PC World's 50 Best Tech Products of All Time 399
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).
mmmh (Score:1, Insightful)
Commodore C64 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The list (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know, but I'd submit that realistic polyphonic sound/music was more revolutionary than 3D hardware acceleration. 3D graphics are cool and all, but at least the CPU could generate 3D graphics (Quake?) before hardware acceleration - if it weren't for the Soundblaster we'd be playing visually stunning games with beeps and parps for sound effects.
Misleading title (Score:5, Insightful)
And even with that in mind I think the list is bogus. With criterias like:
Re:Misleading title (Score:4, Insightful)
Instead, implementations that changed how we use technology ARE on the list. For example cell phones = Motorola StarTAC; mp3 = iPod; tcp/ip = Hayes modem/Compuserve/Netscape; television = Tivo and so on.
The purpose is not immediately clear maybe, but there's a reason why it's the 50 "best" *products* and not 50 best technologies.
West Coast Bias and Revisionist History (Score:5, Insightful)
Where for example (as others have pointed out) is the Commodore 64, the "Model T" of computers? It's simply the single most successful computer of all time, selling more than 33 million units of a single "model" of machine, more than any other single model of machine.
And while they mention the Amiga 1000, where's the Video Toaster and Lightwave 3-D, the software that revolutionized 3-D animation on reltively cheap low-power machines? Oh sorry, that technological marvel came out of Kansas, and nothing high-tech comes out of Kansas, right?
And here's something that was developed on the west coast that deserves praise (is it on the list?) The Palm Pilot -- without which, we'd probably not have half of the other items that *are* on the list.
It always seems to me that the editors of such "lists" only remember what they themselves "played with", and if they didn't touch it with their own hands, it didn't exist and therefore isn't worth mentioning.
Also, exciting innovations such as the mouse which are made at academic think-tanks or research departments of large companies are also not worth mentioning. Do you think these editors bothered to research anything happening at MIT's media lab? Of course not. MIT after all, is on the EAST coast.
This list makes me sad that we're already forgetting important history from just a few years ago. In twenty years, people will be saying the Bill Gates invented the computer and taking that as fact.
50 Best Tech Products of All Time (Score:5, Insightful)
1. the hearth
2. the knife
3. the rasp
4. the stirrup
5. the saw
6. the steam engine
7. the light bulb
etc.
Software choices (Score:5, Insightful)
Flash drives (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The list (Score:3, Insightful)
IF a 3d accelerator is mentioned at that point, it should be voodoo1.
Re:West Coast Bias and Revisionist History (Score:4, Insightful)
("west-coast bias". Snicker...)
Huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
Compuserve?... That bloated, expensive, pretend internet thing that became AOL... that Compuserve? In the top 50?
*Checks date to see if it's still 1st April*
Re:Commodore C64 (Score:3, Insightful)
Stupid list, they forgot C64. How many programmers haven't learnt programming using C64 BASIC?
There isn't many "real" programmers out there. Remember Turbo C and Turbo Pascal? Pascal in 29K of RAM, and likely not a programmer coming on line today can say "Hello" in 29K. Forget about a compiler, linker, editor, libraries, debugger and full type checking in that 29K.
My peeve on the list is Lotus 123... it was a copy... VisiCalc and Supercalc were better and more original, 123 was a "borrowed" concept from VisiCalc.
Re:West Coast Bias and Revisionist History (Score:1, Insightful)
The Voodoo *3* ?!?!? (Score:5, Insightful)
I can understand that they choose to mention 3Dfx : the company played a key role introducing hardware accelerated 3d to the masses who up to that point mostly had only software flat shaded pixelated polygons.
They could have picked up the Voodoo Graphics, as the first affordable 3D card, whereas before hardware 3D was something only used by movie studios.
They could have picked up the Voodoo 2, one of the most popular 3d card (and from a technical point of view, whose dual pipelines where behind the shadow map used by most FPS games) and with very good longevity, thanks to the SLI technology.
They could have picked up the later Voodoo 4/5, the first card to introduce the antialiasing effects and similar (was a small revolution in term of quality) and initiator of open-source compression (still found in Intel's chips).
But the voodoo 3 ? It has almost no new characteristics (appart from a slightly better pseudo-22bits filter), it's not even the first all-in-one 2D & 3D card nor the first AGP (both from 3Dfx - previous was the banshee - or from concurrence).
It's a nice card, with a couple of nice features (better quality at 16bits thanks to filters), but it basically looked like any other card on the market.
(Note: Have all the line from Voodoo 1 to Voodoo 5. Though no leaked Rampage prototype).
Re:Best operating system = Vista (Score:3, Insightful)
7 Mins to start an OS? That is an exaggeration?
Neither my Windows or Linux boxes take that long to start, even with Vista. In fact, currently, my Linux Boxen take on average longer than the Windows ones, that is including starting X.
and the typical "besides, my tools don't work on Vista"
Tell me, what is wrong with Re-Compiling the tools using Cygwin, or whatever? It shouldn't be difficult right? Especially if you are already a Linux so called "power user"...
I have all my platforms containing all the tools I need, recompiling where necessary, and i have a growing collection of Java based tools which don't need recompiling.
Time started in 1980, apparently... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:West Coast Bias and Revisionist History (Score:3, Insightful)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC [wikipedia.org]
And behind the internet ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:mmmh (Score:4, Insightful)
--
Thrower awayer of one TRS-80 Coco II and III, 5 years ago after powering it up and realizing I was nostalgic for my PC sitting on my desk.
Re:DSLR (Score:3, Insightful)
Most of the items on the list were chosen not because they were the best (which is subjective anyway), but because they were the first or because they significantly changed our world or the market.
Re:mmmh (Score:5, Insightful)
Even though some products can't be bought anymore, they still were very important in their times, and things wouldn't be the same today if they hadn't existed. Stuff like the NES (revived video gaming), Epson MX-80 (brought printing to the home), Doom (popularized FPS), Netscape Navigator (pushed the WWW) et al. were major milestones in tech that made what we have today possible.
Oh fuck! (Score:2, Insightful)
Anyway, those kinds of Top X lists are stupid...
Re:mmmh (Score:4, Insightful)
Even still I would say that something like the cell phone, or ethernet is more important than Netscape Navigator.