The 50 Best Tech Products of All Time
By Christopher Null, PC World
Page 5 of 5
41. Apple HyperCard (1987)
Trying to explain HyperCard to someone who's never used it is a bit like explaining a thesaurus to a three-year-old. But here goes: HyperCard--which was created by Apple software genius Bill Atkinson--was a programming environment that provided you with a stack of blank "cards," upon which you could add text, graphics, and little videos. And most important, you could link the cards together, sort of like an offline version of a Web site--years before the Web existed. (Some of HyperCard's design features live on in browsers to this day, such as the use of a tiny pointing-hand cursor to indicate hyperlinks.) Side note: The game Myst was originally built with Hypercard.
42. Epson MX-80 (1980)
Aside from the sound of a successfully connected modem, has there ever been a noise in all of computerdom as satisfying as the chugga-chugga-crunch-buzz of a dot matrix printer? Dot matrix ruled the printing universe for years, sucking up tractor-fed paper with abandon. Reasonably cheap, relatively durable, and fast enough (about 1 page per minute), the MX-80 became the best-selling dot-matrix printer after it was released, with Epson claiming that it had captured 60 percent of the dot matrix market . Exactly how popular was the MX-80? Despite its being 27 years old, you can still buy printer ribbons for it. Six bucks a pop.
43. Central Point Software PC Tools (1985)
Purchasing PC utilities one by one has always been costly, not to mention a pain in the neck. Central Point's PC Tools wasn't exactly revolutionary, but by bundling into a single package over a dozen useful utilities (antivirus, backup, undelete, and unformat(!), to name a few), it provided frustrated tech-savvy users with a one-stop shop for fixing problems on their DOS machines. After a disappointing 1991 release, the company was bought by Symantec and was eventually dismantled, as Norton SystemWorks continued what PC Tools had started.
44. Canon EOS Digital Rebel (2003)
With the 2003 launch of the Digital Rebel , Canon brought high-end camera technology to regular consumers. The EOS was a 6.3-megapixel digital SLR that broke the $1000 price point, finally putting swappable lenses and greater photographic control within financial reach of serious shutterbugs disappointed with the performance of pocket digicams. The Rebel may also be the most-hacked camera ever made: Clever tweakers have created new firmware for the camera and even written DOS apps for it. The Rebel line is still a mainstay for Canon, with its EOS Digital Rebel Xti a popular choice for serious photographers.
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.
46. Adaptec Easy CD Creator (1996)
Optical disc burning is something we take for granted now (just drag files to the DVD-R and go), but in the early days of writeable CDs, burning a disc meant using third-party software and a lot of trial and error. Easy CD Creator took a lot of the guesswork out of CD burning, and was pretty much the standard for CD writing until Windows XP came along. Its direct descendant, Roxio Easy Media Creator 9 , does much more than CD burning, of course, but many of us still look fondly on the original.
47. PC-Talk (1982)
PC-Talk was a terminal program that let you dial into bulletin board systems and early online services such as CompuServe. But the program was better known for a different reason: It's widely credited for helping to create the shareware model of software distribution. When its author, who just so happened to be Andrew Fluegelman, the founding editor of PC World, decided to release his creation to the world, he simply requested that if people liked it, they send him a little cash. Though he trademarked the word "freeware" for his creation, "shareware" soon became the accepted term for this business model. And now there are entire Web sites, or major parts of them, devoted to downloading software .
48. Sony Mavica MVC-FD5 (1997)
In the wee early days of digital photography, getting pictures from camera to computer was a major challenge. There were no memory card slots, no Bluetooth, not even USB. Sony's Mavica MVC-FD5 was a stroke of genius: Put a floppy drive inside the camera, and then let shutterbugs use sneakernet to tote photos back and forth. You could fit about eight pictures on a disk (images were limited to 640-by-480-pixel resolution), which was good enough for most people at the time. The Mavica line eventually evolved to include integrated DVD writers .
49. Microsoft Excel (1985)
OK, to some of you this may be a contentious choice, since Microsoft Excel has been plagued with bugs and virus vulnerabilities throughout its existence. But would you believe that Excel was released for the Macintosh a full two years before it came out for the PC? Ultimately, when Excel did arrive on Windows, it buried Lotus 1-2-3 within a few years, thanks in part to its powerful scripting language. It eventually became so dominant that the rest of the Microsoft Office programs were redesigned to look more like Excel .
50. Northgate OmniKey Ultra (1987)
A legend among keyboards, the Northgate OmniKey was a monstrous, mechanical beast. It was heavy, loud, and insanely durable--a far cry from today's practically disposable membrane keyboards. Northgate fanatics still use them today (or its clone, the Creative Vision Avant Stellar ), and original versions of the 'board regularly fetch $100 and up on eBay. Why did Northgate go out of business in 1997? Perhaps its products simply didn't break often enough to be replaced. We'd like to know what you think, so vote for your own favorite best product . And see our Slide Show: The Products PCW Should Have Picked .