As technology has vastly expanded since the mid-19th century, those technologies that can be affected by the Sun and by solar-produced processes has also increased in number and in their design and operational complexity. A brief history of the influences of solar-produced effects on technologies is provided, beginning with the deployment of the initial telegraph communications systems in the 1840s. It would be several decades before the relationship between solar-produced effects and the operations of the electrical telegraph were firmly believed, nearly a century before "space weather" became a wider concern for technology, and more than a century and a half before "space weather" became a term in common usage. An overview is provided of present-day technologies - with a concentration on communications - that can be affected by solar-terrestrial phenomena such as galactic cosmic rays, solar-produced plasmas, and geomagnetic disturbances in the Earth's magnetosphere and ionosphere.