Inventions, computing, and the systems that connect the modern world.
A transistor is a semiconductor device used to amplify or switch electronic signals. Transistors are made from semiconductor materials, usually silicon, and can act as amplifiers or switches. The device is considered one of the most important inventions of the twentieth century, and its invention revolutionized electronics. It was a major breakthrough in solid-state physics that opened up the field of solid-state electronics.
The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a U.S.-owned utility that provides users with positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) services. As a space-based radio-navigation system, it delivers continuous, worldwide, all-weather positioning and timing to an unlimited number of users. GPS serves both military and civilian applications, and the United States government provides the service free of charge to users worldwide. The system has become a foundational element of modern infrastructure, supporting activities ranging from transportation and surveying to precise timekeeping.
A barcode is a printed series of parallel bars or lines of varying width that is used for entering data into a computer system. In its original form, this pattern constituted a linear, one-dimensional (1D) code, a format that remains the basis for the most familiar symbols. Such codes are read by optical scanners called barcode readers, devices that translate the alternating bars and spaces into machine-readable information. Because the code is a printed marking rather than an electronic component, it can be printed on various materials, including paper and plastic.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the project of building computer systems that perform tasks associated with intelligent beings — systems that infer, from the input they receive, how to generate outputs such as predictions, content, recommendations or decisions. The term was coined for a 1956 summer workshop at Dartmouth College, proposed in 1955 by John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude Shannon on the conjecture that every feature of intelligence can be described precisely enough for a machine to simulate it. The field's first test of machine thinking was Alan Turing's 1950 imitation game. Early work on symbolic programs, robots such as SRI's Shakey and expert systems such as DENDRAL (1965) gave way to a first funding winter after the Lighthill report of 1973; the learning turn arrived with the back-propagation paper by Rumelhart, Hinton and Williams in Nature in 1986, and accelerated in 2012 when Krizhevsky, Sutskever and Hinton's AlexNet cut the ImageNet contest error to 15.3% against 26.2% for the runner-up. Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in 1997, AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol 4-1 in March 2016, and the Transformer architecture of 2017 led to large language models: GPT-3 (175 billion parameters, 2020), ChatGPT (November 2022) and GPT-4 (2023), which scored around the top 10% of test takers on a simulated bar exam. Governance moved in parallel — the OECD AI Principles (2019, updated 2024), the NIST AI RMF (January 2023) and the EU AI Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689), in force since 1 August 2024. The systems remain narrow and fallible: NIST's Generative AI Profile names confabulation — confidently presented false content — as a core risk, and Stanford's 2025 AI Index recorded record investment, 78% organizational adoption and sharply rising incidents.
Bitcoin is a digital currency proposed in a nine-page white paper published on 31 October 2008 under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. It lets payments travel directly between parties without a financial institution, replacing the trusted third party with a peer-to-peer network that timestamps transactions into a proof-of-work chain. Nodes that validate the chain are rewarded with newly created bitcoins; the reward started at 50 BTC and is halved every 210,000 blocks, so the supply approaches but never exceeds 21 million. Launched in 2009, bitcoin remained a niche of cryptography enthusiasts until prices and media attention surged in 2013 — the year of its first documented all-time high of $1,240 on 4 December. Regulators followed: the IRS treats virtual currency as property (2014), the CFTC called bitcoin a commodity (2015), the ECB published two reports on virtual currency schemes (2012, 2015) and the BIS devoted a chapter of its 2018 Annual Economic Report to the technology's limitations. After a federal court vacated its Grayscale order, the SEC approved 11 spot bitcoin exchange-traded products on 10 January 2024. El Salvador made bitcoin legal tender in 2021. Volatile market figures in this article carry the date of the source that recorded them.
Linux is a free operating-system kernel first announced by Linus Torvalds on 25 August 1991, in a Usenet post describing "just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu" for 386 AT clones. It is the kernel — the program that allocates the machine's resources to other programs — normally used with the GNU Project's software to form the complete system Richard Stallman calls GNU/Linux; GNU had been under construction since January 1984 and was complete except for a kernel when Linux appeared. The kernel is released under GNU GPL version 2; the FSF's licence history runs from version 1 in 1989 and version 2 in June 1991 to version 3 released on 29 June 2007 — a revision whose anti-tivoization terms the Linux developers declined to adopt. Kernel development now follows a steady cadence: one mainline release every 9–10 weeks maintained by Torvalds, backported stable releases, and longterm kernels such as 6.12 kept alive until December 2028. Distributions turn the kernel into products and services — Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, Ubuntu and SUSE Linux Enterprise among them — sold by Red Hat under subscriptions, with Red Hat acquired by IBM on 9 July 2019. Dated figures in this article carry the year of the source that recorded them.
SpaceX (Space Exploration Technologies Corp.) is the American aerospace company founded by Elon Musk in 2002 that pioneered reusable orbital rockets, operates the Starlink satellite-internet constellation, flies NASA astronauts and cargo to the International Space Station, and is developing Starship — the largest rocket ever flown — for the Moon and Mars. This file tracks its vehicles, mission and flight-test records, contracts and finances from the founding through September 2026.
The Internet is the worldwide network of interconnected computer networks that exchange data using the TCP/IP protocol suite. It grew out of ARPANET, a U.S. research network whose first host-to-host message — the truncated word “lo” — was sent on 29 October 1969, and it expanded through packet switching, the Cerf–Kahn TCP protocols, the Domain Name System, and open standards bodies such as the IETF. Running on top of it is the World Wide Web, the hypertext information system invented by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1989–1991 — a distinction this article keeps front and centre. By ITU estimates, about 6 billion people, or 74% of the world's population, were using the Internet in 2025.
The World Wide Web is the leading information retrieval service of the Internet — a system of hyperlinked documents written in HTML, addressed by URLs and delivered by HTTP. British scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented it at CERN in 1989; by the end of 1990 the first web server and browser were running on a NeXT computer, and the world's first website went live at info.cern.ch. On 30 April 1993 CERN put the Web software in the public domain, a decision that allowed the web to flourish. The World Wide Web Consortium, founded in 1994, develops the Web's royalty-free open standards; the Internet the Web runs on now reaches an estimated 6 billion people (ITU, 2025).
YouTube is the video-sharing platform and social media site registered on 14 February 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim, three former PayPal employees. Its first video, “Me at the zoo”, was uploaded by co-founder Jawed Karim on 23 April 2005; the site opened as a public beta in May 2005 and launched officially on 15 December 2005, serving more than two million views a day. Google announced it would acquire YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock on 9 October 2006 and closed the deal on 13 November 2006, letting the platform operate independently. Advertising and the YouTube Partner Program followed in 2007, and copyright management — today anchored by the automated Content ID system — reshaped both the platform and the music and media industries. Recommendations, powered by more than 80 billion signals a day, drive more viewership than subscriptions or search, and are subject to demotion rules for borderline content introduced in 2019. By the mid-2020s YouTube was a dominant force in television streaming, with Shorts averaging around 200 billion daily views in early 2026 and YouTube advertising revenue reaching $40.4 billion in 2025.
Google is an American search engine company founded in 1998 by Stanford doctoral students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and since 2015 the flagship subsidiary of the holding company Alphabet Inc. Its rise began with a research project called BackRub that ranked web pages by their links: PageRank, the algorithm described in Brin and Page's 1998 Stanford paper, which treated a link as a citation and let the web itself vote on what mattered. A prototype indexing at least 24 million pages grew into a company that earned money by pairing its search engine with keyword advertising — AdWords opened to self-service advertisers in 2000 and AdSense put ads on third-party sites in 2003 — a model that by 2025 still produced more than 70% of its revenues. Google expanded by acquisition and invention: Blogger, Gmail, Maps, Chrome, YouTube (2006, $1.65 billion), Android (unveiled in 2007 with the Open Handset Alliance) and the AI lab DeepMind (2014). In 2015 Google Inc. was restructured under Alphabet, with Sundar Pichai as Google's CEO. Scale brought scrutiny: the FTC closed a search-bias probe with voluntary commitments in 2013; the European Commission fined Google €2.42 billion (2017, comparison shopping), €4.34 billion (2018, Android) and €1.49 billion (2019, AdSense); the US Department of Justice sued in 2020, won a landmark ruling in August 2024 that 'Google is a monopolist', and secured behavioural remedies in September 2025; a second DOJ case over the advertising-technology stack succeeded in April 2025. In FY2025 Alphabet reported $402.8 billion in revenues and 190,820 employees.
Wikipedia is a free, volunteer-written online encyclopedia operated by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation. It began with its first edit on 15 January 2001, grew out of the expert-reviewed Nupedia project, and became the world's largest reference website, with more than 68 million articles across more than 300 language editions and over a billion visitors each month. Its content is governed by five pillars and by policies such as a neutral point of view and verifiability, and it is licensed for reuse under Creative Commons BY-SA. Studies — from Nature's 2005 comparison with Encyclopædia Britannica to peer-reviewed research on coverage gaps — have both tested its accuracy and documented where it falls short; in the 2020s the Wikimedia Foundation reports declining human pageviews attributed to generative AI while describing Wikipedia's human-curated knowledge as more valuable than ever.