* Special Tribute to Univ. of Illinois. * Introductory Note Below are great U of I tech achievements, but let's begin with: "it continues to continue!" Forbes has a recent article about a company just emerging from "stealth mode" founded by two Illini PhDs. Xerion is commercializing a breakthrough greatly improving lithium batteries, but also a) cutting both costs and carbon footprint throughout the entire supply chain and b) enabling procuring and refining the essential materials almost exclusively from domestic sources, including California's Salton Sea .
Those of us who prospered in Champaign-Urbana probably never knew Bob Miner, a math major, born in 41 to Iranian-Assyrian parents in Cicero. Miner ended up in Silicon Valley writing code for what became Oracle Corp -- which he cofounded with Larry Ellison, who had also attended U of I. The university has an incredible digital-age record of achievement, starting perhaps with Jack Kilby (in uniform) who invented the microchip. John Bardeen, who invented the transistor, and who is the only person to win the Nobel Prize in physics twice, taught there for 24 years. Another UI great, son of an impoverished Ukrainian coal miner, born in Ziegler, IL, grew up in Glen Carbon, Il, [neither of which you have ever heard of] is Nick Holonyak -- he invented the ubiquitous light-emitting diode (LED), used in lightbulbs, mobile phones, TV sets and microscopic surgical equipment. Other graduates include founders of PayPal, YouTube, Lotus, Netscape, Yelp!, Safari, Firefox, Mortal Kombat (video games), and Tesla. Others had substantial roles in creating MRI scanners, LED screens, DSL (internet access), and JavaScript (www). And the current (2021) CEO of IBM is an Illini: Arvind Krishna.
Finally, what about the internet? -- UI has that covered, too.
Washington Post: "William Wulf, computer pioneer who opened way for internet, dies at 83 . . . born Dec. 8, 1939, in Chicago. His father was a mechanical engineer who had emigrated from Germany and his mother was a homemaker. He studied at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, earning a bachelor’s degree in physics in 1961 and a master’s degree in electrical engineering in 1963. [PhD U VA, computer science] . . . [1988] swapped ideas about the future of a dial-up network that was barely known to the public and restricted mostly to academia and federal agencies. Imagine, the colleague said, if this system was open to everyone. “And that hit me like a ton of bricks,” Dr. Wulf recalled. . . . [Contacted Al Gore] . . . Gore helped push the changes through in Congress — becoming lampooned in the process after making comments suggesting he “invented” the internet. Dr. Wulf, meanwhile, as head of the National Science Foundation’s computer and engineering directorate, oversaw changes to consolidate the data-sharing technology, first developed by the Pentagon, and open it up to civilian users."
Oh, and the first browser? U of I. And early email system for the PC? Eudora.

Hard to believe . . . but there's more!
This is not technology, but biology -- revolutionary biology! There have long been two branches to the tree of life, depending on whether an organism's cells have or lack a nucleus -- known by the Greek word for "kernel" (karyote). Prokaryotes developed first ("pro"="before") and comprise bacteria (many forms, incredibly abundant). Eukaryotes includes us (and so much more, including plants and fungi, et al.).
Two branches, a fundamental biological division, first proffered by a French biologist in the 30s. Universally accepted -- until the U of I changed all that, starting in the 70s. Professor Carl Woese and collaborator George Fox, discovered a kind of microbial life which they called the “archaebacteria” (Archaea).They reported that the archaebacteria comprised "a third kingdom" of life, now seen as a third branch to the tree of life.
(Interestingly, there was much skepticism at first, even by some of the great names in biology (Harvard, MIT), but today the U of I has won out, and the 3rd branch is accepted).