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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).
Stupid list, they forgot C64. How many programmers haven't learnt programming using C64 BASIC?
Football Odds
The 3dfx Voodoo3 is placed at number 16, but the Soundblaster is way down in 40th place?
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.
Argh.
And even with that in mind I think the list is bogus. With criterias like: 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. you have to wonder where mp3 (software and hardware), television (hardware), tcp/ip (software) and cellphones (hardware) are. But then again. I may have misunderstood what this is all about.
Thomas S. Iversen
I hate lists like this, because they are usually revisionist history. Again, there's a heavy West Coast Bias, as if the IBM PC and Apple and Microsoft were the only tech companies that ever existed.
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.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
They forgot:
1. the hearth
2. the knife
3. the rasp
4. the stirrup
5. the saw
6. the steam engine
7. the light bulb
etc.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Isn't it odd that they list applications as "tech products", as things we couldn't live without, but they completely miss software that we can't live without such as MP3, ZIP, TCP/IP, and instead list ipods, email, chatting software, etc., all of which couldn't exist without the underlying "tech products".
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
I think flash memory drives should have at least made the list. They really changed how a lot of people work. It's easy to transport files from office to home and back again. With such a large percentage of people working at least part time at home the drives make it much easier. I use them all the time to shift files from my desktop systems to my notebook. Also they credit Zip Drives but fail to list Syquest. That was really the landmark drive and they were more stable than Zip drives they just happen to be Mac based.
I can't understand why they specifically choose the Voodoo 3 to represent 3Dfx.
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).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
DNS? No listing for the software that allows us to type "www.pcworld.com" instead of "70.42.185.10"? Sendmail? Where is our email without the server software? Apache? Where's youre #1 pick without web servers to connect to? Not even a generic plumbing or infrastrcutre listing for these vital programs that make the Internet function. Shame on those guys.
There's more to it than this.
Exactly. How many of us really care about the products listed that you can't buy anymore? Why are we still pining away for our Apple IIe's, Commodore 64's and our TRS-80 Coco's? (Did I miss anyone that mattered?) If it's that important, obtain or build an emulator for some of these products. Beyond that, just give me list of the top 50 products that are still worth the money to buy.
--
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.
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.
After 3 days without programming, life becomes meaningless
- The Tao of Programming