I’m talking about usability for the everyday person, rather than major inventions.

I’d like to nominate the ability to press a key then type and it finds whatever you type – documents, programs, settings etc. First came out in Vista I think in Windows land…?

Plug and play/USB.

Serial connections used to be a complete nightmare.

Pinch-zoom

Oh yeah wozwoz, definitely.

First came out in Vista I think in Windows land…?

OS X had spotlight in 2004/5. Vista was 2006/7 I think. Likely both pinched it from some other more obscure OS though.

wysiwyg was pretty important. I remember using WordPerfect to write stuff, and all the formatting (like fonts, bold, underline) wasn’t visible until you printed it out. Being able to see the actual font on the screen was a major step forward. I’m sure someone will tell me who did it first, but I’m guessing it was Apple copying Xerox.

Cloud.

It’s second nature to me now, and it will be ubiquitous soon enough. Before too long the idea of local data storage will be laughable

Touch screen smartphones.
USB/plug n play.

Its not a UI thing, but the phasing out of DVD+/- R and all the varying formats..

It’s second nature to me now, and it will be ubiquitous soon enough.

Not for everyone. Too many issues.

Luddite. History will prove me legendary. 😉

Multitasking/multiprocessing. Imagine if you needed a separate device for every task or you couldn’t do one thing without closing down what you were doing, loading a new programme, completing that task etc etc etc.

Imagine if you needed a separate device for every task or you couldn’t do one thing without closing down what you were doing

😆

Imagine? I was there!

In 20 years time Stoner will still be telling us all that we’ll all be using the cloud soon. 😉

Plug and play/USB.

Serial connections used to be a complete nightmare.

At least the polarisation on serial connectors is slightly more obvious!

Some of us still use serial connections…

molgrips – Member
Imagine? I was there!

Don’t start that pissing war sonny….

😆

SSD storage drives. Users expect iPad and Phone-like instant-on responsiveness.

And the cloud.

Spotlight was ported from Sherlock that was in MacOS 9.

My nomination? Wacom tablets.

Graphical user interface. Getting rid* of the command line was they key step in making computers viable for the masses.

* You can argue that it runs in parallel if you like.

USB flash drives.
A lot easier for moving files around, instead of slow/unreliable floppy disks or re-writable CDs

http

Easily findable donkey pr0n, surely?

Allegedly. 😀

SSD storage drives. Users expect iPad and Phone-like instant-on responsiveness.

It weird that never hits my as the most important thing going forward.

WiFi for getting rid of the need for so many cables, plugging a phone or tablet in should be the absolute exception these days.

bandwidth

Spelchek.

SSD is a revelation but more in application launch times. Turning even a fast system to instant launching and with bucket loads of memory, keep on launching big heavy weight apps in no time.

Though for me, not exactly a computer innovation but a side effect from the music world… twin deck tape recorders and C60 cassettes 😀

All those games you could copy! 😀

Bill Gates wants a word with you…

The ‘cloud’ has just become a marketing buzzword, most of the consumer services that purport to be ‘in the cloud’ aren’t really, you may as well call anything not on your own PC ‘the cloud’ which is pish :p

I guess tablets still win for me; always on, touch screens, web browsing from the couch with minimal effort etc.

The development of microprocessors so that nowadays most people don’t know or care what make or model is in their PC.
In the old days every six months there was something new, which geeks like me had to buy. 286, 386, 486, maths co-processors, over-clocking, fancy RAM, duel bus whatsits.
Now, I can run excel on a £99 tablet.
(Still need a massive laptop for CAD)

Tied up with PnP, PCI has to be a big one. It was the advent of PCI that finally did away with hours of setting jumpers on cards to configure IRQ, DMA, base address and so on. I worked in support before then and it was a bloody nightmare helping folk do that remotely, especially when everything was an add-on board rather than integrated into the motherboard. Sound card, graphics card, network card, modem, serial ports, parallel port, game port all needed frobbing manually to avoid clashes with each other. The fact that we’re still using a variant of PCI today says it all.

Similarly, and it pains me to say it because it was wildly unpopular at the time, but Windows 95 / DirectX / “Games for Windows” was a paradigm shift. Prior to then, every new game you’d buy would require endless fiddling with config.sys / autoexec.bat and memory managers to squeeze out the last few drops of conventional memory in order to satisfy whatever specific requirements that particular title had.

plug and play in all its forms

size, as in the smallness of stuff, that’s quite an innnovation, nobody would be wandering around with a mainframe in their pocket… here we are with iphones + galaxys + whatnot

the cloud internet, that’s been quite handy

mice + other pointing widgets + GUIs + desktop + multitasking and so on

Monitors that didn’t have to do double duty as the family telly

Likely both pinched it from some other more obscure OS though.

that was in MacOS 9

I was right 😉

wysiwig… I’m sure someone will tell me who did it first, but I’m guessing it was Apple copying Xerox.

Xerox PARC

Not really an innovation (much like much of the above) but MS Office caused a revolution in the way people worked and was the thing that put a computer on everyone’s desk.

paper tape so I didn’t have to keep feeding these punched cards in individually and getting in a mess if I dropped the pile 😉

Reliable secure digital payments – can you imagine life without eBay, Amazon, CRC

WYSIWYG

multitasking

GUIs

As someone who ends up cobbling docs together oh Format Painter how I love thee.

Come on, it’s UNDO isn’t it? I could take or leave most of teh rest but life definitley got better with undo..

Energy efficiency and battery design. The stuff we can do on portable devices now is mindblowing.

Smartphones – being able to do so much on a device you can hold in one hand – amazing.

Progress bars that give you an accurate estimate of how long something is going to take. Oh wait…