How-To Geek
Ask the Readers: What Technology Are You Most Thankful For?
Tomorrow is Thanksgiving for U.S. readers and we’re interested in what technology our readers, celebrating the holiday or otherwise, are most thankful for. Hop into the comments and share.
Smartphones? Ebook readers? All that miniaturization that makes your medical equipment tick? Whatever technology you’re most thankful for this year, we’d love to hear all about it. Sound off in the comments with a note on what technology–be it gizmo, gadget, or bit of code–you’re thankful for and what makes it dear to your heart.
Check back in on Friday for the What You Said roundup to see what you’re fellow readers are thankful for.
Got Feedback? Join the discussion at discuss.howtogeek.com
Comments (68)
Jason Fitzpatrick is warranty-voiding DIYer and all around geek. When he's not documenting mods and hacks he's doing his best to make sure a generation of college students graduate knowing they should put their pants on one leg at a time and go on to greatness, just like Bruce Dickinson. You can follow him on Google+ if you'd like.
- Published 11/21/12
Without any hesitation I can say that my iPhone is the best gadget I’ve ever owned.
Technology that actually works!
I’d probably have to say the Internet in general, because that has essentially inspired most most of the features in modern technology. Plus, I wouldn’t know nearly as much about tech now if I didn’t have access to the Internet.
World Wide Web
The Interwebz.
The internet of course, but there’s something else : anything that can produce digital sound : earbuds, speakers, headphones…
Without them, seriously, what would be music ? And communication ?
Probably the gun. I doubt you’d be celebrating the day had you not used it to wipe out the indigenous people.
Really dude? REALLY?!
The net….. and the transistor. And my beautiful beautiful Asus G74Sx :)
The Internet of course. Never has so much information been available to virtually everyone on the planet at the speed of electricity.
Hands Down – Toilet Paper
Sorry about the pun, but it is true.
The Internet. The information I’ve found and people I’ve met, (including my wife), have been life changing
Water purification, by far.
A distant 2nd is a hot water heater attached to the shower head.
All other tech falls very far below those two in my book. If you don’t believe me, turn off your water heater for a week and stop assuming water from the tap is clean enough to drink.
Ahhh hifi audio (hi end), then the internet. But that subject to change and can be swapped around at any time. It so cool to listen to KSHE95 and live well over 1000 miles away. Best of both worlds.
yep – plumbing – water on tap, don’t need to carry a heavy bucket 10 miles, and sewerage you dispose of by pressing a button …
followed by electricity on tap, 24 hours a day – without which, as we saw with NYC Hurricane Sandy and continuing – all your fancy iPhones and data centres don’t work for very long at all … !
oh yeah – agreeing with TheFu – I forgot to include the clean safe almost-free drinking water on tap we take for granted in Australia, while much of the world’s population has to deal with the risk of cholera and terrible diseases
PHP, Mysql, and javascript
Have never posted here but I think the thermos bottle.
The wheel. Even the humble HDD has one.
Modern plumbing, most definitely.
Clean drinking water, can’t live without it. All the other stuff is nice, but we can live without it.
Integrated Electronics! This is what drives & will drive each & everything in our world.. :-)
i am thankful for the GPS without it i wouldn’t have know my wife my cheating on me with 3 different people 5 blocks away from my house. Thank you GPS because of you i threw her out to the dump!
Medical tech keeps me alive. I have had a cardiac pacemaker since February 2001 keeping my heart beating. Amazing tech in a very small device.
Solar Power
I’d have to say that I can’t live without any of my gadgets or stuff like plumbing. I couldn’t live without any of that stuff.
Though, in a whole separate category, Dropbox is epically awesome, and I use it on a daily basis.
World Wide web
I would hands down have to say CLEAN WATER and ELECTRICITY!!!
Then I would have to say the Internet, Thank God for DSL!
electro-mechanical generators
As many have already stated, water purification is #1 by far. Everything else is just nice to have.
The NAND gate, without the NAND gate there would be no logical processing so no computers, no internet, no phones only lights bulbs and Morse communication.
AMD processors. God knows how I’d've got a quad-core laptop at the price otherwise. :P
BIRTH CONTROL!
Not that anyone knows how to use it or anything. I’m still thankful for it. Because without birth control our planet might be more over run by even more hungry humans than ever. Not a whole lot unlike cockroaches on garbage or cancer!
That’s “technology”, right?
clean water and waste disposal; toilet paper
Velcro
Super-glue
Cable Ties
Label Maker
Gotta B Electricity Little if anything in an urban area works without it. Go on name ONE Thing
The bicycle
Preperation H, amazing how it shrinks those nasty roids
The internet. Without it, we would be still writing letters everyday instead of texting, and wishing the letter would get to the other side of the world in less than 24 hours. I mean, the internet is the center of the whole chain of technology. A lot of things would not exist in the world yet without it!
But to come to think of it, maybe microchips. As in those tiny chips that once were much bigger. Without that, not even the internet would have existed.
But most of all, without the web (aka internet) How-to Geek wouldn’t exist right now!
Oh and one last thing, displays! I mean any would do (lcd, LED, plasma, big-boxed-old-monitors) although the big-boxed-old one irritates your eyes. But seriously, whatever it is, without digital displays, life would suck! Plus you would never be able visually see whats going on in your nice powerful box sitting on your desk, right? Its like being blind!
Ecmo machine . A medical miracle used at Colubia Presbyterian Hospital to save my 27 year old nephew who had pneumonia and was in critical condition.
The handy-dandy laptop with all the bells $ whistles: camera, speakers, microphone, internet connectivity, windows 7, and Micro-soft office word. It presents a quality of life issue. With Skype I can video-chat with far distant family, friends; with Google Voice make inexpensive calls to far distant people. Microsoft Office allows me to type in Hebrew, Greek, and Russian. How Great is that!? The internet makes available a wide range of information in just seconds. I paid to have my Master’s Thesis typed many years ago–by an incompetent typist; now I could type a doctoral dissertation complete with Hebrew and Greek text. If you look at dissertations from back in the day–the author had to hand write the Greek or Hebrew. Spell check makes white-out a thing of the past. I remember the day when I would type the paper–with carbon–only to make numerous mistakes, requiring white-out or correct-tape–or requiring the whole page be retyped. Gad, the computer word processor is a God send to any writer.
The Electro-magnetic force. It makes all this possible.
A properly functioning flush toilet.
air conditioner [a/c] to me thats the best invention of the 20th century
1). Toilet Paper
2). Google, along with the internet
3). Laptops
4). My Win7 smartphone
Am absolutely with
iandrewmartin
on that one! Toilet Paper! Think about it…
The Internet without my doubt…
The PC too!
Betamax!
The Internet.
Indoor flush toilets, especially in the winter.
Definitely electricity and running water.
I believe that without the advent of the electric power nothing else that we enjoy today could be made available to so many for very little cost.
Submersible ships. (the kind that come back up)
i would say internet, microchips, nano tech, capability of genetic modification.
but all this still not able to improve quality of life people live on this earth, long way to go…!!!
Heated car seats :-)
Circuits and computing (correct me if i am wrong). The were the first thing which started the whole idea of computers and devices. Almost every thing is made due to the initial invention.
Bottled water
FREEDOM!!! and How-To Geek which has helped me tremendously!!!
Simple, fire, or even more generic, combustion. Without we would have no electricity to run the water purification plants, no vehicles, no heat much less hot water, and many more things. Combustion is used in everything you do even if it is indirectly like the generation of the electricity you use to charge your phone or the heat used for heating your water or house in the winter.
Without someone having introducing the concept of a zero into ancient numbering systems, absolutely nothing (or zero, if you will) mentioned in the foregoing comments would have been possible. We would never have been able to develop pure mathematics, and its associate sciences. In fact, the very word “Technology”, would never have entered into the etymology of any language. Ironic that we should attribute to this non-existent entity – a symbol – which resembles “The Wheel”, as well as the very building blocks of all matter, from sub-atomic particles to the very Cosmos itself. In the absence of detailed research, I believe credit should go to the ancient intelligentsia in the Middle East and India.
Electricity my friends, without it there would be no PCs, iPads, iPhones, Internet and the like!
Electricity.
i am tempted to cite the m1919a4 browning and m1911a1 colt .45, but that might make some folks unhappy
The collective technology that taught teachers how to teach. Without teachers technology would not exist. As well as any other thing that helped modern life survive. Teachers !
TCP/IP it is the mother of all internet technologies.
I’m going to go with the roads
Spreadsheet software. Project design is so much easer with it