5 world-changing computer science breakthroughs that started at university

5th April 2016 

For decades, universities have been at the forefront of making innovations in computer science. Many of these breakthroughs have significantly changed the world we live in, revolutionising humanistic and scientific fields such as medicine, natural resources, financial and economic systems, defence, and entertainment, just to name the few. These innovations have also increased connectivity in what has become a vital component of the globalised world. With these historic milestones in modern human civilisation, it is safe to say that the world of computer science would not be what it is today without the input of students and faculty at universities around the world.

Lets take a look at some of the breakthrough computer science innovations made in universities that changed the world we live in:

Google search engine

It was in September 1997 when computer science Ph.D. candidates Larry Page and Sergey Brin registered Google.com as a domain after collaborating on a search engine called BackRub. The two, who met two years prior to the registration, were driven by their mission to organise seemingly infinite amounts of information on the internet. Google’s name was derived from wordplay from the term “googol”, which is a mathematical term for the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros.

The following year, the two received seed-funding from Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim who wrote a check for $100,000 to establish Google Inc. Fueled mostly by word of mouth, traffic for the site grew by 50 percent per month and within several months Google was rated by PC Magazine as one of the Top 100 Websites for 1998.

In June 1999, Google Inc announced the completion of a $25 million round of equity funding led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and in the year after, began offering search in Chinese, Japanese and Korean, bringing its total number of supported languages to 15.

Over the next decade, Google had made reached several milestones, including the acquisition of YouTube, the release of Google Maps, Gmail, and the launch of the Android smartphone operating system, which all took place under the helm of its chief executive, Eric Schmidt.

Today, Google is estimated to be worth some $527 billion, not far behind Apple’s market value of $605 billion.

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