Watson

IBM supercomputer Watson defeats two of Jeopardy's greatest players in February 2011. Out of 30 answers, Watson was first to buzz in on 25 of them, getting all but one of them right. Watson uses hundreds of simultaneous algorithmic calculations to help the machine parse human speech patterns, check them against its vast database of knowledge, and provide a most likely answer.
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MP3

Tomislav Uzelac of Advanced Multimedia Products deploys the first MP3 player in 1997. Five years earlier, the prestigious Fraunhofer Institute Integrierte Schaltungen research center in Erlangen, Germany laid the foundation for MP3 by researching high quality, low bit-rate audio coding through its project named EUREKA. By the end of the 1990s, the MP3 technology become a huge commercial success.
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The subroutine

EDSAC computer programmer David Wheeler develops two significant contributions to computer programming during the early 1950s: the subroutine and program code library. He also develops the “Wheeler Jump”, which allows a program to pass control to a subroutine. The "Wheeler Jump" is the precursor of the Goto statement.
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ASCII

The American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) is introduced in 1963. ASCII is a universal standard for computers that allows machines from different manufacturers to exchange data. 128 unique 7-bit strings stand for either a letter of the English alphabet, one of the Arabic numerals, one of an assortment of punctuation marks and symbols, or a special function.
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Wide Area Network

Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) researchers Thomas Merrill and Lawrence G. Roberts create the first Wide Area Network (WAN) in 1965. The network connects the TX-2 computer at MIT to the Q-32 computer in Santa Monica, California via a dedicated telephone line with acoustic couplers.
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Yahoo!

Yahoo! is born in February 1994. The website, originally named "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web," is developed by Stanford Ph.D. students David Filo and Jerry Yang. It begins as a way to keep track of their personal interests on the Internet. Before long, hundreds of people are accessing their guide from well beyond Stanford University.
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DEC

MIT colleagues Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson establish Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1957. They began building small digital hardware modules that can be combined together to be used in a lab setting. By 1961, the company is making a profit and begins construction of their first computer, the PDP-1.
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