Q: What were some surprising court decisions?

American Council for the Blind v. Boorstin, 644 F. Supp. 811 (D.D.C. 1986), holding that the First Amendment required the U.S. Government to continue publishing the Braille edition of "Playboy" magazine.

Rodriques v. Furtado, 575 N.E.2d 1124 (Mass. 1991); Rodriques v. Furtado, 950 F.2d 805 (1st Cir. 1991). Upholding execution of 1 a.m. search warrant, signed by an assistant clerk-magistrate and not by a judge, of plaintiff's vagina.

The Trial of John Peter Zenger, 17 Howell's State Trials 675 (1735). Philadelphia attorney Andrew Hamilton persuades jury to acquit defendant on charge of seditious libel, on the grounds that anonymous essay criticizing New York government was true.

Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137 (1803). U.S. Supreme Court held that it did not have the authority to issue order to U.S. Secretary of State when petitioned as court of first instance, despite petitioner's legal entitlement to relief and Congress's purported grant of such authority in Judiciary Act of 1789.

Kyllo v. United States, 533 U.S. 27 (2001), holding police use of thermal imaging camera to take infrared photographs of petitioner's house was a search and was presumptively unreasonable without a warrant.

Q: What are the most impactful inventions created in Boston?

I think the telephone is probably the all-time top Boston invention, but also these:

1802 -- Modern navigation -- Bowditch

1886 -- Management consulting -- Little

1901 -- Disposable safety razor -- Gillette et al.

1914 -- "Tech"nicolor -- Founded in Boston by Kalmus et al.

1919 -- Trans-Atlantic aircraft -- Hunsaker et al.

1929- -- Instant photography (Polaroid) -- Land

1931 -- Stroboscopy -- Edgerton, Germeshausen et al.

1937 -- Use of Boolean logic to design "digital" circuits -- Shannon

1940-45 -- Practical radar -- Anglo-American military collaboration at MIT

1944 -- Mark I/II computers and first computer "bug" -- Aiken, Hopper et al.

1945 -- Hypertext -- Vannevar Bush

1951 -- Huffman code

1951 -- Random access memory ("core")-- Project Whirlwind

1953 -- PET scan -- Brownell

1953- -- Doppler radar -- Gordon

1956- -- Chomsky hierarchy

1957- -- Generative grammar -- Chomsky

1957 -- Confocal microscope -- MInsky

1957-61 -- Time-sharing (and some of what we now call virtualization) -- Project MAC

1958 -- LISP -- McCarthy

1961 -- Chaos theory -- Lorenz (and many others)

1961-2 -- Digital videogame (Spacewar!) -- Graetz, Russel, Wiitanen, Kotok 

1963 -- CAD -- Sutherland

1964 -- Minicomputer -- DEC

1964-5 -- Electronic mail -- Van Vleck / Morris on CTSS (also network email, Tomlinson in 1971)

1969 -- Apollo guidance computer that navigated to and landed on moon -- Instrumentation (now Draper) Laboratory

1970-90 -- Object-oriented programming and data hiding -- Liskov (and many others)

1972 -- Packet-switching and ARPANET -- Kahn, BBN, etc.

1973 -- Black-Scholes option pricing model -- Black, Scholes, Merton

1978 -- Practical public-key cryptography (RSA) -- Rivest, Shamir, Adelman

1979 -- Spreadsheet -- Bricklin and Frankston

1981-89 -- Copyleft/sharealike, GNU and free software movement -- Stallman

1995- - E-ink -- Jacobsen et al.

2000 -- Zipcar -- Danielson, Chase