The best software inventions ever
Virtual reality
Virtual reality uses a headset to project images and sounds to project a realistic environment to the user. Users can look around and interact with the virtual world and features in it.
YouTube
Bought by Google in November 2006, over one billion hours of content is watched on YouTube every day. Its premium subscription service, YouTube TV, delivers live streaming access from the five major broadcast networks for $35 per month.
Voice assistants
Alexa and other AI personal assistants are capable of voice interaction to manage your daily life. You can control devices in your smart home by invoking the voice assistant using its wake up word.
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is the largest general reference work on the internet. There are over 40 million articles in over 250 languages and anyone can edit any article.
Search engines
Search engines search for information across the world wide web. The results are presented in list form on search engine results pages.
Bots crawl the web to find pages to add to the index. Careful use of images and text-based keywords ensures that pages feature high in results
Notepad
Notepad is a simple text editor for the Microsoft Windows operating system. It strips all formatting, hidden characters, and scripts.
It has basic text manipulation functions such as word wrap. Its basic features means that it is quick to respond on low-powered hardware.
Blockchain
Blockchain is the cryptographically-secured chain of blocks that is the core component of the digital currency bitcoin, managed autonomously without the need for a trusted administrator.
It records transactions across multiple computers that cannot be altered retroactively and confirms that each unit is transferred only once.
Podcasts
A podcast is a digital audio file that can be listened to on the user's computer or mobile device.
Episodes can be subscribed to and downloaded from a central server which maintains a list of files available. The word 'podcast' is a combination of iPod and broadcast.
World wide web
The world wide web is a set of web addresses, or Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), which are linked together by hyperlinks. The web was invented in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee.
OLE
Object Linking and Embedding allows one document or object to be linked to or embedded in another document or object. Objects can remain connected to the source data and updated when the source data changes.
HTML
Hypertext Markup Language (html) is the standard language for creating web pages and applications.
HTML describes the structure of the page and its elements such as <p></td></tr><tr><td> etc., and it provides different descriptors of the page. It is a basic technology of the world wide web.
3D printing
3D printing enables computers to build a three-dimensional object using layers of material, usually polymer, although other materials can be used such as chocolate.