When Queen Elizabeth II succeeded to the throne in 1952, televisions were black and white, telephones had rotary dials, and Tim Berners Lee was little more than a glint in his father\u2019s eye.<\/p>\n
70 years later and the majority of people in the UK carry computers around in their pockets and a pair of virtual trainers just sold in the Metaverse for $80,000.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s no denying that things have changed drastically since The Queen was coronated.<\/p>\n
In this post we look back at some of the most important technological advances and inventions of her reign.<\/p>\n
1950s<\/strong><\/p>\n At the start of the 1950s super glue and cling film hadn\u2019t even been invented and you couldn\u2019t buy a kitchen appliance in any colour other than white.<\/p>\n But then inventors put their foot on the accelerator and the decade became one of innovation.<\/p>\n In 1953, television programmes started broadcasting in colour and in 1955 the first microwaves were produced.<\/p>\n Major progress was being made in the computer world, too.<\/p>\n In 1956 the first computer hard drive was used.<\/p>\n Two years later, the modem was invented.<\/p>\n 1960s<\/strong><\/p>\n The headline news of the 1960s was undoubtedly the moon landing when Neil Armstrong took one small step for man and one giant leap for mankind.<\/p>\n But it\u2019s important to remember that inventors had been making their own strides towards technological advances in the nine years prior to this momentous occasion, too.<\/p>\n In 1967, for example, IBM started working on the creation of a floppy disk.<\/p>\n A year later, the Intel Corporation was set up.<\/p>\n 1970s<\/strong><\/p>\n The 70s were an bumper year for technological advances.<\/p>\n In November 1972 the first commercial video game, Pong, was released by Atari.<\/p>\n In 1975 Bill Gates and Paul Allen set up Microsoft.<\/p>\n Then in 1976 Steve Wozniak designed the first Apple computer.<\/p>\n Just before the close of the decade, in 1979, CompuServe started offering dial-up to the world.<\/p>\n 1980s<\/strong><\/p>\n Just like the production of shell suits and leg warmers, tech progression was relentless in the 1980s.<\/p>\n At the start of the decade around one million computers were being used worldwide.<\/p>\n By 1981, this figure had already doubled.<\/p>\n The 1980s was the decade of the home computer boom.<\/p>\n In 1981 IBM released its first PC and the Osborne Computer Corporation launched its \u2018laptop\u2019 \u2013 although weighing in at more than 11kg, it wasn\u2019t that lap-friendly.<\/p>\n In 1984, the Apple Macintosh was released.<\/p>\n Then in 1985 Microsoft launched Windows 1.0.<\/p>\n On March 15, 1985, the first domain, symbolics.com, was registered.<\/p>\n Then in 1987, PowerPoint 1 was released.<\/p>\n By the end of the decade more than 100 million computers were in use worldwide.<\/p>\n 1990s<\/strong><\/p>\n The 1990s is the decade that the world got online.<\/p>\n In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee invented hypertext.<\/p>\n By 1993, there were 130 websites on the internet.<\/p>\n A year later, two Sanford students launched Jerry\u2019s Guide to the World Wide Web, which was renamed Yahoo!<\/p>\n In 1994 and 95, Amazon and eBay were launched.<\/p>\n Then in 1997, wi-fi became available to the general public.<\/p>\n The 1990s also saw the world\u2019s first spam email being sent out and the first web cam being launched \u2013 the latter was set up by Cambridge University to monitor a coffee pot in the Computer Science Department.<\/p>\n The decade closed on a worrying note, as people speculated that the Y2K bug might render huge parts of the world\u2019s computer ecosystem useless.<\/p>\n 2000s<\/strong><\/p>\n There were highs and lows in the technological universe in the 2000s.<\/p>\n On the plus side, the decade saw the birth of Facebook, Wikipedia, YouTube and Twitter. Apple launched the iPhone and Google introduced Street View.<\/p>\n On the downside, the LoveBug virus infected 2.5 million PCs and the number of SPAM emails sent in the world began to exceed the number of legitimate ones.<\/p>\n 2010s<\/strong><\/p>\n The 2010s was the decade the world moved to mobile and began to embrace smart tech and virtual reality.<\/p>\n In 2010, Apple launched its iPad and a year later Amazon released its Kindle Fire.<\/p>\n In 2014, Facebook took ownership of the Oculus VR company.<\/p>\n Then in 2015, the same year that Microsoft launched its Windows 10 operating system, Amazon unveiled Alexa and the Amazon Echo.<\/p>\n 2022<\/strong><\/p>\n Statistics from the State of Mobile 2022 report suggest that the average person spends four hours and 48 minutes a day using their mobile phone.<\/p>\n Other statistics suggest that two hours and 25 minutes of this time is spent scrolling through social media.<\/p>\n It\u2019s also believed that most people use nine mobile apps every day and 30 apps per month.<\/p>\n In March 2022, a property sold in the Metaverse for $4.3 million.<\/p>\n In April 2022, Nike sold a pair of metaverse trainers for $80,000.<\/p>\n At the time the UK was celebrating the Queen\u2019s Platinum Jubilee with a four-day weekend, newspapers were reporting that the future of parenthood could be having virtual children in the metaverse.<\/strong><\/p>\n What will the next 70 years of tech invention look like? Watch this space.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Celebrating The Queen’s Jubilee by looking back at 70 years of tech achievements. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":24200,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-web-design","category-web-hosting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heartinternet.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heartinternet.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heartinternet.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heartinternet.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heartinternet.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24197"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.heartinternet.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24197\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heartinternet.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heartinternet.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heartinternet.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heartinternet.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}