Gadgets That Changed The World Part 1

Every so often, a device comes along that changes the way we live our daily lives and things are never the same again. With today's digital technology, such devices may come more frequently than in the past, but our list revolutionary gadgets extends back two centuries.

Apple Macintosh

The personal computer debuted in the 1970s, but the 1984 introduction of the Macintosh set the standard for how they would operate from then on. A Mac-like computer had debuted a year earlier -- the Lisa -- but at nearly $10,000, it was a flop. At $2,495, the Macintosh wasn't exactly cheap by 1984 standards, but it revolutionized the way people interacted with their computers, establishing the interface and metaphor that every current OS uses.
We do love our gadgets. They serve as tokens of tribal identification, but they also make our lives easier. And sometimes they change everything. Who would have thought fifteen years ago that we could have our entire music libraries in our pockets to listen to whenever we wanted? For that matter, who would have thought 35 years ago that we could take music with us wherever we went?
Some of the 19 gadgets on our list are obsolete or nearly so, but even those changed the world by paving the way for what comes after. They represented a paradigm shift: they caused a permanent change in our idea of what was possible, and they created new standards that later devices had to meet. 

ATM

For our money -- get it? -- this is probably the most revolutionary gadget in the list. It's hard to believe there was a time when the money you had in hand by 3 PM on a Friday afternoon was all the money you had for the weekend. Experiments with cash-dispensing and deposit-taking machines at individual banks started in the early sixties, but it was in 1963 that the first networked ATM made its debut. Nightlife would never be the same. 

GPS

These days we can always know where we are and how to get where we're going, thanks to the portable satellite receiver known as a GPS (Global Positioning System) unit. The system was first conceived by the U.S. military in the 1970s, and the satellites that let the units triangulate their locations were launched between 1989 and 1994. Magellan claims to have been first out with a hand-held unit, in 1989. 

VCR

First introduced in 1963, the VCR may now be almost obsolete, but it revolutionized Americans' relationship with their TV entertainment. We no longer had to make sure we watched something when it was first broadcast or risk missing it forever, and it enabled us to watch our shows whenever we wanted rather than when the networks thought we should. 

Microwave Oven

It might come as a surprise that the microwave has been around for more than 60 years, but in fact, there was a commercial model (almost 6 feet tall and weighing 750 pounds) on the market in 1947, two years after a chocolate bar melted in the pocket of an engineer working around a source of radio waves. College students and harried homemakers everywhere owe their ability to eat something resembling real food to that happy accident in 1945