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THE BOX

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I know people will joke but I sincerely think the smartphone is a legitimate accomplishment. One of the few technologies that outpaced what many sci-fi authors and artists were predicting for decades prior of what phones could be, imo. A handheld PC/phone/camera/music player in your palm? Amazing!

Cancer care Statins MRI HGH treatments Botox Automated metros Autotransformer railroad electrification

Medical Aid in Dying

The various treatments for cystic fibrosis that have taken life expectancies for those born with it from the low 20s to 65+

The pioneer and voyager probes were all in the 70s Venera 7 in 1970 could be considered the first successful landing on Venus, or any planet Viking 1 in 1976 for Mars Huygens in 2005 for Titan The advent of space stations in the 80s Hubble, large cultural impact there

Molecular biology.

HPV vaccine

The French Messmer-Plan gets far too little attention even inside France itself. In 1973 France discovered that relying on oil for power was a problem. Barely two decades later they were so successful at solving it, they even had to scale back a bit...

mRNA vaccines, CRISPR CAS9 and biotech in general. We used to have to isolate insulin from animals. Now we can produce it in a lab that any middling university could easily afford – maybe even some hobbyists

The Oxford Covid-19 vaccine

THIS (Source: blogs.worldbank.org/en/opendata/...)

the Voyager program.

The first baby conceived via IVF was born in 1978. Relatedly, the advances are more incremental but the improvements to birth control since the 1960s have been really dramatic.

Internet connected computers in everyone's pockets each with vastly more processing power, storage, and memory than was used in the Apollo program is quite an achievement

The Wikipedia entry for smallpox starts with probably the greatest two words in English, "Smallpox was..."

Public health campaign against tobacco use. It’s insane how successful it has been

Not at all the greatest achievement, but the improvements in observational astronomy has been almost unbelievable

Good prompt.

The ISS

Global child mortality rate dropping from around 14% to below 4%. One in seven of all children used to die before they were 5!

Social progress has been huge since then.

Golden rice. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_...

repeating my regular call to make Smallpox Eradication Day an international holiday

Conveniently enough, ARPANET was created in…1969.

1.5 billion people lifted out of extreme poverty in the last 50 years.

Eradicating Guinea Worm disease.

In the US: accessible healthcare Criminal justice reform Ending homelessness and poverty Urban mass transit Long distance high speed rail Pleasant, efficient air travel Effective policing Mandatory vaccinations Effective efficient universal K-12 education Ending government corruption

Yeah, nothing technological of the *type* “flight”. Arguably information processing and communication tech. Renewable energy is worth a shout. But socially it’s the massive decline in worldwide poverty, especially China. (Incidentally, The Pill was pre-1969)

MDT treatment for Hansen's Disease/Leprosy, 1981. Wikipedia: "In the 1980s, there were 5.2 million cases globally, but by 2020 this decreased to fewer than 200,000." It's not gone like smallpox, but there's substantial progress.

While it was invented in 1960, the birth control pill didn’t get widespread availability to unmarried people in the US until 1972. If we count it in the 1969+ camp, I’d say the ability of women to control their own fertility changed the world more radically than almost anything else.

This wouldn't be "greatest" but in a purely "cool technology" sense I'd say the availability of civilian/consumer drones is pretty incredible.

The DNA revolution! For medical science, biology, forensics, and archeology.

Safe, effective IUDs. The modern copper one (paragard) was approved in 1984 and the hormonal one (mirena) in 2000.

Solar panels. My parents had a very early solar system, a panel that heated water directly and saved on got water bills. That was as good as you got in the 90s.

HIV is no longer a death sentence and a vaccine is on the horizon. Same with a ton of cancers.

Charged coupled device.

Berner-Lee and HTML

Gravitational wave observatories

Things got much worse before they got better in this period, but HIV has gone to a treatable and widely treated chronic condition from a death sentence in the past 20-30 years

crunchwrap

Not having A nuclear war

are we doing We Didn't Start The Fire but optimist twist

The internet connecting different cultures. Specifically how it provided support to marginalized people who used to think they were alone, but can now find their community from thousands of miles away.

Modern computing

bsky.app/profile/smol...

With the internet, the entire planet is your job market, your circle of pals, and your dating pool.

Not quite the same time period, but 66 years (or less) from first understanding of DNA (structure in ‘53) to CRISPR-based genome editing.

Unleaded gas? Simply the work of the EPA and similar in cleaning the air is ASTONISHING to anybody who remembers what the air used to be like.

PCR?

When do we consider the Green Revolution to have happened?

Ending regular famines, ending chronic malnutrition in most of the world, & making birth control widely available.

Surely the launch of the "world wide web" (and hypertext markup language aka HTML) in 1993 was a major achievement. Sure, we done gone f*cked it all up since then, but the original intention was a good one.

-drastic reduction in infant mortality -international agreement to ban CFCs, reversing the expansion of the hole in the ozone layer -renewables cheaper than coal -ending apartheid -establishing democracy in much of central and southern Europe, Latin America, and several Asian countries

4-bit to 64-bit processors? Going from, like 92,000 instructions per second in 1971 to billions per second in 2026.

HIV treatments have come a LONG way

ok gave this a real think and I think the fact that there's so many that I couldn't decide is an answer by itself

Recency biases, but: Development of the COVID-19 vaccine.

Eradicating rubella

Escaping the Cold War without some damn fool US or Russian soldier nuking the planet.

Wikipedia.

Large vocabulary continuous speech recognition appeared in ‘97.

Despite the many downsides, the Internet.

In my lifetime I've gone from a TI calculator with 8 bar led display to this Pixel 10 in my hands. Connected by home WiFi and then to a fiber modem out to the Web and Internet.

The massive decline in global poverty, from roughly half the living human population in 1969 to less than 10% today even with that population more than doubling in that time.

HIV going from "you have three years make your peace" to a reduction in lifespan only visible statistically.

Weird Al’s Food Album?

The covid vaccine, for one

LANDSAT and, from that, availability of satellite imagery, in timeseries, across multiple spectral ranges NDVI (Normalized difference vegetation index) is so basic that it’s hard for me to think of it as “invented,” much less as recently as 1973 (or 69 if thinking of such indices generally)

Tang

The Americans with Disabilities (I don’t know how things have changed in other parts of the world) And let’s hear it for Wikipedia (whose model is gravely endangered by the billionaires who own AI)

Wikipedia, the largest and most translated collection of knowledge in human history, is free for everyone and accessible anywhere.

Minor compared to smallpox or sanitation, but American central cities are cleaner and safer than in the late 20th century to an extent that for many demographics they're more appealing than suburbs. Also, American food/coffee/beer is better by several orders of magnitude.

The campaign to install toilets in even poor, rural homes and end the custom of defecating outside in India was shockingly successful, and only happened in the past 15 years.

Saying nice after any use of 69

Relational Database and practical Application Programming Interface (API) both emerged in the 1970s. IMHO 100 years from now, looking back, both will be ranked among the greatest human inventions ever.

Digital payment, especially through credit cards, is another game changer. Impact society and how we live a lot more than moon landing.

The Internet, especially commercial Internet, completely changed how we communicate and receive information.

At the risk of falling too much into my own idiom, the 1974 Health and Safety at Work Act.

In the neighborhood, and I guess it's more of a standardization push than an invention, but it's a major achievement nevertheless: ISO 668

Seems like an increasingly safe bet that the things you will be able to do with a computer in 2035, relative to 1969, will be at least an Apollo/Kitty Hawk ratio. Not sure which will be number one in retrospect, but VLSI, the Internet, and transformers will probably make the top ten.

getting soda cans to open reliably without leaving bits of metal all over the place

Are we counting social progress/human rights, or only tech/medicine/infrastructure stuff?

Consumption of media. We went from paper, film, and early tape to now being able to access nearly every book, movie, magazine, song, hell even any recipe, instantly. It’s near to witchcraft and it happened in a lifetime

Pediatric leukemia. For the most common type, ALL, it was so commonly a death sentence that it became a firmly entrenched TV trope as late as the early 90s and frankly late 90s too. Now? If you catch it early enough, 98% survival rate is entirely possible.

Pretty much everything related to computers, the internet, telecommunications. This has not always been an achievement used for good (but then, neither was aviation), but it's definitely been impressive.

My great-grandfather used to sit on his back porch and watch the wright brothers try to fly their prototypes in a big field behind his house, and lived to see the moon landing on TV.

sabr.org/gamesproj/ga...

Machine tools, CNC tools, Computer measuring tools.

Childhood mortality, maternity mortality. Gene therapy, gene editing, farm utilization, irrigation, food preservation, financial tools.

For me, the eradication of polio in the USA in 1994, a disease that plagued my childhood. Recently, Dracunculiasis (Guinea-worm disease) is on the verge of being eradicated, with 13 human cases reported in 2024, thanks to Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter and The Carter Center. It could all be undone.

Gravitational wave detection. For the first time in history, humanity gained a new "sense," allowing us to hear the universe through ripples in spacetime rather than simply see it through light.

I came down with type 1 diabetes a year ago, and the tech is fucking amazing. Like when I was crying over the endo diagnosing me because I'd looked up my life expectancy, she said "No, that's completely changed in thr last ten years from the new tech, and the stats haven't had time to catch up yet."

my wonderful wife and son were both born after 1969 and they are the greatest achievements of history

Reversing the damage to the ozone layer

Once it’s figured out gene therapy will be a massive achievement. Genetic diseases like sickle cell and diabetes, the vast majority of cancers, and even AIDS will have a cure. This is actually what science is pushing hard for right now. MRNa stuff has been around since the mid 2000’s.

The green revolution, which technically began well before 1969 but the fact that food security around the world was mostly solved by the mid 60’s was massive for global stability. Also, RIP USAID which helped to spearhead this.

Streaming services figuring out a way to make sure we don't save any money by cutting cable.

I’m piggybacking but I think it’s good that in the US a phone conversation (telephony is mostly now interwebs) is massively cheaper than booze or a pack of cigarettes