1. Cell phones
How many years old: 36
Date of birth:
October 17, 1973
Father: Researcher Martin Cooper
From being a luxury for the rich to an absolute necessity even for the common man, the cell phone’s come a long way - it’s almost an extension of the human body now. Martin Cooper made the first call on a hand-held mobile phone on April 3, 1973. The first mobile phone was approved by the Federal Communications Commission in the United States in 1983.
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2. The Mouse
How many years old: 40
Year of birth: 1968
Father: Douglas Engelbart
This is one birthday boy that’s really clicked. The new-fangled, upstart touchpads in laptops never quite feel the same as the audible click of the mouse. Douglas Engelbart created the early prototypes of the now-familiar device in 1963 at Stanford Research Institute, but he first displayed his creation to the public only in 1968. Which makes this reliable little feller older than most of the people who use it.
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3. The Internet
How many years old: 40
Date of birth: September 2, 1969
For something that you can’t feel or see, the World Wide Web has changed our thoughts and our lives in ways we’re only just beginning to realise. The internet truly shrunk the world, being the harbinger of an information revolution. This mode of connectivity was born at the University of California 40 years ago last week. And when was the first time it was attacked? In 1988, by ‘Morris’, one of the first internet worms.
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4.Blogs
How many years old: 10
Date of birth: April 1, 1997
Father: US web guru Dave Winer
This one’s the kid in the family. Blogs are freedom of expression on steroids - everything from Bush-bashing to your sex life can be broadcast to the world. ‘Scripting New’ was the first modern blog. Initially, it was named ‘weblog’ (meaning log of the web), and later, in 2004, it received legitimacy from the etymological elite, with the Merriam Webster dictionary making it its word of the year.
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5. The Walkman
How many years old: 30
Date of birth: July 1, 1979
This one passed away young, but its memory lives on every time someone plugs in the earphones of an MP3 player. Thirty years after it was born, the great grand daddy of iPods has been relegated to obsolescence, but the snazzy gadget revolutionised the way people listened to music, and it still inspires fond nostalgia from the parent types.
