Oh.. here we go.. ..
This will end in Arguments..

#4 - Mosiac. UofI, represent.

#1: Comment-posting technology

AOL? Ctrl+Alt+Del? Fuckin' Solitaire? I scoff now.

I don't have that much of a issue with #1, I will say it has made my life a lot easier to use a computer with USB then have many different connections for different pieces of hardware.

The Wheel.

the list could use some tweaking, but on the whole (insert austin powers joke here) it's pretty accurate. not like that horribly done top 60 greatest fictional weapons list last week.

Maximum Crap.

Spoiler--

#1 is USB... that the Mac introduced to the public. Ironic, as they mention FireWire and Macintoshes lumped together into some irrelevance. Not true.

Yeah, hataz (i.e., ignoramuses).

@DeathBySnooSnoo: not sure that qualifies as tech, however the insertion of silica blends into the wheel to promote anti slip tech...definitely cool!

A better description of this than a 'countdown of the top 100 tech products' is 'a list of the top 100 tech products in no particular order'.

Lets Hack that list:

[www.hacknmod.com]

Greatest Crap List Of All-Time

Given that Mac's Powerbook makes its appearance at 83, is really confined to PC innovations?

I think firewire should have been in there in the high numbers. It was so much faster than USB1.1 but has since been killed even by Apple.

BOC! @ WOOT!

@codykniffen: oh yeah UIUC represent! And also #91 is the creation of a UofI person so we basically have two things on the list. Too bad it didn't cover tech as a whole since plasma displays and LEDs would give us more to claim. :-)

IOMATIC AT 09:26 PM
#1 is USB... that the Mac introduced to the public.

If I recall correctly, USB was originally a Microsoft/Intel initiatve. Firewire was Apple's competing interface. USB was never introduced to the public on a Mac, it was adopted by Apple when Firewire failed to gain ground. USB support doesn't appear in the Mac OS until OS 8.6 (1999), while the USB 1.0 spec came out in 1995.

@EMoShunz: spoon.

@iomatic: for reals. firewire, kids, firewire.

17. Fast Ethernet (1995) too low.
63. Nvidia SLI (2004)good.
71. Hitachi 7K1000 (2007)good, but toshiba was just that much faster to the obvious next step.
86. America Online (1985) should be higher(yeah, i hate it too.)
85. SATA (2003) IDE is just big.
100. Microsoft Solitaire (1992) (throw in minsweeper too. boo.) Please replace this with Oregon Trail.

¡Qué Mier#@!

@mofojojo: also, it is because the fact that Apple charges 25 cents everytime a manufacturer uses one in a computer. USB is cheap.

I agree that the UPS is sweet, but ... continue your game of Wizardry? WTF IS WIZARDRY, and did nobody mention that you could play for about another half an hour only if you have the 50 lb. car battery UPS? Not to mention the fact they cost, like, $400 (at least when I saw 'em they did...NH surplus @ $9, ftw). Hmmm, I wonder why Windows' 'End Program Now' screen didn't make it ...

as long as Doom made the top 10, I have no gripe xD

USB: great idea for low-speed peripherals, with the world's worst connector design.

A rectangular plug that can't have its orientation determined by touch, instead requiring an end-on look at both plug and socket?* Genius!

(*or trial and error, with the first two attempts being wrong)

1984 Mac #55 == these guys are morons.

I have some quibbles with some of the selections, but what's really bugging me is #24, CGA. I don't even remember anything running in CGA mode (King's Quest maybe?).

Replace that with VGA, and all is forgiven.

@mofojojo: "Firewire was Apple's competing interface. USB was never introduced to the public on a Mac, it was adopted by Apple when Firewire failed to gain ground. USB support doesn't appear in the Mac OS until OS 8.6 (1999), while the USB 1.0 spec came out in 1995."

Firewire was a high-speed replacement for SCSI. It and USB (for keyboards, printers, mice and the like) were both on the first iMac that came out in 1998.

Since USB was the primary expansion port on the iMac (Firewire being used for hard drives and camcorders), it did help drive the creation of USB peripherals (the spec may have come out in 1995, but even in 1998 it was far from popular on the PC).

But that was nine whole years ago. Records from that era are sketchy at best.

They have some good picks, but ISDN was available way before DSL #88 and it was a big upgrade at the time with low latency digital connections.

SATA #85 Are you kidding me? SCSI is still faster than any SATA abomination. The fastest World of Warcraft hard drive is the Fujitsu U320 SCSI 143gig drive and you can get them for $74. SCSI was and still is the multitasking dream.

Eudora, yay Eudora.

Overall I think they did a good job with the list, considering the number of entries they had to deal with.

if this truly is representative of what the top 100 best PC inventions of all time are, it saddens my heart. if this world didn't have apple, it would be a very backwards place indeed

No OSX? Windows 98 and XP, but no OSX?

@someToast:
I'll give you that Firewire was designed as a replacement for SCSI, and that it was on the iMac, but those points are tangental from my original statement. I said that USB wasn't first introduced on the Mac, it was developed in part by Intel back when they were "the enemy". History hasn't changed no matter how sketchy records are.

I dub this the most difficult to please top list of all times.
The more fanboys' subjects a list deal with, the more difficult it is to please.
Hell, I think even a TOP 100 games of all times would be easier to please people...

@someToast: I agree. There are only two options and I normally end up trying it at least 3 times before I get it right.

Best magazine out there. PC Mag is an joke next to it.

Go Illini! Although this list pales in comparison to the trip to the Rose Bowl.

And why the Steve Jobs cult is out on Maximum PC for not including more Apple stuff is pretty funny.

is it just me - or do you guys hire blog writers with "I hate Microsoft" on their resume....

I mean - there is tons of crap on the list but the only thing this guy pics up to show in his link is #5 for XP.

I mean seriously - not that i am in love with MS, but damn - give some credit to the guys whose OS is being used on more computer systems than there are hair on all apple fan boys heads combined....

ok - may be i crossed the line... but it annoys me to see a talented gadget info site - to keep on harping along the same string over and over and over and over....

I GET IT - you DONT LIKE MICROSOFT.... and if it were up to you - APPLE WOULD OWN THE WORLD....

now for a change.... try to see if there is something else wrong with the world besides Windows....

Maybe scsi is not on the list because it is more of a business solution. It was quite rare to find individuals who bought a scsi controller and hard drive at that premium. I remember when there was this great tyan dual proc. bx board that had an integrated ultra scsi controller (way back when aceshardware still updated its reviews)...businesses and (though pretty rarely) enthusiasts bought scsi.

Probably also why fibre channel and alpha or any other risc procs never hit the list.

Where was the transmeta crusoe (that went far!), and why would they pick red hat over slackware (popularity, ipo)?

Yeah, it's too bad firewire (oxford 911!) never achieved dominance in the storage market. It really made sense to use it in concert with usb rather than have the two compete, but that was partly a result of poor business decisions by Jobs as well as the expense of its complicated and expensive, but efficient architecture.

Whatever, they could not make a list that would please everyone. It was fun to read.

WHERE THE FUCK IS MYST?

Whooooo!
USB #1! USB #1 USB #1! USB #1! USB #1! USB #1 USB #1! USB #1!
Suck it, Parallel! Back in your box, Serial!
Firewire? You got burned, bitch!
Whoooo! USB rules forever! WHHOOOOOO!!!!!

But seriously. This entire endeavour is all very sad. Top 100 lists are the editorial equivalent of running out the clock.
I feel justified in never having picked up a single copy of Maximum PC in my entire life.

@xaflatoonx: WEll the article was originally titled without "PC" in the headline. I love Windows XP, but man, if it was all technologies over all time, don't you think that XP comes behind the wheel and fire?

@luckypictures: Bwhahaahh!

WHAT ABOUT NETBUS?

@mofojojo: Nobody is saying Apple invented USB or was the first to do it. As with all things Apple they were the first to really "mainstream" it. They would get similar credit for the GUI, the mouse, the portable music player and (probably) the non-stylus touch-screen interface. With USB it was the fact that the only way to expand an iMac was through USB devices, so USB versions of any and everything began to flood the market as "iMac" accessories. If you were alive during this era you remember how most USB devices used some blue-ish tranparent plastic, just like the iMac.

Also, Firewire was never meant to be a perfect competitor to USB. Apple never tried to go with firewire keyboards or anything like that. USB 2 ended up eating into much of the external hard drive market because it was good enough, but those who relied on consistent speed (anybody in video, basically) stuck with firewire (which is true to this day if not using eSATA or something better).

@someToast and @mofojojo: Hah! FireWire wasn't introduced first on the iMac at, which originally came with a measly two USB ports in 1998, supported by Mac OS 8.1 (not 1999 and 8.6) FireWire's first introduction was in 1999 on the Blue & White PowerMac G3. You know, the tower that looks like a smurf. Then came the PowerMac G4 in the same year. FireWire wasn't introduced on the iMac until the very end of 1999 with the introduction of the slot-loading iMac DV.

And I don't remember USB being popular at all before Apple started selling iMacs. Whether it was causation or correlation is a matter of debate but the correlation is definitely there.

I find it absolutely hilarious that Maximum PC's picture for the "#1 tech innovation of all time" includes a picture of a modern motherboard (one I've thought of purchasing) that has a built-in FireWire port, right next to an eSATA port. The caption goes on to say that FireWire is effectively relegated to Macs. Poor choice of photo.

I don't know if anyone else will agree with me but I still prefer FireWire for DV transfer. It usually gives you way more control of the camera and better quality, depending on the camera. I always edit in Windows though...maybe using Windows is where I've gone wrong.

@lafond66: FireWire killed by Apple? Hardly! Have you looked at any Mac lately? Every single computer that Apple makes comes with at least one FireWire port. That excludes the Apple TV, which isn't intended to be a dedicated computer anyway. Just because Apple moved to using USB for the iPod doesn't mean they were killing it off. Even the Xserve has a FireWire port on the front, something I find useless and awesome at the same time. But like I said, maybe using Windows is where I've gone wrong. We have a ton of Dell PowerEdge servers that the dell dude sold us. Despite what they tell you though, Windows is a stable server OS if you know what you're doing. And those things run Red Hat pretty handily, too.

Let's see, Ubuntu won't work right on my laptop (Fedora 8 did)... drivers drivers.

Napster??? Where is AudioGalaxy?

21 fails to mention the metal plate that was inside them... So you thought it was sturdier.

15 Come on guys, it's a blatant ripoff of CP/M

The mouse should be a lower number... It's way better than mp3.

9 Defines computational prowess... Can it DooM?

5 This is how you know you screwed up. Vista does make XP look thinner (by comparison). But XP is still a bloated beast.

But you cannot ignore the fact that USB is what's right with PC industry.

And that was my rant!

@jamesuschrist: Truth is... If you ask everybody about Firewire and USB, most people will know about the later rather than the former. USB is now some sort of necesity, when you can live without firewire. I know i do.

the biggest flaw is the inclusion of so much dreck that is not innovative or even remarkable, but is just "neato" right now. Like the Core 2 Duo, SLI and the terabyte hard drive. There is nothing revolutionary or evolutionary about these things. They are just iterations in the onward march of progress. The Athlon 64 with the on ie memory controller is innovative. Perpendicular hard drives, SOI, 45nm, are innovative but bland.
socket 939/Athlon 64, CDr/DVDr, Win 95/XP etc, why so many redundancies?
Why such a crap tossed of list?

I think the Tandy 1000 might have something to say about number 8. At least it was 'affordable'.

NO Amiga? 386 protect mode "the beginning of multitasking?" WTF?

While my PC buddies were trying to be impressed with EGA grpahics I had my A1000 and A500 doing shit the PC (let alone Mac) wouldn't do for years to come.

A few things...

Yeah, Myst... hello. I'd also bring up Living Books from Broderbund. Like it or not, that really started selling the multimedia PC. One of the very first commercial multimedia titles was actually from a company I worked for. It was called Composer Quest. Back then, we used Director on the Mac, and got animation over to Windows 3.1 using a program called the gaffer.

On the Mac-side, yeah... Apple was the FIRST computer manufacturer to drop disk drives, and feature a built-in CD drive for all their computers. That was the charm of the original iMac... although at the time I found it extremely scarey, and most people were scrambling for USB floppy drives even though they really didn't need them. I'd also object to Ubuntu being mentioned before Mac OS X. Why? Well, if there was a consumer friendly Unix-based system to celebrate, it was the synthesis of Mac OS X form the dregs of NextStep, and helping Apple become the viable surging force it is today. Up until Mac OS X, Apple was treading water. It wasn't until Panther that I realized that much of the Unix experience I was gaining from shared/dedicated hosting environments directly applied to the new OS X, and more importantly, functioned even better than the previous Mac OS 9.

Also, they're very remiss in not mentioning the Video Toaster. As an ex-Amiga-head (who is Bit Torrenting roms for UAE on my Mac at this very moment), Video Toaster from NuTek was a HUGE break-through. It was quite possibly the Amiga's last hoorah. It was such a break through in allowing production quality titling and 3-D modelling and compositing with its Lightwave 3D, that people literally built systems that effectively built Amigas INTO PC compatibles, simply to use the VIdeo Toaster functionality. Lightwave spawned some of the first television budget 3-D effects in shows like Babylon 5.

Those are some big ones. They could have done with missing at least one of versions of Windows. Seriously. I'd pick XP personally.

@whiskey: Quite true! My work computer doesn't have a FireWire port nor does it need one. I use the ones on my PC at home sparingly. I've also got about a deskful of USB peripherals...good thing my PC has like 12 USB ports.

The odd thing I've noticed that a lot of laptops out there that have either regular FireWire ports or mini FireWire ports. Most people that I know who do any kind of DV editing sure as hell don't do it on a laptop, so I've never understood that trend.

And although a lot of people don't know FireWire from SCSI, the average user has no idea about any number of technical aspects of the machines they use on a daily basis. Some people can't differentiate between a computer monitor and the computer itself. Trust me, part of my job is supporting client machines that belong to clueless operators.

@mofojojo: i don't think anyone doubts that Intel developed USB. i never remember not knowing that. no one thinks Apple invented it... Apple was the first to force it into the market by creating a popular computer that completely relied on USB. not the first but certainly the driving force behind the USB peripheral development "boom".

when the iMac came out it killed off pretty much every single legacy port Macs had previously used. leaving USB the only interface for peripherals. when it was announced i thought it was the stupidest thing ever... i mean really... there was dickall in terms of USB devices at that point in time. within a few months however... a TON of USB devices were available.

i don't know what the other person was talking about... but there wasn't Firewire on the original iMac... it had modem / ethernet / 2 USB. Firewire came later... and i'm pretty sure that was introduced on the Blue & White G3s. the iMac ditched the ADB / Geoport serial / SCSI / and the then ubiquitous floppy drive. never to be seen again!

seemed like a bad idea. turned out to be a great idea. and i'm glad my Powerbook doesn't still contain superfluous ADB or SCSI ports on it. meanwhile 90% of PC motherboards still have PS/2 ports for some inane reason. (i think parallel ports are finally gone though... right?)

ok.... so WTF! So there's like 5 different versions of Windows but not one of Mac OS ??? fuck that list... i said fuck that list.

ah. everyone made the points i was making between me opening the page and me deciding to post to it. damn it.

@Cleverboy: i certainly agree on the Video Toaster. pretty sure anyone that worked in television during that period of time would agree. the Video Toaster was completely amazing back then... still is in some ways. the place i worked at waaay back then couldn't afford one however... we just had a genlocked A1200 which was still pretty awesome. no Mac or PC could (or was) doing that at the time.

@x23: Actually, the original iMacs did have a GeoPort, it was connected internally to the IrDA on the front panel. If you removed the back panel, you could disconnect it and plug pretty much anything you wanted into it however. You could even disconnect the internal monitor and plug in an external one. The on-board graphics supported resolutions higher than the 15" CRT was limited to!

Also if you had the balls to do it, you could add a floppy driver header to the motherboard.

I can't believe that flash memory didn't get a mention on the list. Thumb drives and