The 50 Best Tech Products of All Time
By Christopher Null, PC World
Page 4 of 5
31. Nintendo Entertainment System (1985)
Gaming had been wallowing in a two-year depression when its savior finally arrived. The NES was a powerful gray box that introduced millions to the world of Super Mario Bros., the console's most visible and lasting hit. With the NES, Nintendo began a years-long reign over home gaming, thanks largely to its near-perfect ports of various arcade classics, like Super Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong. The NES's legacy is still apparent today in the success of Nintendo's Wii console , with characters like Mario and The Legend of Zelda's Link still holding court, 22 years later. You can relive those days of yore, probably for less than $20, which is about what the original NES sells for these days on eBay .
32. Eudora (1988)
Few freeware programs have had as profound an effect on the development of technology as Steve Dorner's Eudora. Originally developed as part of a class programming project, Eudora was the first nonmainframe e-mail client used by many a consumer, including (based on a straw poll) a good chunk of the PCW staff. The app is also notable for offering both free ad-supported versions and paid pro versions, which nixed the promos. Purchased by Qualcomm in 1991, the program is still in development ( version 7.1 is current and available in PC World's Downloads) and is actively supported for a variety of platforms. Future versions of the program will use the open-source Thunderbird as a development core.
33. Sony Handycam DCR-VX1000 (1995)
Home videos were huge for years before the the Handycam DCR-VX1000 came along, but this was the product that finally brought the camcorder kicking and screaming, into the digital era. Thanks to its use of MiniDV digital tapes, which made editing video on a PC significantly easier, the sketchy quality of VHS and Hi-8 soon became a thing of the past. For $4000, you got only a 410-kilopixel image, but things improved over time, as Sony finally hit 1 megapixel in 1999 and high-definition quality by 2004. Mini-DV is now being phased out in favor of better technologies, but Sony still offers new camcorders with the technology .
34. Apple Airport Base Station (1999)
Apple wasn't the first company to introduce Wi-Fi, but in 1999 its flying saucer Base Station became a visible (and stylish) emblem for the joys of wireless connectivity. Apple was a forerunner when it came to incorporating 802.11b into laptops, and it championed the technology before other vendors did. Nowadays, Apple's Airport Extreme Base Station is a direct descendant of the earlier technology. But even though the company is a relatively minor player in networking hardware, the original Base Station had a powerful influence in the early days of Wi-Fi and helped kick-start the migration to the wireless world as we know it today.
35. Brøderbund The Print Shop (1984)
Once upon a time, the only way to set up for a party was to print out an enormous banner on tractor-fed paper, using all of the ink in your dot matrix printer. From clip-art-festooned fliers to cheese-ball homemade greeting cards, The Print Shop offered a wealth of ways for bored Apple II users to prove that computers could do anything a crayon could, and more. In a nutshell, it was the world's first useless killer app. Believe it or not, Print Shop is still around--the PC version is now on release number 22 .
36. McAfee VirusScan (1990)
As long as there have been PCs, there have been viruses. But it wasn't until the early days of Windows 95 that antivirus software became utterly indispensable (Windows 3.1 viruses weren't nearly as bad). At the time, McAfee VirusScan was the top choice in virus protection (though many opted for Norton). In 1997 McAfee acquired Dr. Solomon's Software and with it, one of the best antivirus engines around. And even though recent versions of VirusScan haven't been as well received as its early brethren (McAfee now seems more interested in promoting other security products than catching exploits), it remains a pretty good product .
37. Commodore Amiga 1000 (1985)
Commodore's Amiga probably has more cult followers than any other defunct computer system, despite the fact that it never sold well and eventually bankrupted the company in 1994. But what a noble failure it was. The Amiga was years ahead of its PC--and Macintosh--brethren, using the Mac's Motorola 68000 processor and a separate video CPU, which allowed the computer to perform 3D animation, full-speed video, and other unheard-of feats. Its abilities with high-end audio processing quickly earned it the title of world's foremost "multimedia computer," but perhaps users simply weren't ready for its next-gen tricks.
38. ChipSoft TurboTax (1985)
If you really understand what all those cells and instructions on your 1099s, 5305-EAs, and Schedule Rs mean, you probably don't need TurboTax (now owned by Intuit). But for those of us who don't know our ISOs from our NSOs, TurboTax makes life much easier during that first (and possibly second) weekend of April every year. TurboTax may not be revolutionary, but as far as essential PC software goes, many users can't easily live without it.
39. Mirabilis ICQ (1996)
Why pick up a phone when you can send an e-mail? Why send an e-mail when you can fire off an instant message? Specializing in short-burst communications, IM was a no-brainer technology that took off quickly thanks to ICQ, developed by Israeli tech firm Mirabilis. For a long while, ICQ was the only choice in IM, and hundreds of millions of user ID numbers were assigned. Alas, the numerical ID was ICQ's downfall. By the time it was able to easily link digits to e-mail accounts, users had moved on to other options. AOL bought ICQ in 1998 and still supports it , though AOL Instant Messenger is now the market leader.
40. Creative Labs Sound Blaster 16 (1992)
Prior to the Sound Blaster, your PC's audio was pretty much limited to a few squeaks and beeps to let you know that you successfully stabbed the ogre or your machine was crashing. The Sound Blaster product line changed all that by putting real audio capabilities into the computer. The Sound Blaster 16, one of the series' early models, brought 16-bit sound to the mix, which made audio (and music) finally passable on a PC. Today, integrated audio has become standard, largely relegating the Sound Blaster family to high-end gaming PCs . That's not such a bad thing, because the SB16's direct descendants, today's Audigy and X-Fi lines , do an astonishing job of reproducing the high-quality, multichannel sound that gamers thrive on.