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Eight Greatest Computer Innovations
that Actually Make Life Easier

Introduction

As an enabler of great business ideas, probably nothing has approached the digital

computer. It permeates the lives of everyone in the western world and has

in a remarkably short time created business opportunities that could only As an enabler

have been a dream without it. How then do we choose the greatest ideas of great busi-

in this realm? We have chosen a timeline of developments that slowly but ness ideas,

surely made computers useful and fun. probably

It was at the outset a mathematical tool, and it is worth looking at nothing has

what that means using the example of iteration Idea 45 and critical path approached

analysis Idea 46. After that there is the database Idea 47 technologies, which the digital

enabled much of the information that gives birth to other great ideas, as computer.

did spreadsheets Idea 48.

When the first personal computers came out their advertisements vied for new

ways to express the term ‘user friendly.’ But whatever the ads may have said, a

reviewer who tried to take a PC out of its box, switch it on and use it was probably

nearer the truth when he described them as ‘as user friendly as a cornered rat’. The

graphical user interface Idea 49 changed that and earns its place in the 100 greatest, as

does Windows Idea 50.

We then switch to an idea that gets a mixed reception but is almost certainly a

force for consumer satisfaction in the long term – the call centre Idea 51.

But we start at the beginning with the mathematician who first developed the

basic mathematical idea of a mechanical process for reliable and consistent calcula-

tion.