How has Europe advanced any technology in the last 50 years?

I'm in the open source world and a lot of core technology improvements here come from Europe. So I will stick to just that (leaving alone millions of other things outside this space).

1. Joshua Engel already mentioned Linus Torvalds. Linux is the king of the server market.
2. There was this dude Tim Berners-
   wikipedia.org
   Lee who created the World Wide Webwhile working at CERN enabling us to communicate over this network originally designed for defense research and scientific applications.
3. There was this Swedish company named MySQL AB that created the eponymous database that powers most of the small companies on the Internet (including all of the Wordpress blogs and at one point entire Facebook).
4. Almost all of the members of OpenSSL, which powers the majority of secure transactions on the Internet, are in UK/Denmark.
5. OpenOffice was originally called Staroffice when it was developed by a German company. Sun bought the whole company (as the whole company costed less than what they would have paid Microsoft to just use Office). Sun eventually opensourced that. 

This is just a small chunk of open source projects.