My god, how much of an attention w**** can you be? What are you missing in your life? Fire was never invented anyway.
How about the chemicals "they" are putting in the water to turn the frogs gay? That's gotta be a top 10 invention all time.
honestly those foam capsules you put in water when you were a kid . . . THOSE are pretty much a technological wonder
Yes ARPANET was invented in 1969 and is the precursor to what we know as the Internet. The first email was sent in 1971. I agree it's really the commercial internet so I would put the significant invention at 1990 with "WorldWideWeb / Nexus" or the first Internet browser. As a fan of classic sci-fi it's always interesting to see what writers many decades ago thought about would be the future. Things like the Internet, cell phones, and even tablets were predicted by many writers. In 2001 there is a brief scene of where Heywood Floyd is seen on a Moon shuttle using what looks like a tablet. Also the Star Trek TOS communicator presages the cell phone but even the design of flip phones. Asimov, Clarke, and many other writers predicted instantly available global communications. Although they thought rather than dividing humanity it would lead to more unity of humanity and lead to a global government. One other thing that I find interesting is that so much of previous sci-fi focused on revolutions of transportation and large scale engineering. That we would have things like flying cars, spaceships that could take humans to the rest of the solar system, Moon bases, etc.. We aren't anywhere to a Moon base and the ISS is pitifully small compared to what Clarke envisioned. According to 2001 Space Odyssey, construction on this should've started in the early 90's. For the most part our transportation technology is still largely powered by the same technologies that were developed in the 1940's and earlier. What they got wrong though was the revolution in information technology so while they predicted personal computers, cell phones and the Internet they didn't see how that would transform technology. Particularly things like touch screens and the GUI. Here is the Space Shuttle Columbia's cockpit Here is the command module for Space X Dragon. About 40 years separates Columbia from Dragon yet Dragon's concept is simpler than the Columbia and is pretty much the same idea as Mercury or Soyuz. It's control and telemetry systems though are far more advanced and the interface does away with the need for all of the dials and switches in Columbia.
