These days, it's all too easy to take the amazing technology around us for granted, especially for anyone born after the personal computing age began. Think about it for a minute; you can build a personal cloud with a few easy-to-get components, sketch your designs onto a computer screen, or create a music streaming service with a pocket-sized device. These are truly mind-blowing computing features, but what's even more brain-bending is just how many years ago each of these computing concepts was invented. Let's take a little trip through computing history and a look at some of the amazing inventions we use today.

7 Digital stylus

The "light pen" dates back to the late 1940s

One of the coolest computing tools to me is the humble stylus pen. I mean, just take a minute to think about what's actually going on when you scribble that stylus tip across your touchscreen. The best ones, like from Wacom or Apple, have an electromagnetic field sensing layer in the display that can tell where the electromagnetic coils at the end of the stylus are. That allows for it to infer angle, pressure, and a bunch of other metrics, so the digital lines you want to draw are saved accurately. It's incredible tech, and you might think it's a recent invention, and you'd be partly right.

But the practice of using a stylus on a computer is much older than that, dating back to the light pen in the late 1940s. This novel invention worked in a similar manner to the NES Zapper that you might have used for playing Duck Hunt, or any other light-based gun game. A light sensor in the pen's tip picks up lighted sections of a CRT display and feeds that information back to the computer. Then it knows where the pen is, so it can be utilized as a sort of mouse cursor or a drawing tool, as it was often used for Computer Aided Drawing (CAD) purposes. The light pen went through many revisions for speed and accuracy over the years, and was a fairly common accessory during the 8-bit computing days. Now we've moved on to LCD or OLED displays, and the CRT technology that powered it is gone, but the spirit lives on in every stylus-equipped computing device.

6 Electronic music composition and instruments

It's a long way from modern DAWs but still very impressive

Electronic music has a long, storied history stretching back well over 100 years, to the end of the 18th century, but you'd be forgiven if you thought it only came with the modern computing era. Many analog or electromechanical instruments were invented in the period immediately following the invention of the lightbulb in 1878 and the mains electricity to power them. Most of these devices were designed for exhibition use, but some, like the Theremin or Hammond Organ, are still in active use today.

But it's not just the instruments that predate the personal computer era. Electronic composition first started to appear using audio tape in the 1940s, and digital music composition wasn't far behind. Programmable synthesizers came in the late 1950s, and the roots of what would make modern DAWs came in the decade to follow. Nowadays, every Apple device has access to Garageband for music creation, and AI tools can also compose, but without these early pioneers we wouldn't have any of it.

5 Streaming music services

The Telharmonium predates the internet and provided orchestral music over the telegraph

Streaming music services might be everywhere in the Internet age, but people have wanted to send music across copper wires since the late 1800s. The Teleharmonium was a giant electronic organ, an early form of electronic synthesizer, and it was patented in 1897. That's over a century before Napster, Spotify, iTunes, or any of the streaming services that we use daily. It used tonewheels and an unholy amount of electricity to send music across telephone lines, as the telephone receivers were the only thing of the day that were able to amplify the sound it generated. It wouldn't be for a while until the amplifier existed, and the Teleharmonium was superseded by the advent of broadcast radio.

4 Computer graphics and animation

Photoshop didn't exist, but drawing on computers is from the 1960s

Bell Labs (later owned by AT&T) was the startup incubator of its time, and an impressive number of modern computing concepts came from it, particularly in the exuberant and exciting 1960s. One of particular interest to digital artists is the advent of computer drawing and early animation (via JHU's Project Muse). Mainstays of digital art all came from this period, like using ASCII art to digitize images by assigning grayscale values to the scanned picture and using pixellated icons that corresponded to the grayscale value to create a mural form of the original. The combination of mathematic equations and pseudo-randomness that was explored in the early 60s is still used today in popular digital art packages, as are the processes of stereography that enable 3D movies to be viewed.

3 Digital prototyping of electronic circuits

Bell Labs were really, really busy in the 60s

Nowadays, there is a plethora of PCB prototyping companies that can spin up any circuit design you come up with within hours of you sending them the plans. Circuit board CAD programs are everywhere, and all they require is for you to know which components you need, and roughly where they go in an electronic circuit. They auto-route the traces for you, avoid induction or interference issues, and are generally simple to use. You might think those are really modern programs, and they are, but they're just the latest in a long line of successive circuit design tools that stretch back to Bell Labs.

Using a light pen and a CRT, you could create circuits by dragging and dropping the components you wanted into the order you wanted, and by drawing traces between them. In the 1960s, it was possible for the computer program to simulate the output of your circuit, so you would know if your design was viable or not. That's not long after the first integrated circuit was invented, and you already had computers that could do electronic simulations. Now, they were probably fairly slow at doing the calculations, but that's okay if they get the correct answer, right?

2 VFX for movies

Would you be surprised if I said it was Bell Labs again?

You'd think that computer-generated graphics for movies and animation were a recent thing since many of the techniques were created by George Lucas and others in the 1970s and 80s, but the roots go back to Bell Labs a decade before that. The technique was more akin to hand-drawn animation, as a camera was used to record the images drawn on a CRT by a plotting program, but it was still computer-generated. It wasn't many years after the first computer-created movie that the technique was used for more complicated moves, and the work from these plotter programs would end up being used for movies, animation, and the first computer games.

It's surprising how little has changed in terms of creating computer animation since the 1960s. Many of the effects and logic used are just what you'd have used commercially a decade ago; the computers that the programs run on are exponentially faster.

1 Computer speech

The seeds for digital assistants were planted in 1937

Sure, the 1960s saw the invention of satellite communications, data transmission over copper wires that would eventually be the Internet, lasers and fiber optics, and computer networking, but it also saw one big breakthrough in the first computer-based speech-synthesis systems. Yes, the very same systems that would eventually power Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant and every other voice assistant.

But the generation of speech by a computer was only half of the equation. It was decades earlier, in the 1930s, when the vocoder was developed to analyze human speech and break it down into fundamental tones and resonances, without which the underpinnings of computer-generated voices would not exist. Nearly a century ago, scientists figured out how to break down speech into pieces that a computer could reassemble. That's incredible.

Computing has been around for a lot longer than you might think

It's truly amazing to me how many of the foundational technologies of modern computing were invented decades ago, before most of us were born, and in some cases, before any of us were born. These weren't trivial consumer-focused features, but real innovations that shook what we knew about science, the world, the universe, and our place in it. The market conditions today make it incredibly unlikely that another Bell Labs or similar incubator of ideas will come about, but the legacy of those early visionaries lives on in the technology we use every day.