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Ranking New York's Top Information Technologies

The New York metro area has long been a center of high-tech innovation. That's easy to forget given all the software developed in Silicon Valley and Redmond, Wash., and the gadgets designed in Japan. But New York has 4,000-plus technology companies and research experience that dates back to the opening of Bell Labs in 1925. In fact, Google's expanding in New York because of the technical talent here.

Given New York's rich history of technical innovation, and the brain trust of computer scientists and entrepreneurs that call New York home, it's not surprising that many advances in computing and communications originated in and around the Big Apple. I'd like to come up with a Top 10 list of those innovations. Following are a few suggestions to get the ball rolling, but I'm inviting you to weigh in with your own suggestions. Then, with your input, InformationWeek will generate a list of the best of the best.

*IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer. IBM research has a long list of innvoations, including the relational database and parallel computing, but it's unclear which of these have their genesis in New York. Deep Blue got the world buzzing when it beat chess champion Garry Kasparov at his own game and turned supercomputing into a household concept.

*The Nasdaq stock exchange. Back in 1971, it became the first electronic stock market, according to Wikipedia. The Nasdaq is more a collection of technologies than a single piece of software or hardware, so I may be stretching the definition here. Nasdaq showed that computers could regularly handle a billion transactions a day.

*The Unix operating system. Developed by Bell Labs, Unix served as the software platform for business computing for much of the 1980s and 1990s. Even now, fragmented into dozens of variants and neglected by some of its caretakers, Unix plays a critical role.

*C programming language. C begot C++, and together the languages have driven software development for a quarter century. C was a product of Bell Labs, too. Alexander Graham Bell could never have imagined all the technologies to be invented there.

*Google's Bigtable distributed storage system. Developed partly in New York and also in Mountain View, Calif., Bigtable provides petabyte scalability on commodity servers. Bigtable has allowed Google to push the frontier of Web scalability with a kind of flexibility that seems to accommodate new capabilities and applications with no negative impact.

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