The 50 Best Tech Products of All Time
PC World has posted their list of The 50 Best Tech Products of All Time, and while there are a few fairly obvious omissions (Google, anyone?), it's also quite a trip down memory lane if you've been working or playing with technology for more than a couple of years.
Ones that have special meaning for me are (in the order they are listed in the PC World piece):
1. Netscape Navigator (1994)
It's late 1994. I'm fresh out of college, working at Time Life's now-long-defunct Digital division, learning HTML for this new project (The Virtual Garden) to be posted on the fledgling Pathfinder portal. They say you never forget your first time, and that's true of a lot of things, including the first time you see HTML you wrote all by yourself render correctly in a browser. You are coming to a sad realization. Cancel or Allow?
10. Tetris (1985) and 22. Nintendo Game Boy (1989)
Whoever that girl was who sat diagonally from me - the one who let me borrow her Game Boy to play Tetris during 6th period Trig class back in 1990 - I owe you many thanks, even though I forgot your name a long time ago. The GB/Tetris combo got me through many a long afternoon as we all waited to graduate and move on with our lives. I guess I didn't move on that much, though - I still have a later generation silver Game Boy with Tetris that I occasionally pick up and play even today.
11. Adobe Photoshop 3.0 (1994)
It was my first software purchase after I got into the "real world," and I still have the CD ROMs it came on somewhere in my house. After cutting my teeth on Photoshop 2/2.5 in college, the addition of Layers in version 3 were nothing short of a revelation, and to this day, it can be argued that no version of Photoshop produced since was as groundbreaking as Photoshop 3. The new CS3 Extended version may come close, what with the excellent new dockable interface and long-awaited video features, but only time will tell there.
13. Atari VCS/2600 (1977)
Yeah, the Atari 2600 rocked my world back when I was ten. Pitfall, anyone? But I also remember the ColecoVision we got a little later rocking harder. That Smurfs game kicked major tail on the ColecoVision, and it looked like a pile of dried dog sick on the Atari. Ah, memories.
19. id Software Doom (1993)
A kid in my fraternity house had Doom on his brand, spankin'-new Pentium system. Poor guy never got anything done on it, between his playing and everyone else patiently waiting in line. First video game that truly had the capacity to scare.
23. Iomega Zip Drive (1994)
So, I walk into an interview in the Spring of 1995, toting my digital portfolio on a 100 MB Zip disk and accompanying SCSI drive. The designers in the room were blown away (having lived and died with SyQuest drives to that point), focusing more on the gadget and its unbelievable awesomeness more than me, but I got the job anyway. These actually hung on longer than they had any right to, considering the pervasive "click of death," but it wasn't until CD burners were in pretty much every machine that I finally saw the last of the Zip disks come my way (about 5 years ago now). It all seems so silly now considering how ubiquitous USB Flash drives are these days, but the Zip drive was a revelation at the time. Incidentally, anyone remember the 1 GB Jaz drives? Those rocked pretty hard too - it was the first technology that truly allowed me to bring work home on a consistent basis.
31. Nintendo Entertainment System (1985)
The aforementioned ColecoVision was supplanted in the Schmitt household in the spring of 1987 by the NES, which served faithfully until the Sega Genesis I got in college in the fall of 1992. When you get up an hour early before school just to play Super Mario, you know you have an addictive hit on your hands (not to mention are a complete loser, but that's already been established).
34. Apple Airport Base Station (1999)
Wireless is everywhere now, so it's easy to forget just how amazing the technology was when it first came out. The 802.11b standard had been around for a while, and there were some products that supported it, but it was Apple who did what they are now infamous for, taking a complex standard and making it simple enough for mere mortals. My graphite ABS served me well until the G standard came out, and by that time, most wireless routers were simple enough to set up (not to mention much cheaper). But in early 2000, being able to lug our Graphite iMac DV from room to room and have our Internet connection available wherever it ended up was nothing short of miraculous.
41. Apple HyperCard (1987)
HyperCard was the tool that made me fall in love with interactive multimedia. I learned it relatively late - during an intro to electronic media class I took in college in the fall of 1992 - but more than anything else it showed me the possibilities of computer graphics and multimedia as an honest-to-goodness career path, and I never looked back. HyperCard eventually gave way to Director as the predominant multimedia authoring tool, and then Flash took the mantle (and it seems to be doing relatively well these days, don't you think?), but HyperCard set the standard for approachable programming for those whose minds didn't necessarily work that way.
Yeah, so after writing all that I have arrived at the conclusion that I'm a huge tool. But damn, that was a fun look back.
Posted at 01:15PM Apr 03, 2007 by Kevin Schmitt in Random | Comments[0]
