Assuming I want to do a major leap forward type thing I get to figure out what would be the biggest leap (either by itself or as a foundational tech with ripple effects), and also what might be best able to be supported and integrated.
https://iea.org.uk/the-20-biggest-tech-advances-of-the-past-20-years/
Nothing too terribly interesting there.
https://www.computerworld.com/artic...developments-of-the-past-20-years.html?page=1 also amuses as it is a 2006 article.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/g2778/most-important-automotive-tech-milestones/ has not a lot.
There is probably some medical thing I am unaware of that would do good stuff but most things I am aware of are more in response to other things (better antibiotics maybe, though that would likely just edge them closer to oblivion) or are so small in potential application that I don't know. We are still less than 20 years from the human genome being sequenced but it was already an inevitability by this point, might be nice to have a better sequencing option (would shotgun still have been the dominant approach at this point?).
CRISPR could be something to send back as that would probably accelerate the timeline a bit.
https://pharmajet.com/significant-medical-innovations-past-20-years/ has nothing too interesting that is not just needing time and money to implement what was already obvious (we have had electronic book scanning, prisoner files and student files and lookup for years by that point, obvious to flick it across to medical records purposes and sync things).
https://www.syberscribe.com.au/blog/19-mind-blowing-medical-advances-in-the-past-8-years/ has some more fun stuff.
https://www.medscape.com/features/slideshow/20th-anniversary has some things but nothing I would want to send back.
I think I am probably too much of an arsehole to consider this properly and opt for rather a bit of Darwinian approach (evolution's several billion year corpse pile can get a tiny tiny fraction larger, no great loss really -- not like I can make a big dent in common cancers, dementia or any of the big ones, and "stop smoking, use a condom, don't be a drunk, put the opiates down, and don't be a fatarse" likely does far more for those, heart disease and diabetes anyway and was already widely known).
Would probably look to some kind of chip fabrication but it is usually a matter of degree than me rocking up to a time machine with a container with some kind of low size lithography to make small gate chips, not to mention much of that is small improvements that stack up and I would want to have some understanding of the lot.
3d printers and CNC machines are not much different today to what could have been produced back then. Some of the automating software for it might be interesting but still nothing too fun.
Speaking of software. Could send back a hard drive with some nice neural network implementations going on and maybe knock some off the path of supercomputers sooner. That said it was all largely known as far as solid theory, and what I sent back from today would be lesser anyway (give it ten years and the current fads will have gone back towards needing much computing power but getting fun results).
What might happen if I sent back a snapshot of source code for Linux (or a full Linux distro with all programs) I don't know (might want to scrub it of some things as well). This would be early days of Windows XP (betas out there, manufacturers before long and retail by the end of the year) so that could make for an interesting time -- Windows was already a monopoly but this would be still be early enough to bother XP and that was when it got really serious.
Something of me wonders if I could send back a half decent crypto currency implementation. There is always the time and place debate in technology but I reckon it could have been kicked off sooner (folding@home and seti@home already doing distributed projects by 20 years ago, prime95 being even earlier with the name kind of being a clue) and might even be early enough to disrupt paypal which would be nice.
If not a nice p2p encrypted chat program that could get itself widely distributed might be nice. Could go one further and figure out a nice censorship resistant social meeja and video effort but would run up against technological implementations and have to run it as a loss leader, and still be dealing with utterly clueless politicians (
https://www.investmentwatchblog.com...st-40-years-the-average-age-has-sky-rocketed/ , so 2000 - 60 and expecting those to have a nuanced view of technology). If I went back with it then even without the proverbial collection of newspapers to look through for scandals I reckon a modern tech focused approach could upend things there quite happily, but it is also new enough that it would not be that much of an edge for long.
A modern multi-core processor.
If Intel released hyperthreading on server chips back in early 2002 then not sure what particular perks that would have.
Modern high gate count $10000 FPGA on the other hand.
Edit
Do they really have much on them that would not have been as readily sourced by say Encarta or some other computerised encylopedia, and maybe a copy of archives of various government agencies?