the limiter there was that portable computers didn't show up until late.)

Curiosities in the Text

In creating the list, the group hoped to single out "25 non-medically related technological innovations" 

... and managed to get 23, arguably 24.

t is safe to say that the first words of someone who walks away from a car accident unharmed are not, "Thank goodness for the advent of nanotechnology [No. 21] and MEMS [microelectromechanical system, No. 11]." Yet without the tiny silicon chip that sensed the impending collision, the airbag would not have deployed in time. 

And what does a silicon chip, invented in 1958 by Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce at Texas Instruments after the 1957 Fairchild sponsorship, have to do with MEMS/Nanotech, which were only being first thought of in 1959 by Feynman? MEMS/Nanotech are physical devices, mechanical in nature; chemically etched silicon simply pumps electricity. Just because it's very small doesn't make it nanotech; in the timeframe discussed there were artists which could paint angels on rice, or in fact on the wires of an exposed IC, something done more than once as art. You might as well say that the breeding of penicillin, the formation of steel's crystalline structure or the repair of stress cracks in glass are nanotechnology; each is multiple orders of magnitude smaller than even a single wire from primitive ICs.

The device that causes an airbag to inflate in a crash is a nanotech device," said David Kirkpatrick, senior editor at Fortune Magazine. 

Ahem. The triggers for airbags are MEMS, not nanotech. We're barely able to make functional nanotech in laboratories today, let alone on a large reliability-focussed manufacturing scale. (Yes yes, I know I just suggested MEMS and nanotech were the same thing. They are; it's a bit like saying "ahem, cars weigh in megagrams, not kilograms" after insisting that both are a form of gram and therefore are the same thing.) Still, for an article suggesting that MEMS and nanotech are so different that they get ranked 40% of the list apart, it'd be nice to get some items on the right side of the fence. Did you get all of your science from editors at a money magazine?

Also helping keep people safe are advanced compact power sources such as nickel-metal hydride and lithium-ion batteries (No. 15), which make emergency phone calls possible. Without those batteries, cell phones would be far less dependable and certainly not rechargeable. 

Oh for christ's sake. Nickel metal batteries have been around since 1899, and lithium ion since 1947 (the latter wasn't commercialized until 1977 because of a tendency to blow up.) In the meantime, since I'm sure the iron hydride is going to be played up as some kind of major invention, let's point out that the US Military has had functioning safety phones since World War 2, and extensively deployed them in both Korea and Vietnam. The WW2 models used less advanced lead-acid batteries, and a few were even diesel generator driven. Please cut the drama.

And digital cameras would not exist without flash memory (No. 22) and OLEDs (organic light-emitting diodes, No. 17). 

The hell are you talking about? The Kodak LS633, the first digicam with an OLED screen, came out in March 2003, almost 20 years after the first consumer-grade digital cameras. Digital cameras were the confluence of literally dozens of other inventions; their creation date is extremely difficult to define. However, Kodak was selling a megapixel digital camera in 1989, which it had developed in 1986. Early digital cameras recorded onto floppy disks, MiniCDs, various forms of digital tape, or simply kept slow battery-backed ram and fed out by cable. By comparison, the kind of flash memory being discussed here, NAND flash, wasn't invented by Toshiba until 1989, when the Kodak camera had already been sold for five years as a consumer-grade device after a decade of arguable predecessors in the professional market (NOR flash was invented just a year earlier in 1988 by Intel.)

"Flash memory is a tiny version of the disk drive that's in your computer," said Gene Fitzgerald, MIT professor of material science and engineering. 

In the same way that a car is a tiny version of a passenger jet, maybe. Just because they serve the same gross purpose doesn't mean you should tell people it's a miniaturization, Jack. The underlying technologies are fundamentally unrelated, and the benefits of each approach are totally contradictory.

"DNA fingerprinting is important because it's an absolute identification of each individual," said Merton Flemings, director of the Lemelson-MIT program and MIT professor of material science and engineering. 

Merton, Merton, Merton. Have you ever actually followed court proceedings? DNA evidence with modern techniques is only about 98.8% accurate with perfectly clean samples - say, matching someone present's identity to military records. In the situations in which DNA evidence is usually used, such as crime scenes, the DNA is frequently comingled with the DNA of other people, damaged by extremes such as solvents or temperature, decomposed by age and exposure to the elements, and difficult to seperate from whatever medium, such as cement or carpeting, from which it is withdrawn. To that end, the police have been forced to adopt a ranking system (in the US the political pressure to do so followed the mess regarding DNA evidence in the highly public OJ trial) in order to quantify the accuracy of DNA evidence, specifically because it is not and cannot be an absolute identification. Complex issues such as cloning, twinning, chimerae, transplants, procedural contamination, source contamination and so forth further muddy the waters. And you teach at MIT?

No two DNA fingerprints are alike 

Horseshit. Isolated populations have stunning inbreeding patterns. Family relations like twinning defeat this outright. Furthermore, the issue you're attempting to discuss is the actual identity of a DNA strand; DNA fingerprints are not that identity, but rather the subject form we are able to extract, which is not perfect. Computer scientists will be comfortable thinking of the process as running the DNA identity through a hash function - some information is lost, and two non-identical sources can on rare occasion collide. If you'll remember again from the highly public OJ trial, best estimates of all that DNA evidence from the crime scene placed that DNA evidence at 0.5% of the population of Los Angeles county, whose 2000 census estimated a group of 9.5 million people, meaning that the DNA fingerprint narrowed it down to abotu fifty thousand people from LA alone. The accuracy on matching of real fingerprints hasn't been that inaccurate for over a hundred years. There are dozens of cases in US case history where a parent was convicted on heavy DNA match only to find out later that the actual culprit was the child, or vice versa; as a professor at MIT, you should have access to enough biologists and statisticians to explain to you how DNA's pairing patterns where parents match can produce offspring whose DNA strands have the superficial appearance of being far more than 50% parent-identical. In practice, as a rule of thumb in US court, DNA matches in the range of 90% certainty and up are introduced by prosecution into non-solid trials and of about 85% certainty on up into otherwise solid trials. I have no statistics on defense, though I expect the numbers to be much lower based on attempts to use DNA vaguary to introduce doubt.

"... so we can distinguish the individual who committed a crime from one who didn't, and we can determine family relationships that couldn't otherwise be determined." 

Sometimes. However, a basic familiarity with case law shows that sometimes the results are inconclusive, and as a result the US courts do not accept DNA evidence as the sole evidence in an otherwise circumstantial case. This decision was not made lightly, nor without an informed stance. It is disingenuous to promote DNA fingerprints as an identity panacea.

Everything from airport security and delivery services to supermarket checkout lines uses radio frequency ID tags (No. 10) to track materials on their way to their intended destinations. 

What, did you write this article in 2011 and send it back to us to be published now? Walmart, the world's largest retailer, famous for its forcing its suppliers to do exactly what it wants when it wants, has recently backed off of their plan to have a fully RFID inventory by 2007, citing the suppliers' inability to change their production lines over in time. Walmart's current purchasing stock contains only 40 suppliers which produce RFID inventory at all. Walmart served notice that it expected its top 100 suppliers to be RFID capable by January 1 of 2005 in mid 2002; since that date was eight days ago as of this writing, I can confidently say that they will miss that prediction by more than 60%, and that's just talking about their biggest, most capable suppliers. I live in two very technologically progressive areas: San Diego, CA and Pittsburgh, PA. I have yet to see even a single supermarket using RFID.

Some of the inventions on the list have brought to life concepts formerly reserved for science-fiction writers. Among them are ... hybrid cars (No. 16), which pollute less by using less gasoline. 

You know, maybe the funniest thing about this is that hybrid cars were out of fashion thirty years before we stopped calling it speculative fiction and started calling it science fiction. Besides, since these are well-edited articles and thought up by MIT associated people, it shouldn't be a shock to point out that the benefit of hybrid cars isn't in using less fuel at all, but rather in 1) reclaiming waste energy efficiently and 2) moving the fuel consumption to large-scale plants where the consumption can be made more efficient, right? Because you guys are the people that know that hydrogen is a storage medium, not a fuel, and so you should also know that batteries are storage, not fuel, too, right? Because batteries don't just pull power from thin air, and neither do power plants? I mean, some of the most compelling arguments I've seen for well-dispersed breeder reactors to fuel a hydrogen economy have come out of MIT. Are you just on the other side of the campus or what? Like, you don't eat with those people over in the "Know What The Hell We're Talking About" building?

Interestingly, the innovation that laid the groundwork for many of the inventions mentioned above can be found underground, where fiber optics (No. 4) has helped turn the world into a global village. 

Actually, almost every one of these inventions predates fiber optics significantly. However, I don't argue the intent, which is to state the promotion effect that networking (the invention isn't fiber optics, it's networking) has on research. Still, come on.

"Fiber optics have linked the world together and made our world, our planet, basically one small place. If it weren't for fiber optics, we wouldn't be able to have inexpensive global phone calls or 200 cable channels on our televisions," Kirkpatrick said. 

Man, someone has a low opinion of radio, satellites, laser transmission, microwave transmission, wires, axial cabling, parallel cabling, packet delivery, et cetera. Sure it'd be more expensive. But, wouldn't have? Am I the only person on Earth which realizes that if there's a way, there are five other ways too, and someone which wanted to make money would have found them instead?

"There are innumerable ways that fiber optics have changed our life, but the most significant one is that they have woven the planet together into a very tightly knit global society." 

That's funny, most people attribute that to horses, the road, the boat, the canal, the railroad, pervasive paper mail, radio, the telegraph, air travel, live television coverage and the internet, in that order. I don't believe fiber optics has had a larger impact on a wired country than bell's telegraph network had on an unwired country for a half a hot second. Kindly spend some time with your face in a history book and try to get some perspective, chum. Oh, and before you tell me the internet couldn't exist without fiber backbones, please note that it was largely run over metal until the late eighties, and that the telcos switched to fiber because of voice traffic, not the 'net; fiber may be a minor enabler, but wasn't even a significant player as the web began to emerge. Don't kid yourself.

And the kicker?

"In the coming days, CNN.com will announce the invention panel members chose as the most significant of the last 25 years. Be sure to log on and find out what they ranked No. 1."

Huhuhuhuhuh. The way this is going, I kind of expect them to name styrofoam, plastic, the internet or the printed page as the best. If there's any sense among them, the answer will be HTML, but there isn't, so it won't be. Brace yourselves, kids: this one's going to suck, hard.

Upshot

This list is absolute bunk. Of the 25 items listed, three are redundant, twenty two weren't invented in the discussed time frame, two violate the guidelines of the list itself, six are minor inventions, and three aren't inventions at all. Eleven are repetitions of earlier inventions, seven are just the new names for older inventions, four of them don't exist yet, and two of them aren't to consumer hands yet and therefore cannot have their impacts judged. In under an hour I've torn apart something that CNN writers and editors apparently had at.

Do you guys not read what's coming out of your presses?

Admissions

• #6, Osborne's portable computer, makes the cutoff by eight months.
  • I am of the opinion that invention is the conceptualization, not the first deployment; in that case, not only does Osborne's computer break the cutoff, but so do a number of items discussed by Vannevar Bush, Alan Turing, Walter Beschell and Edsger Dijkstra; the earliest invention absent implementation I can find is in the late 1930s, but I'm sure Babbage and probably others talked about it significantly earlier still.
  • There is a reasonable argument that the portable computer was in use before Christ, if one is willing to accept mechanical computers, which one should be willing to accept; there were rudimentary portable copies of the Antikythera mechanism, whose primary purpose was as a stellar calculator, in use all over Greece in the ancient world. Then of course there are abaci and Mayan ropings.
  • Furthermore, there were portable calculators in the 60s and 70s, including programmable calculators as early as '71 with the Intel 4004. There were portable devices built on the 8080, which was the basis of the 8086, well before the cutoff, each of which included a screen, input, the ability to create userland software, and to store, fetch and operate on arbitrary data.
  • Further still, the definition of "portable" is somewhat suspect: the Apple ][ Plus had much of the portability of the later //c, including a small form factor even compared to modern laptops, and a handle. Admittedly these both required an extrenal television or RGB screen to function; however, plasma-display luggable briefcase boxes go back to 1978, and need nothing more than a wall outlet.
  • So, to start with, if you're willing to discuss devices which need no support, can accept data, perform computations (hence computer,) and which may be moved by one person from place to place without great effort, there are abaci, the Antikythera copies, and various other ancient widely reproduced devices. If we're arbitrarily redefining computer to mean electronic general purpose math devices, requiring the ability to create software and to work on stored data, then we have machines like the early Apples and Altairs, which were relatively luggage-esque, and needed both a wall socket and television/monitor. If in order to be portable one needs to have all hardware included, encompassing a screen and a localized power supply, then one gets the calculator in 1971. If one needs significant computing horsepower and a general-use interface (say, a keyboard involving letters and a spacebar) but can discard the power supply, then there are luggables in 1978. If one needs the power supply and is willing to discuss something invented but not yet implemented, there's osborne in 1979. If none of those conditions suffice, then yes, by less than a year this just barely makes the time cut. I don't like it.
• I agree with regards to #10, RFID tags. This is in fact the only item in the list with which I have neither factual nor conceptual argument.
• #22, flash memory, is debatable. Whereas I disagree, there's a very good argument for this being in the list, so I won't claim it's as obviously wrong as the rest of the list.

Salt Into Wounds

There's just something wonderfully satisfying about rubbing into an MIT professor's face that something they claimed was invented in the last 25 years in fact predates the lord their probable God. Yay for using Christ in debates about the youth of an idea; also for pointing out that said idea predates our current calendar scheme, and comes about the same time in history as large-scale road development and proper mapmaking. I mean, you're three ages off in the eyes of a Civ player. That's hard to do - there are only four ages, doncha know. That is roughly equivalent to calling pottery the result of modern ceramic techniques, or declaring the aqueduct a product of current digging techniques. I mean, just how often does a professor get something's age wrong by two orders of magnitude? They're off by almost the length of recorded history! Awesome.