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).

Comments

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)

Re:The list

[HugePedlar]

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.

Commodore C64

[bjourne]

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

Re:Commodore C64

[MosesJones]

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

Re:Commodore C64

[ErroneousBee]

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.

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...

50 best, 50 worst... ho, hum

[chebucto]

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!

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?!

Re:Voodoo 3 sucked.

[pslam]

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.

Misleading title

[zensonic]

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.

West Coast Bias and Revisionist History

[tekrat]

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.

50 Best Tech Products of All Time

[$RANDOMLUSER]

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.

Nothing too contentious in there

[91degrees]

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".

Software choices

[tekrat]

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".

Flash drives

[edwardpickman]

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.

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:RealSound? Covox?

[turing_m]

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

Ah, memories.

Re:Bad list, forgot all of the most important tech

[ideonode]

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

The Voodoo *3* ?!?!?

[DrYak]

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).

No search engines?

[meringuoid]

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

My List

[rlp]

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.

And behind the internet ...

[mikeraz]

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.

Re:mmmh

[NewKimAll]

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.

Re:mmmh

[hswerdfe]

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."

Where's the wheel?

[Grebekel]

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...

Re:mmmh

[Phisbut]

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.