Gallery: The Decades That Invented the Future, Part 11: 2001-2010
01the-iphone-gadget-lab
 Today's leading-edge technology is headed straight for tomorrow's junk pile, but that doesn't make it any less awesome. Everyone loves the latest and greatest. Sometimes, though, something truly revolutionary cuts through the clutter and fundamentally changes the game. And with that in mind, Wired is looking back over 12 decades to highlight the 12 most innovative people, places and things of their day. From the first transatlantic radio transmissions to cellphones, from vacuum tubes to microprocessors, we'll run down the most important advancements in technology, science, sports and more. This week's installment takes us back to 2001-2010, when the U.S. was attacked, the iPhone was introduced to the world and social media took over. We don't expect you to agree with all of our picks, or even some of them. That's fine. Tell us what you think we've missed and we'll publish your list later. 2007: The iPhone (Gadgets) -------------------------- “Every once in awhile a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything,” Steve Jobs said when he unveiled the first iPhone at the Macworld Expo in 2007. He was right. The iPhone was and is revolutionary. It did change everything. The iPhone, hell, smartphones in general, are so ubiquitous now it’s easy to forget it was just six years ago when the iPhone first [said hello](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Bvfs4ai5XU). But the iPhone was the first device that challenged our expectations of what mobile devices can, and should, do. It was the first device that took the mobile phone from something ugly, unreliable, and unwieldy to something elegant, intuitive, and sexy. It was the first handset to have a multitouch screen, visual voicemail, and its own browser that could access any web page, not just WAP versions of pages. You could store up to 16 GB of music, photos, notes, and e-mails on one device. Wi-Fi and EDGE (and later 3G) capabilities meant you could stay connected no matter where you went. By putting e-mail, web-browsing, and maps at our fingertips it changed not just how we communicate but how we consume information. And, perhaps most importantly, it’s responsible for the robust app ecosystem we have today. The iPhone jumpstarted the now billion-dollar mobile-apps industry. It was a full year after the iPhone came out when the first third-party apps were introduced. But what started off as just 500 apps quickly spawned into the multi-billion dollar industry of hundreds of thousands of apps we have today. *Photo: [Carl Berkeley](http://www.flickr.com/photos/mac_users_guide/3680455198/sizes/z/)/Flickr*
02the-human-genome-science
2000s: The Human Genome (Science) --------------------------------- The 2000s didn't mark the start of human genome science -- many fundamental breakthroughs, from understanding DNA's structure to flagging mutations underlying hundreds of gene-based diseases, had come in previous decades -- but they'll be remembered for opening the research floodgates. New tools, in particular [SNP chips](http://www.broadinstitute.org/news/197), an inexpensive method for surveying select spots in a genome, and [the human genome sequence itself](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genome_Project), finished in 2003 and giving researchers a framework for studying our chromosomes, made genomic science more powerful than ever before. Though [clinical progress would come slowly](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/10/beyond-the-genome/), as genomes proved more complicated than most scientists anticipated, more was learned in that decade than any before. Not insignificantly, the [economic consequences were massive](http://battelle.org/docs/default-document-library/economic_impact_of_the_human_genome_project.pdf ). Now, nearly 10 years after the Human Genome Project's completion, genetics is a fantastically fertile field. Researchers are [probing important types of newly-discovered genetic differences](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/11/recent-human-evolution-2/), mapping [the geometry of chromosomes](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/08/erez-lieberman-aiden/), developing [extraordinarily powerful clinical tests](http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/new_scientist/2012/09/prenatal_genetic_testing_of_entire_fetal_genome_what_is_a_healthy_baby_anyway_.html), probing [the genome's network properties](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/05/linux-vs-life/ ) and appreciating [portions of the genome once dismissed as inconsequential](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/09/encode-human-genome/). All this work rests on a foundation laid in the 2000s. As National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins [told ABC News in 2009](http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Decade/genome-hormones-top-10-medical-advances-decade/story?id=9356853#.UM93L7amBA4 ), "I think when people look back in 100 years, and look at what was the most significant advance in medicine and all of scientific research in this decade it will be the human genome." *A visualization of gene interactions in the human genome. Image: [Krzywinski et al.](http://genome.cshlp.org/content/early/2009/06/15/gr.092759.109.abstract)/Genome Research*
03instagram-5
2010: Instagram (Photography) ----------------------------- The 2000s were a rough time for film. Polaroid, the company that revolutionized instant photography and left a lasting effect on nostalgic hipsters, stopped making their product in 2008. And in 2009, Kodak stopped producing Kodachrome, the first mass-marketed color film, which was responsible for capturing many of the world's most iconic images—including Steve McCurry's famous image of the Afghan girl. Digital cameras were taking over and making life a lot easier for pros and consumers alike by doing away with cumbersome film and pesky processing. Little did we know, however, that just as we were getting comfortable in our new digital world—and buying big expensive digital cameras—the next huge change in modern photography was already taking shape in tandem. Philippe Kahn is widely credited with creating the first camera phone in 1997. And in 2000 Sharp launched the J-SH04 in Japan, which became the world's first commercially available camera phone. Soon enough, cameras were standard features on all cell phones and the race was on to create the best one–a race that’s still accelerating today. In 2007 the iPhone was announced and the game changed again as the app world was ushered in and cemented the camera’s symbiosis with phones. Today there are so many photography apps, it’s mind-boggling, but none has changed the world of photography, and the world itself, quite as much as Instagram. Released in late 2010, Instagram climbed to 100 million users in just under two years and shocked everyone when it sold to Facebook for $1 billion. Though its impact bled over mostly into the subsequent decade, its release is a symbol of the tumultuous changes undergone in the preceding ten years. Not only do more people carry cameras with them at all times than ever before, they are enabled with constantly evolving ways to share those photos instantly. [Photographs became an experience rather than a document](”http://stag-komodo.wired.com/rawfile/2012/11/stephen-mayes-vii-photography/”). Even at the current height of its success, the chances are stacked against Instagram still being relevant in another 10 years. Perhaps the [recent rights-grab controversy](”http://stag-komodo.wired.com/rawfile/2012/12/instagram/”) is the beginning of the end. But few products have changed photography and humans’ relationship to images more than this cute little app.
SSgt Samuel Morse04rise-of-the-drones-war
2000s: Rise of the Drones (War) ------------------------------- Since the world saw its first drone strike in 2002, drone warfare has quite literally taken off. One reason why: the U.S. went to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and needed a tool to spy and strike at any time. Unmanned drones, which make for excellent spies, were put to work tracking insurgents on battlefields with no clear front lines. They can hover over vast areas for long periods, use digital image processing to stream real-time footage of the ground, and navigate with GPS-guided precision. In short, they take the best that satellites have to offer and add in the ability to move to the area where intelligence is needed. The military has also understood the potential for drones to be more than just a peeping eye in the sky, and has armed its line of unmanned combat aerial vehicles (or UCAVs) to the teeth. But the Pentagon hasn’t always been so enthusiastic about drone technology. Before the recent rise of drones, the military took a rocky road marred with failures and failed development programs. In 1960, a CIA pilot aboard a U-2 spy plane was shot down in Soviet air space during a reconnaissance mission and survived to be interrogated and put on trial. On the back of this very public embarrassment, the U.S. began to develop a drone called “Red Wagon.” However, the project was short-lived as it proved to be too expensive. Despite that false start, drone advocates persisted and managed to build several drones in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which were used in the Vietnam War. But they didn’t match the near real-time imagery sophistication of satellites at the time. This changed in the 1990s. Thanks to a number of innovations and advancements in other fields, such as GPS and wireless communication, drones began to realize their technological potential. And on Feb. 4, 2002, an MQ-1 Predator drone fired the first missile from an unmanned vehicle at a live target -- believed at the time to be Osama bin Laden. Journalists later reported that the strike had killed civilians, not the terrorist mastermind. But the failure of the first combat mission didn’t impair the future of the robotic plane. The U.S. currently has at least 678 drones operating today. Programmers are also now looking at ways to grant drones some forms of limited autonomy, eliminating the need for a human controller during particularly monotonous tasks. Though the Pentagon has promised that a human will always decide when a robotic bird shoots to kill. *Photo: Three MQ-1 Predator drones ready for launch in southern Afghanistan on Oct. 25, 2008. Credit: U.S. Air Force/Staff Sgt. Samuel Morse.*
05hadoop-computers
2000s: Hadoop (Computers) ------------------------- Yes, the most important computing creation of the aughts is called Hadoop. It all started with a man named Doug Cutting, who was trying to build an open source version of the Google web search engine -- a version anyone could download and run on their own machines. In order to build this search engine, Cutting needed a way of, well, building an index of the entire web, and that's a task of epic proportions. As luck would have it, Google had just released a pair of research papers describing the sweeping software platform used to build its web index across a sea of low-power computer servers, and Cutting set about recreating the thing. He called it Hadoop after his son's yellow stuffed elephant. Eventually, Yahoo got behind the project. And so did Facebook. And today, Hadoop helps drive not only Yahoo and Facebook but online operations across the web. It's even moving into a mainstream businesses, thanks to a fleet of Hadoop-minded software startups. Hadoop is the Linux of the cloud computing age -- open source software that has remade the internet. And, yes, it's named after a yellow stuffed elephant.
06infotainment-comes-to-the-fore-autopia
2000s: Connected Cars (Vehicles) -------------------------------- A confluence of events and technologies led by embedded data connections, smartphones, navigation systems, streaming audio and social networks have made the car into the ultimate mobile device. And the first decade of the 21st century was infotainment's coming out party. BMW's iDrive system led the way in 2001, followed by the automaker's integration of the iPod connector a few years later. Luxury automakers began offering real-time traffic data, hard drives for music storage and video screens to keep the kiddies in back appeased during long trips. That technology began filtering down to more plebeian rides in the following years, spearheaded by Ford's Sync system. No one wants their connected life to stop while they're behind the wheel, and the car-as-mobile-device is just beginning to revolutionize how we interact both inside and outside our vehicles. *Image: BMW*
07september-11th-threat-level
2001: September 11th (Security) ------------------------------- On September 11, 2001 Al-Qaeda fundamentalists hijack four airliners. Two planes crash into the World Trade Center in New York City, another the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia and a fourth in a Pennsylvania cornfield. About 3,000 were killed and thousands more injured. The development sparked increase surveillance across the United States, the war on terror, the U.S. invasion of Iraq and U.S. intervention in Afghanistan. President George W. Bush implemented a once-secret, warrantless spy program in the aftermath, one that continues today. Osama bin Laden, the alleged mastermind behind the attacks, was assassinated by U.S. forces in Pakistan on May 2, 2011. *Photo: [Michael Foran](http://www.flickr.com/photos/pixorama/239262084/in/set-72157594277535958/)/Flickr*
James Aronovsky08nintendo-makes-everyone-a-gamer-game-life
2000s: Nintendo Makes Everyone a Gamer -------------------------------------- After Sony took over the gaming market with PlayStation, Nintendo was in a tight spot. Microsoft had entered the market with Xbox and it seemed as if the future of the industry would be determined by the two tech giants. The future was more mature, more expensive high-tech content for high-def televisions, marketed right at the sweet spot: 18 to 35-year-old males. Nintendo decided to pursue a different audience: everyone else. With games like Brain Age and Nintendogs, it got unlikely gamers to buy Nintendo products: women, senior citizens, etc. The Wii console continued the trend, selling more than any other home game machine ever with accessible motion-controlled games like Wii Sports. It didn’t just mark the return of Nintendo, it smashed all the stereotypes and conventional thinking about what sort of people would play videogames. *Photo: Nintendo*
09steve-jony-and-the-rebirth-of-design-via-apple-design
2000s: Apple (Design) --------------------- Design was always important. Everything man-made (and if you're a creationist, everything in the natural world, too) has been, at some stage, designed. But in the 2000s, industrial design finally overtook the bland, beige box consumer tech culture, thanks in part to a raft of slick products (most notably Apple's crop of brushed aluminum iMacs, iPods, MacBooks and iPhones). Consumers suddenly realized how important the look, feel, and usability of hardware — that is, its design — was to the user experience. On top of the shiny veneer, Apple's aesthetics and the “it just works” user interface helped the company resurge, after a poor run through most of the 90s. People noticed that there was something and someone behind the good looks and feel — that Jony Ive’s design and Steve Jobs’ maniacal corporate dictatorship were a fundamental foundation for the end product. Other companies noticed it, too, and followed suit. Design, and designers, had arrived. *Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired*
Noah Berger10doping-playbook
2000s: Doping (Sports) ---------------------- Sports fans saw no end of amazing performances in the 2000s. Barry Bonds hit 73 home runs in a season and became baseball’s all-time home run leader. Lance Armstrong racked up seven consecutive Tour de France victories. Marion Jones won five medals at the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney. But what many suspected at the time, and we all know now, is all these amazing accomplishments were tainted by performance-enhancing drugs. Call it the decade of doping. Doping has long been a part of sports, but only in the past decade or so has it become so widely acknowledged, [condemned and debated](”). Championships, medals and awards were swept aside following positive tests for steroids, human growth hormone, and EPO in a series of high-profile cases. Terms previously confined to science labs became common on the sports pages: norboletone, THG (tetrahydrogestrinone), and stanozolol. Every sport was impacted, but baseball had the highest profile. Bonds got most of the headlines, but other big names – Alex Rodriguez, Roger Clemens, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and Rafael Palmeiro – were caught up in scandals too. And then there was cycling, a sport seemingly synonymous with doping. In the aftermath, we’re left to debate whether any of the records that remain are worth recognizing. Will Bonds’ home run records stand? Or will they be noted with an asterisk? Does A-Rod keep his 2003 MVP award. Armstrong, who [vehemently denied doping](”) and fought to the bigger end, lost everything, yet still has his defenders. Anti-doping authorities have pushed hard to keep pace with the juicers, and the past decade has seen great strides in the [fight against cheaters](”). Rather than chase offenders one at a time with a new test for each new drug, the World Anti-Doping Agency pursued on a two-pronged approach. In 2004, the World Anti-Doping Code brought rules andregulations into sync across sports and countries, and in 2009, WADA introduced the Athlete Biological Passport: an electronic record of an individual’s biological attributes, compiled over time from multiple tests. The passportlooks for deviations from an athlete’s normal readings, rather than searching for a specific drug. But it [remains a game of cat and mouse](”), with those who would cheat always one step ahead of those who hope to catch them. *Photo: Former baseball player Barry Bonds, center, leaves federal court on Wednesday, April 13, 2011, after being convicted of obstruction of justice. Credit: AP/Noah Berger.*
Jon Snyder/WIRED11
12social-media-underwire
2000s: Social Media (Culture) ----------------------------- A new breed of star is born in the 21st century as social media turns the internet into the world's most powerful platform for self-expression. Sites like MySpace (launched in 2003), Facebook (2004), YouTube (2005) and Twitter (2006) transform the way we communicate while simultaneously sparking a revolution in user-generated content. Suddenly, anybody's burst of brilliance — crafting the perfect pop song, filming a fantastic short video, penning a dazzling essay or even composing a hilarious tweet — can be shared instantly with friends or even the entire world. We've entered a viral age, and there will be no effective inoculation. Also in the 2000s: Comic books become Hollywood's go-to manuals for cinematic success. Triumphs like *Hellboy* (2004) and *Batman Begins* (2005) raise the bar for pulp-powered filmmaking, and 2008's "[summer of the superhero](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/underwire/2008/07/comics-whip-up/)" — triggered by the swaggering *Iron Man* and hammered home by the staggering *The Dark Knight* — prove comics' box office allure. *Image: [Marc Smith](http://www.flickr.com/photos/marc_smith/4882275727/in/photostream/)/Flickr*
