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The technological artefact of 2010 is the Apple iPad. That's my vote anyway.

Generally Apple's technology is in advance of most others - it at least popularizes technologies that have been around and makes them highly accessible and desirable to the techno-istas. And this is true of the iPad - the first flat panel tablet computer / book reader / internet device.

Hey, I should be on commission!

Hi Rory,

A little off subject I know but your email address is not easy to find!!

I am trying desperately to get hold of a copy of your Dad's excellent programme "The Great Paper Chase" Is it possible you could assist me in this? I am more than happy to pay for a copy,

all the best

David

When I first started work, in the mid-sixties, I used an electro-mechanical Olivetti calculator for statistics. It would happily chug away for many seconds before printing an answer (and a favourite trick was to enter all the 9s and divide them by 1 and then unplug the thing so that the next user would have to wait for perhaps a minute till it finished---humour was simple in those days) it's amazing to think that my current iPhone is probably more powerful than any computer that existed back then. And I can use it, just like an old transistor radio, to listen to the radio in the UK (I'm in Texas). Sound's about the same quality as that transistor radio too!

For me it would have to be a modem. When I think of how much the internet has changed our lives it's truly staggering.

Rory Cellan-Jones.

"Which single object sums up life in 2010?"

for the umpteenth year in a row -- the television.

2. At 11:05am on 27 Sep 2010, poofacio wrote:
I am trying desperately to get hold of a copy of your Dad's excellent programme "The Great Paper Chase"
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What about pieces of software? As the name suggests, they're not hardware, i.e not objects. Nonetheless, the world has seen some software that has had a definite and enduring impact the world over. Love it or loathe it, the (now) humble Windows XP is one such, in my opinion. Such is it's endurance that even its creators Microsoft have faced rather fierce resistance in trying to remove it of the face of the earth! It may not be the best OS out there, but it's relative simplicity for the user, robustness, among other things has given it such a legacy. For me, a Windows Xp DVD on that list would be ideal.

I think an iconic 'object' of our modern age, if can be called such, is the bar code. It represents the point at which technologists recognised that it was far easier to develop a new language for talking to machines, than to attempt to make the machines understand the world as we saw it. The machine then needs only one scanner, to read its world, but with that, you could tag just about anything, using paper and ink.

In itself, each bar code adds relatively little, of course, but the power arises because of what can be achieved once this data is tied together and made generally available.

Today, a bar code can be attached to something or someone, such that it does not simply identify them, but supplies extra information about them. A matrix bar code, attached to a photograph, for instance, can tell us the GPS location, or the date, when it was taken, who took it. A bar coded wrist band, on an unconscious patient, can tell medical staff who that patient is, but also give them a case history of their previous treatment, allergies to certain medications, and so on.

Bar codes are now routinely used as feeds, to tie into other data. So, we get the mobile phone applications that can be shown a photo of a bar code, identify the product, consult it's own GPS data, to work out where its owner is standing, and offer a list of places that item might be available, for sale, nearby (with prices).

This ties into the wider 20th Century concept of holding massed, organised data, of course, but it is iconic because it is the point at which the physical world became part of that 'database'.

7. At 3:29pm on 27 Sep 2010, EMC wrote:
What about pieces of software?
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This is a very good idea as in the future the software will still be understood by technical historians but anything electronic will be a piece of broken junk.

Further to my previous post perhaps the software should be Grand Theft Auto so that future people can see what the start of the twenty-first century was really like!

For 2010, I give you the low-energy lightbulb.

The 20th Century saw electricity replace steam and muscle-power all over the world, and the lightbulb allowed that time after dark to be used for learning, entertainment, and any number of other things.

However, it also brought the spectre of pollution, as rampant energy usage, primarily through hydro-carbons, brought all kinds of environmental problems to a global audience.

The early 21st Century saw ingenuity in all its forms - in new ways to produce energy (or the engineering refinement of older concepts) but also demonstrated that every problem has a variety of solutions and that reduction in energy usage could be combined with increase in "utility" - a massive increase in efficiency that only technology combined with need can provide.

One could argue that low-energy bulbs were available long before 2010, but 2010 marks, from an economic perspective, the year in which they became the CHEAP choice - coming in, at my local DIY shed at least, as finally cheaper than the older, less efficient versions.

So, technological innovation, economics of cost-saving, and something that surely everyone in Britain has in their house. What better device to symbolise 2010 that the low-energy lightbulb?

Continuing on the same line of highlighting software life-changers, I would also add TCP/IP! Most people on this planet don't have to worry about it, but this is the software stack that ensures the various nodes connecting to the Internet can communicate. I had a chance of meeting Vint Cerf, one of its co-creators, at a conference in Manchester in 2004 where he gave an awe-inspiring talk on how they did it way back in the '60s while at DARPA. What's more is that this software stack is now a world standard and free to use by anyone wishing to implement it for any device and any size network. It's changed over the decades, however the underlying principles have remained largely the same. The most recent change is TCP/IPv6 which enabled the connectivity of essentially an 'infinite' number of nodes. Such is the runaway success of TCP/IP that its creators did not imagine that the several billion IPv4 addresses (which is what most people know about TCP/IP), would run out!

TCP/IP is the invisible transporter that delivers packets around the world, has been at it for decades and will be at it for probably more decades to come. In this fast paced world of tech, there are very few technologies which you can predict to last decades, and TCP/IP is one of them.

I think the object that should be used is just a short piece of wire. Electricity and electronics rely upon wires to supply the power for so many things we take for granted these days.

Not exactly tangible objects, but how about

1 and 0

Modem, software, iPhone (or hardly any mobile device), television, IP - none of these would have even existed or evolved into more advanced technology for all aspects of life (business, entertainment, collaboration, research, etc.) without this humble but vital pair.

After all, what, today ISN'T digital?

6. At 12:05pm on 27 Sep 2010, Kit Green wrote:

2. At 11:05am on 27 Sep 2010, poofacio wrote:
I am trying desperately to get hold of a copy of your Dad's excellent programme "The Great Paper Chase"
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Many thanks for that, I will book a ticket. However I still want a copy of it for my collection! Someone must have taped it when it was transmitted or know when it is being transmitted again.

How about the Mouse, as a device to interact with a PC (or Mac) it has remained almost unchanged since its creation over 50(?) years ago. Allowing such direct interaction with a computer no doubt impacted the way we perceived our relationship with computers, making them almost an extention of ouselves. Would we have the Nintendo Wii, Xbox Kinect or PS3 Move without the humble mouse? Would we have had touchscreen phones or tablets, without the mouse trailblazing the way for more intuative forms of control.

Windows XP? Apple iPad? Don't make me laugh.

Rory, if you're looking for 'something that represents human ingenuity' it has to be open source software.

With Oracle buying Sun fairly recently the future of OpenOffice was in doubt. However those clever people in the OpenOffice community renamed themselves The Document Foundation and rebranded OpenOffice as LibreOffice. Pure genius.

Curses to Oracle, Apple and Microsoft and long live open source.

my vote is the laser and fiber optic, without it, information-like news, social networking, smart devices, voice, video, photos, sms, blogs, online transaction across continents would be a nightmare.

The 'smartphone' (apple or otherwise) marks a hugely significant step as computers go really 'personal'. This tiny but powerful device will organise your life, shape your views, link you to the rest of the world and oh yes, might be quite a neat little phone too... we will never be the same again.

If you want to see how much things have changed, get along to The National Museum of Computing, Milton Keynes. (www.tnmoc.org). You can almost stand inside Colossus - see how the computer has got smaller and more personal - a scary reminder of just how fast things change.

Although I like the simplicity of a short piece of wire, for me it has to be the valve. Used for entertainment devices it was soon put to good use in early computers (Bletchley Park) it was replaced by the transistor and then the silicon chip. Not sure what came before the valve though, perhaps an even earlier contender! For my money the modern love affair with technology (the current barometer that mankind seems to be judged by) started with the valve.