PC World's 50 Best Tech Products of All Time

Ant writes "PC World picks the 50 best tech products of all time. Apple holds down seven places in the list, Microsoft two, and open source software (Red Hat Linux) one. The top five, according to PC World, are: Netscape Navigator (1994), Apple II (1977), TiVo HDR110 (1999), Napster (1999), and Lotus 1-2-3 for DOS (1983).

The list

[pedestrian crossing]

1. Netscape Navigator (1994)
      2. Apple II (1977)
      3. TiVo HDR110 (1999)
      4. Napster (1999)
      5. Lotus 1-2-3 for DOS (1983)
      6. Apple iPod (2001)
      7. Hayes Smartmodem (1981)
      8. Motorola StarTAC (1996)
      9. WordPerfect 5.1 (1989)
    10. Tetris (1985)
    11. Adobe Photoshop 3.0 (1994)
    12. IBM ThinkPad 700C (1992)
    13. Atari VCS/2600 (1977)
    14. Apple Macintosh Plus (1986)
    15. RIM BlackBerry 857 (2000)
    16. 3dfx Voodoo3 (1999)
    17. Canon Digital Elph S100 (2000)
    18. Palm Pilot 1000 (1996)
    19. id Software Doom (1993)
    20. Microsoft Windows 95 (1995)
    21. Apple iTunes 4 (2003)
    22. Nintendo Game Boy (1989)
    23. Iomega Zip Drive (1994)
    24. Spybot Search & Destroy (2000)
    25. Compaq Deskpro 386 (1986)
    26. CompuServe (1982)
    27. Blizzard World of Warcraft (2004)
    28. Aldus PageMaker (1985)
    29. HP LaserJet 4L (1993)
    30. Apple Mac OS X (2001)
    31. Nintendo Entertainment System (1985)
    32. Eudora (1988)
    33. Sony Handycam DCR-VX1000 (1995)
    34. Apple Airport Base Station (1999)
    35. Brøderbund The Print Shop (1984)
    36. McAfee VirusScan (1990)
    37. Commodore Amiga 1000 (1985)
    38. ChipSoft TurboTax (1985)
    39. Mirabilis ICQ (1996)
    40. Creative Labs Sound Blaster 16 (1992)
    41. Apple HyperCard (1987)
    42. Epson MX-80 (1980)
    43. Central Point Software PC Tools (1985)
    44. Canon EOS Digital Rebel (2003)
    45. Red Hat Linux (1994)
    46. Adaptec Easy CD Creator (1996)
    47. PC-Talk (1982)
    48. Sony Mavica MVC-FD5 (1997)
    49. Microsoft Excel (1985)
    50. Northgate OmniKey Ultra (1987)

That is not the outcome !

[__aahlyu4518]

It is the order of the list on which you can vote !!!

Voodoo 3 sucked.

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

The Voodoo 3 lacked 32 bit rendering and came out months before nVidia brought out the GeForce card.

It was, in short, the beginning of the end for 3dfx. Why would you promote that?!

One page link

[bobdotorg]

Unless you enjoy wading through 11 pages of served ads:

http://www.pcworld.com/printable/article/id,130207 /printable.html [pcworld.com]

Huh?

[MadTinfoilHatter]

45. Red Hat Linux (1994)
Picking a watershed Linux distribution is tough. Literally hundreds have existed over the years, though only a few have advanced the state of the art. Red Hat was critically important for beginning the move (however tentative) toward making Linux beginner-friendly and easier to install. While development of Red Hat was discontinued in 2003, it directly spawned successors like Ubuntu, which aim to make desktop use of Linux commonplace.

WTF!? Ubuntu is based on Debian, not Red Hat. Also, development of Red Hat didn't stop in 2003 - it was just split into RHEL & Fedora. Pretty har to take an article that flawed seriously.

Re:Commodore C64

[marol]

Actually, they didn't forget it, they bundled it with TRS-80 under the Apple II entry, "competitors like the Commodore 64 and TRS-80 Color Computer were mere toys by comparison". And that's pretty much where I stopped reading...

Re:Huh?

[TheNetAvenger]

Compuserve?... That bloated, expensive, pretend internet thing that became AOL... that Compuserve? In the top 50?


Prior to the days when kiddies expected a specific Compuserve interface that was bloated, there were the days that Compuserve was a rather robust community BBS system that was complete text based interface giving access to extensive forums, news searches, stocks, weather and other services.

Even MS required beta testers to have Compuserve IDs to participate in Beta programs prior to the Web.

For its time Compuserve was the king of online communities and did it better than anyone else. Remember this is from the timeframe when the 'Internet' was limited to gov and edu exclusively, and not everyone had access, compuserve was the 'commercial' version of connecting regular people.

Also this is where Al Gore comes into play when he worked to get the internet opened to everyone, and thus resulting in there no longer being a need for Compuserve as a content provider or connection point.

No, Creative did not invent the sound card

[dabadab]

And what exactly had the SB16 to do with "realistic polyphonic sound/music"?... For music, mostly its FM synth was used which was everything but realistic-sounding. It had a single digital channel, which, in fact, did not differ much from the internal speaker as far as technology goes.
SB16 was introduced in the same year (1992) as the Gravis Ultrasound, which, in contrast, had a 32 channel sample-based synthetiser with antialiasing and this card was largely responsible for creating the PC module scene. Since the GUS came with detailed programming information (very unlike the SB16) and it could off-load sound mixing from the CPU (mixing a few digital channels to 44.1 kHz 16 bit stereo sound was a big task for a 486DX2-66) it quickly became the de-facto standard in the demo scene and the games which natively supported it sounded really good when compared to the beep-beep of the SB16.
But, going a little bit further, there was the Paula, the sound chip of the Amiga which also offered HW-mixed sample playback in the mid-80's.
And, finally, there's the SID, the music chip of the C64, designed by Robert Yannes (Ensoniq co-founder) which - despite its relatively simplistic design - was the first audio chip in home computers that enabled creating complex music.

Going on an other direction, Aureal was the company that brought real 3D sound to the PC (although GUS also made some early attempts) that was superior to Creative's technology.

(Oh, yeah, both Gravis and Aureal was driven out of business by Creative's less than admirable tactics, in the case of Aureal only to buy the technology and let it rot. That's really something that helped the advance of the PC sound, isn't it?)

So, well, i am not sure what the hell does SB16 on this list, since it was neither really innovative, nor really good, not even a good quality product (it was awfully noisy).

Re:The list

[Sique]

RTFA ;) They especially restrict the list to the After 1970 Era, and concentrate solely on computing. No Differential Engine, no Abacus, no beans to count.

Re:The list

[clickclickdrone]

>The Amiga had four channel digital sound in 1985
The Atari 800 had 4 channel sound in 1978. Next?

Re:Voodoo 3 sucked.

[Cochonou]

too poor on RAMDAC speed (poor output quality)
Beware: RAMDAC clock speed is not directly linked to output quality, but to the refresh rates that can be used at specific resolutions. You could have a very fast RAMDAC clock speed, but a noisy DAC and therefore end up with bad output quality. The opposite is also true.
For reference, a 250 Mhz RAMDAC can output 1600x1200 at 75 Hz. By the way, I do think that the Voodoo3 3000 RAMDAC was clocked at a higher rate than most TNT2 RAMDACs (350 Mhz vs 300 Mhz).

READ THE F***IN ARTICLE

[Wisconsingod]

People, People, People, Does no one read anymore?
First of all, I apologise to pedestrian crossing for putting this response on his wonderfully reproduced

1. This list is the opinion of PC World Editors, they are asking the readers to comment and vote for themselves....From TFA

   Agree with our take? Great. Disagree? Even better. Take our poll and let us know what your number 1 tech product is. You can vote for any of the 50 in our story--or click "Other" and enter any item you love as a write-in.

2. Some say the Title is wrong:.... From TFA

   Note: We define "all time" as starting from the earliest days of the personal computer...so don't expect to see the cotton gin and the transistor radio on the list.

3. Some say
   PC Mag doesn't know what they are talking about.
   ... I say RTFA

   And, oh yeah, you may think our choices are ridiculous or that we've left out much more important products. Have at us. Smack us down righteously.

4. Some say
   what are the metrics?
   .... Again RTFA (See a pattern here?)

   So what's the best tech product to come out of the digital age? And what qualifies a product as being "best"? First and foremost, it must be a quality product. In many cases, that means a piece of hardware or software that has truly changed our lives and that we can't live without (or couldn't at the time it debuted). Beyond that, a product should have attained a certain level of popularity, had staying power, and perhaps made some sort of breakthrough, influencing the development of later products of its ilk.

so now that I have basically re-written the entire article that is in TFA before the list, goto the article, read through their reasoning for each product, and vote for your favorite!

Re:Huh?

[bhsx]

Slackware didn't invent the idea of Linux distributions. IIRC, Yggdrasil was out before Slackware was, but Slackware was based on Softlanding Linux Systems(SLS). Yggdrasil was the first one I remember trying out, and it was a pain in the neck; but it was a distro. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_distribution [wikipedia.org]

RTFA

[djtack]

Note that we're looking only at technology that has arisen since the dawn of the personal computer, so don't expect to see the cotton gin and the transistor radio on the list.

Re:Not only that...

[macshit]

Sadly, Apple has done a great job rewriting history to cast their middling success with the Apple II in the part actually played by the C= 8-bit machine

The Apple II predated the C64 by five years (an eternity in this context); really the C64 is an entirely different generation of computers. While the C64 was a great machine, and really did a lot for popularizing computers, it wasn't pioneering in quite the same sense that the Apple II was.