Forbes magazine have put together a list of the 20 most important tools of all time (via Metafilter).
There’s one massive gap there. They don’t list arguably the greatest tool ever: the computer. How weird. In response to this guy, who wants to nominate writing, they define tools as “handheld objects that could be physically manipulated to complete a task”. Reasonable enough, but as they include a lathe in their top 20, it can’t be the bulk of a pc that rules it out. Anyway, what about laptops?
You can vote for the most important tool you use at work: the list includes e-mail, software, and the Web. But those aren’t tools. e-mail’s an application that your computer, your tool, allows you to use; the Web is, well, whatever it is – a resource? – and software’s what enables you to use your computer in so many different ways (the various blades, as it were of your pc Swiss Army knife), but the basic tool in all this, surely, is what’s sitting on (or under) your desk: your computer. Why don’t they see that?
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