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PC World's 50 Best Tech Products of All Time

Posted by kdawson on from the time-starts-in-1977 dept.

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).

38 of 399 comments (clear)

  1. The list by pedestrian+crossing · · Score: 5, Informative

    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)

    --
    A house divided against itself cannot stand.
    1. Re:The list by HugePedlar · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.
  2. Commodore C64 by bjourne · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Stupid list, they forgot C64. How many programmers haven't learnt programming using C64 BASIC?

    --
    Football Odds
    1. Re:Commodore C64 by MosesJones · · Score: 5, Funny

      Help me out here, is it 99.99% or 99.999% of all the developers on the planet?

      --
      An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
    2. Re:Commodore C64 by ErroneousBee · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I would pick the Sinclair spectrum over the C64, they were ubiquitous in the UK. The BBC micro might also get a mention.

      They also seem to have picked the cameras almost at random, those models would never have been on my short list when buying a camera. I'd look to the Cannon digital SLRs or the Nikon coolpix range for models that changed the market.

      They missed the Space Invaders machine, and the digital watch.

      Business hardware has been left out, wheres the Xerox machine, fax machine, mainframe, or printer?

      I do think they have a pretty good list, though. Particularly the older stuff.

      --
      **TODO** Steal someone elses sig.
    3. Re:Commodore C64 by marol · · Score: 4, Informative

      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...

  3. 50 best, 50 worst... ho, hum by chebucto · · Score: 5, Funny

    What I want to see is a list of the 50 middle tech products of all time. Which are the most mediocre? Which products excel at mediocrity? Inquiring minds want to know!

    --
    The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
  4. That is not the outcome ! by __aahlyu4518 · · Score: 4, Informative

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

  5. Voodoo 3 sucked. by RyuuzakiTetsuya · · Score: 4, Informative

    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?!

    --
    Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
    1. Re:Voodoo 3 sucked. by pslam · · Score: 4, Interesting
      Indeed, that surprised me too. Voodoo 1 was THE watershed graphics card - it blew away everything the competition had by an order of magnitude in high performance, features AND low price. It was even fairly unique in sitting on a separate card slot with the entire VGA signal looped through it and switched on demand. Instant upgrade for your PC. Genius marketing they had back then.

      Sadly, they started drinking their own cool-aid too much. Voodoo 3 was THE bankrupting card. It was too expensive, too poor on features (16 bit rendering when everyone else was 32 bit), too poor on RAMDAC speed (poor output quality) and way too late to market. To make matters worse, their marketing department was making laughable attempts at convincing customers that they didn't really need all those extra features (what people want is render SPEED not QUALITY! Oh you already have 60fps? Hmm). You could buy an nVidia TNT2 for the same price, and it had the same performance, better quality output and better quality rendering. Even the drivers were better. I think Voodoo3 vs TNT2 marks the point where 3dfx LOST the fight. Strange that the list says it marks the pinnacle.

      Sadder still, rather than recovering, they brought out the Voodoo 4/5 which added very little apart from a huge power supply burden, massive cards, and even higher costs, right when upstarts like nVidia and ATI were bringing out damn cheap, fast and single chip cards that did better.

      As an aside - the CEO who bankrupted them by running the company on pure hopes and wishes alone (Greg Ballard) did the same to the company I worked for (SonicBlue/S3/Diamond). I suspect they brought him in due to his history of running a market leading company into the ground in less than a year. Job done.

  6. Misleading title by zensonic · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Its not the best tech products of all times at the title states, its the most influential products of all time.

    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
    1. Re:Misleading title by mr_matticus · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It's not a list of the 50 best technologies of all time. MP3, television, and cell phones aren't the aim of this particular list.

      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.

  7. One page link by bobdotorg · · Score: 3, Informative

    Unless you enjoy wading through 11 pages of served ads:

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

    --
    __ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
  8. West Coast Bias and Revisionist History by tekrat · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:West Coast Bias and Revisionist History by imsabbel · · Score: 3, Insightful

      And if you widen your horizon even more, you might notice that there is a whole world outside the us, too.
      ("west-coast bias". Snicker...)

      --
      HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
    2. Re:West Coast Bias and Revisionist History by eganloo · · Score: 3, Insightful
      I hit the submit button too soon. Here's the full reply:

      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. Read a map. The IBM PC was developed in Boca Raton, Florida, two counties away from the southeasternmost tip of the United States.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC

      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. Read the article. The Palm Pilot is #18.

      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. Read the title. The list is for the 50 best tech products. Innovations in academic labs aren't products yet, until they are sold commercially. The list does include products that were inspired by MIT's Media Lab's work.
  9. 50 Best Tech Products of All Time by $RANDOMLUSER · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
  10. Nothing too contentious in there by 91degrees · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Surprised about the lack of Visicalc. Perhaps the Apple ][ Visicalc combo would have been a better #2. Nobody ever wanted the Apple 2. They wanted the software. People would go into computer stores and ask for "A visicalc".

  11. Software choices by tekrat · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  12. Flash drives by edwardpickman · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  13. RealSound? Covox? by Animaether · · Score: 3, Interesting

    That's not entirely true... keep in mind that Access Software (Links golf, Countdown, and various other both visually and sound-wise impressive titles) offered an option called RealSound for sound playback. This sound would go through the PC Speaker (in the era of 386 and 486, this was an actual cone speaker) and produce reasonable sound output.

    In addition, long before the SoundBlaster, there was the Covox - a parallel port piece of electronics you could build at home with the right components and a soldering iron - which produced superior sound. Eventually a stereo version was able to be made and addressed as well.

    Now, I'll agree that the soundblaster line of products actually kicked off the real audio revolution as finally you got great quality -without- the parallel port fidgeting.. just plunk in the card and pray you get the address, irq and whatnot settings set up right; but once they were, off you were.

    1. Re:RealSound? Covox? by turing_m · · Score: 5, Funny

      "Looks like he... hit the tree Jim!"

      Ah, memories.

      --
      If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
  14. Huh? by MadTinfoilHatter · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Huh? by TheNetAvenger · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

  15. Re:Bad list, forgot all of the most important tech by ideonode · · Score: 5, Funny

    You know, if we're talking about digital technology, then I reckon that the best digital technology of all time would be opposable thumbs.

  16. The Voodoo *3* ?!?!? by DrYak · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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 ]
  17. No search engines? by meringuoid · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I see browsers and ISPs, but no search. Where in the name of all buggeration is Google?

    --
    Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
  18. Time started in 1980, apparently... by argent · · Score: 3, Insightful

    There's only two products in that list released before 1980, and they're both products that would have still been interesting to teenagers in 1980. It looks like none of the people having anything to do with this list were aware of anything that happened before then.

  19. My List by rlp · · Score: 4, Interesting

    My list would include:

    1) Personal Computer
    2) Word Processing
    3) Ethernet LAN
    4) Mouse
    5) Graphical User Interface
    6) Laser Printer

    In other words, products from Xerox PARC.

    --
    [Insert pithy quote here]
  20. And behind the internet ... by mikeraz · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  21. Re:mmmh by NewKimAll · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  22. Re:mmmh by hswerdfe · · Score: 4, Funny

    metrics? you mean the editors didn't sit around a table saying, "Hey remember my old NES, that was cool"..."It needs to go in."

    --
    --meh--
  23. The list in misnamed by brokeninside · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It should have been titled, the fifty most commercially influential consumer grade ITproducts of the last thirty years. Electrical power plants, water treatment plants and the internal combustion engine (just to name three technical innovations) have far more impact on every day life than any of the products on that list. Or even relational databases and computer warehousing. Here's another example, the credit revolution that began in the eighties was entirely dependent on large mainframes being able to interconnect with various data sources to compile a credit score that has changed the way people work, shop and live far more than the number one product on that list, Netscape Navigator.

  24. Where's the wheel? by Grebekel · · Score: 4, Funny

    Any "Best tech of all time" list that does not list the wheel is bogus. What would I do if my chair didn't have 5 sets of wheels on it? Walk? As if...

  25. Microsoft bashing is de rigeur for slashdot.,. by way2trivial · · Score: 3, Funny

    I'm sick and tired of all the anti-microsoft slant to slashdot..
    continually minimizing microsofts effort to the world of personal computing...

    Microsoft did not have TWO, they had at least 4 of the above.
    Microsoft deserves credit for #36 and #24 as they were directly responsible for bringing them about.

    --
    every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
  26. Re:mmmh by Phisbut · · Score: 4, Insightful

    How many of us really care about the products listed that you can't buy anymore?

    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
  27. Re:mmmh by twistedsymphony · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Perhapse the list should have been labeled the "50 most Influential Tech Products of All Time".

    Even still I would say that something like the cell phone, or ethernet is more important than Netscape Navigator.

    --
    Collector's Edition
  28. Once again where's the HD? by HockeyPuck · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Why is it that whenever someone comes out with a top X computing products of all time, they always leave out the hard drive? Yet somehow these boneheads listed the zipdisk, which a) didn't kill off the floppy drive (USB thumb drives did) and b) only lasted few years.

    How about giving props to IBM, Seagate etc where it's due. Not only did they give you fast, reliable, RANDOM access (remember we used reel to reel tape before this) but its been increasing in capacity and speed ever since, not to mention going DOWN in price. 100GB laptop drives anyone? It wasn't that long ago when 'high performance' disk drives were in the 9 and 18GB range for disk arrays. Not for laptops.

    Remember without it, you'd be trying to boot your PC with punchcards, floppy disks or tape.

    -Storage Admin since 1982.