My Top Technology of (all) Time

I was thinking back over the years about all the interesting gadgets that have been created, invented, and discovered. Some were gone before the public even new they were created. While some are still around today, in one form or another.

Anyone remember the Atari VCS/2600 which found it’s place in many homes (including mine)  in the the late 1970’s. You can’t underestimate the importance of the original Atari, which made home gaming what it is today. All modern game systems owe some portion of their success to this simple machine. The VCS (later named the 2600) sold 8 million units in 1982. The 2600 eventually sold nearly 40 million units, paving the way for competitors and imitators alike.

How about the Nintendo Game Boy (1989)?

A monochrome screen, four way control pad, and two action buttons used to be all it took to entertain kids for hours! The original Game Boy may look primitive by today’s standards, but consider the state of handheld gaming prior to then. Two words: Mattel Football. Through a whopping nine versions, the Game Boy has gotten progressively smaller, while Nintendo’s hold on the portable gaming market keeps growing larger. More than 188 million Game Boys have been sold throughout the years, making it easily the most influential portable gaming device ever constructed.

Iomega Zip Drive (1994)
Before broadband, and before the ubiquitous writable CD, there was the Zip disk. If you regularly dealt with files larger than a few hundred kilobytes, you invested in a Zip drive, which used a super-floppy disk of sorts to hold 100MB (later 250MB and even 750MB) worth of data. The Zip was fraught with technical problems (the “click of death” being its most infamous), but during the latter half of the nineties, you really had no other choice. (What, you were going to buy a SyQuest cartridge? Please.) Look through your desk drawer, and we wager you’ll find at least one of Iomega’s iconic squares collecting dust.

Nintendo Entertainment System (1985)

You didn’t think I forgot this masterpice, did you? 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, some 25 years later.

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 b 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.

Netscape Navigator (1994)
Before IE, Chrome, Firefox, and Safari there was Netscape. Netscape was the reason people started spending hours a day on the Internet, leading to the boom (and bust) of many a Web site. The advent of the browser also led to the U.S. Department of Justice’s antitrust suit against Microsoft, after the company embedded Internet Explorer into Windows. And Netscape’s August 9, 1995, IPO is universally considered to be the official start of the dot-com era. Netscape, unfortunately, couldn’t keep up with the times and was surpassed by Internet Explorer in the late nineties. The Netscape browser still exists (under the ownership of AOL), but has fallen into utter disuse. Nevertheless, its influence can still be felt all over the Web. Fragments of its original code, for instance, live on in just about every browser still in production, from Mozilla Firefox to Internet Explorer.

Apple II (1977)
What was so special about the Apple II? It offered plenty of productivity tools (it was the first PC to run the VisiCalc spreadsheet, for instance), it was good at gaming, and it was quite extendable (when is the last time you saw a computer with eight expansion slots?). And the machine itself looked so much cooler than anything that had preceded it, a philosophy that still lives on in the Apple computers of today. The Apple II may not have been the first personal computer, but it was the spark that ignited the personal computing industry. If you’re lucky, you might still be able to find an Apple II on eBay, thought they don’t seem to last long.

Lastly, my personal favorite, TiVo HDR110 (1999)
It’s hard to believe but it’s true–TiVo has been around for almost a decade, making it nearly geriatric in the world of technology. The premise is simple: TiVo replaced the VHS tape with a monster hard drive, recording shows to disk instead of to analog media. That meant you could pause and resume live TV, skip through commercials in an instant, and record an entire season of 24 with just a few clicks of the remote control. TiVo’s innovations helped it to handily beat ReplayTV in the battle for mind share, though it struggled to reach profitability and now risks falling prey to that killer of many a promising company: commodity status. Though TiVo the brand may eventually die, “tivo” the verb will probably be with us forever.

These are some of my top gadgets….tell me some of yours.

Source:  http://www.pcworld.com/ article/123950-7/the_50_ greatest_gadgets_of_the_past_ 50_years.html