Buzz Lightyear, emails and laptop computers all feature in a list celebrating the Golden Age of scientific discovery.

The list covers everything from the flight of the Comet, the world's first jet passenger airliner, in 1952 to this year's discovery of a solar system called Cancri, which contains planets with similar orbits to our own.

It was drawn up as part of a new exhibition at Birmingham's Thinktank museum of science and discovery, entitled Jet Age to Genome.

A panel of scientists put their heads together to come up with a scientific breakthrough for each year the Queen has been on the throne.

The list is divided into four categories -health, computers, communications and mod cons - and includes many of the technology and new media discoveries we have learned to take for granted.

The exhibition's web site says: "In the early Fifties, a machine with no more computing power than a Furby took up an entire laboratory.

"Now you can buy a computer that fits into the palm of your hand, on the High Street, with a million times the speed and memory."

Among the computer-related inventions spanning the last 50 years is Doug Engelbart's design of the first computer mouse in 1963, which paved the way for today's point-and-click systems.

In 1968, he demonstrated a wooden prototype, together with the first hyperlinks and video conferencing, in a display which astounded the computer industry.

Working in California, Engelbart dreamed of a time when people could "fly" effortlessly around vast amounts of information on a computer screen.

Three years later, engineer Ray Tomlinson sent the world's first email. The exhibition notes his message, "Qwertyuiop" or something similar, was even more uninspiring than many of today's spam messages, but, for the first time, a message was sent over a network from one computer to another.

Although the first email service was restricted to Arpanet, a multi-million dollar military network, it has been eagerly adopted for messages of every kind and the internet currently carries about 500 billion emails a year.

Shops and commercial companies began buying-up internet domain names for the first time in 1985 in what would eventually become the dot.com revolution.

Although the dot.com bubble burst spectacularly in 1999, online shopping has continued to grow and, by the beginning of 2002, one in six people in the UK had tried shopping online.

Many of these people will have tried e-tailing on their laptops, which date from 1985 when IBM brought out the PC Convertible, the first mass-produced laptop computer to run standard PC software and use an liquid crystal display screen.

The web site says Xerox researcher Alan Kay thought-up the idea of a lightweight laptop computer in the mid-Seventies and British designer William Moggridge is claimed to have built the first laptop in 1979.

Moggridge's machine had very little memory and relied on non-standard software but it was used by Space Shuttle astronauts.

People did not have an internet browser to view the world wide web until 1991 when Tim Berners-Lee, a researcher at CERN in Geneva, designed the software.

He also designed the system we use to make clickable "hypertext" links on the web.

A more sophisticated browser called Mosaic was launched in 1993 but this could only show text, not pictures.

In the world of film, the exhibition says computer-generated art came of age in 1995 when Pixar's Toy Story made Buzz Lightyear and Woody Hollywood megastars. Each frame of the movie was made up of 1.4 million pixels.

Visitors to the exhibition's web site can vote for the top three innovations they use most and that have had the most impact on their lives.

www.thinktank.ac
www.jetagetogenome.com