Top 50 Gadgets of The Last 50 Years
PC World editörlerinin kullanım kolaylığı, tasarım, yenilikçilik ve "cool" olma özelliklerini göz önünde bulundurarak belirledikleri "Top 50 gadgets of the last 50 years" listesini sizinle paylaşmak istedim. Bu tür cihazlarla ilgilenenlerin hoşuna gideceğini umuyorum.
Portable music players are so cheap and ubiquitous today that it's hard to remember when they were luxury items, widely coveted and often stolen. But when the blue and silver Walkman debuted in 1979, no one had ever seen anything quite like it. The $200 player virtually invented the concept of "personal electronics." Learn more in Sony's history of the Walkman.
2. Apple iPod (2001)
If the Walkman is the aging king of portable media players, Apple's iPod is prince regent. The iPod is dead; long live the iPod.
3. (Tie) ReplayTV RTV2001 and TiVo HDR110 (1999)
The appearance of the first ReplayTV and TiVo models--the pioneering Gemini of digital video recording--in the number three spot on our list may be a measure of how much we all hate TV commercials. The concept is simple: Digitize the TV signal and stream it to an internal hard drive, so the user can pause, rewind, fast-forward, or record programs at will.
4. PalmPilot 1000 (1996)
The PalmPilot 1000 was everything the Apple Newton MessagePad wanted to be: a "personal data assistant" small enough to fit in your shirt pocket, with enough flash RAM (128KB) to hold a then-impressive 500 names and addresses.
5. Sony CDP-101 (1982)
The first commercial compact disc player signaled a technological sea change that ultimately caused millions of music lovers to ditch their turntables.
6. Motorola StarTAC (1996)
The StarTAC was the first mobile phone to establish that design matters as much as functionality, leading to today's profusion of stylish cell phones.
7. Atari Video Computer System (1977)
Later known as the Atari 2600, the VCS brought video games out of the arcade and into America's living rooms. It was a snap to set up: Just plug the clunky-looking box into your TV set and grab the joystick.
8. Polaroid SX-70 Land Camera (1972)
The SX-70 was a thing of beauty. Just point, shoot, and watch the image develop before your eyes. When you're done, fold up the 7-by-4-inch unit and stick it in your bag. It was the first Polaroid to automatically eject the snapshot and produce images, without making you wait 60 seconds and peel off the outer wrapper of the film.
9. M-Systems DiskOnKey (2000)
For 20 years people had been predicting the death of the floppy, but it took a gadget the size of your thumb to actually sound the death knell. With 8MB to 32MB of flash memory at its introduction in November 2000, was easier to use than a diskette, and was the first device of its type that didn't need drivers for your PC.
10. Regency TR-1 (1954)
The Regency took radio out of the parlor and put it in your pocket. Jointly produced by Texas Instruments and TV accessory manufacturer IDEA, the TR-1 was the first consumer device to employ transistors.
11. Sony PlayStation 2 (2000)
Sure, the Nintendo 64 and Sega Dreamcast were fun machines, but Sony's PlayStation 2 bought gaming to whole new level.
12. Motorola Razr V3 (2004)
The impressively slim and ultrasexy clamshell-style V3 sported a brushed aluminum casing, a color screen on the outside, and a strikingly bright 2.2-inch color LCD on the inside.
13. Motorola PageWriter (1996)
The PageWriter--which looked like a thicker version of Motorola's then-current one-way text pagers--sported a flip-top design that, when opened, revealed a QWERTY keypad as well as a four-line backlit monochrome LCD screen.
14. BlackBerry 850 Wireless Handheld (1998)
Canadian firm Research in Motion didn't invent e-mail, wireless data networks, the handheld, or the QWERTY keyboard. But with the little BlackBerry, along with server software that made e-mail appear on it without any effort from the recipient, RIM put it all together in a way that even nontechie executives could appreciate--and thereby opened the eyes of corporate America to the potential of wireless communications.
15. Phonemate Model 400 (1971)
In 1971, PhoneMate introduced one of the first commercially viable answering machines, the Model 400.
16. Texas Instruments Speak & Spell (1978)
A whole generation of kids learned to spell on this cheery orange device with alphabet keys and a hardy handle. Speak & Spell contained a single-chip speech synthesizer--novel for the time--and a robotic voice that encouraged children to spell more than 200 common words.
17. Texas Instruments SR-10 (1973)
Math classes were never the same after the introduction of TI's handheld calculators in the early 1970s.
18. Diamond Multimedia Rio PMP300 (1998)
The Nano it ain't, but Diamond's Multimedia Rio PMP 300 started the revolution that produced portable music players such as Apple's iPod This first portable MP3 player ran on a single AA battery and packed a whopping 32MB of storage--enough for about a half hour of music encoded in the MP3 compression format.
19. Sony Handycam DCR-VX1000 (1995)
Thank Sony for introducing digital video editing to the desktop. Before it released the Handycam DCR-VX1000, if you wanted to edit video on a PC you had to invest thousands of dollars in an expansion card to digitize analog footage. The DCR-VX1000 was the first camcorder to capture in the mini-DV format, and the first with a FireWire port for transferring digital video to a PC.
20. Handspring Treo 600 (2003)
The quest for the perfect palmtop/phone hybrid hit a new milestone with the Treo 600, released by upstart Palm competitor Handspring (the company founded by Palm founders Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky) before that company was itself swallowed by Palm.
21. Zenith Space Command (1956)
The first widely used TV remote control had four buttons (power, volume, channel up, channel down) but no batteries; press a button, and a tiny hammer inside the remote would strike an aluminum rod, transmitting an ultrahigh-frequency tone to control the set.
22. Hamilton Pulsar (1972)
A wristwatch with no springs, gears, or hands? In 1970, when venerable U.S. timepiece maker Hamilton announced the Pulsar, the first solid-state watch, the concept was so revolutionary that nobody seemed to care that its LED screen actually displayed the time only when you pressed a button.
23. Kodak Instamatic 100 (1963)
The marvel of this $15.95 camera was its easy loading system. Kodak wanted to eliminate amateur errors and make photography foolproof.
24. MITS Altair 8800 (1975)
It sported blinking lights and dipswitches, and you assembled it yourself from a $397 kit sold by an Albuquerque mail-order company that had formerly been in the model rocket business. The Altair was, in other words, a gadget, but it was also the first popular home computer.
25. Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100 (1983)
In the early 1980s, when people talked about "portable computers" they meant luggable monstrosities like the 24-pound Osborne I. Then Radio Shack introduced the Model 100, the first popular notebook.
26. Nintendo Game Boy (1989)
In the old days, kids couldn't wait till they were old enough to get their first two-wheeler. Now they yearn for their first Game Boy. The original handheld, as shown at CyberiaPC.com, featured a black-and-green LCD and a slot for matchbook-size game cartridges.
27. Commodore 64 (1982)
The best selling computer of all time still appears to be the Estimates of this PC's sales range from 15 million to 22 million units.
28. Apple Newton MessagePad (1994)
The Newton PDA had the dubious distinction of being, thanks to its less-than-spectacular handwriting recognition.
29. Sony Betamax (1975)
Few gadgets have had a bigger impact than the first stand-alone video cassette recorder.
30. Sanyo SCP-5300 (2002)
Sanyo was the first to bring a camera phone stateside, although it wasn't the first to introduce such a device to the world--that credit goes to Sharp, which released the J-SH04 in Japan in 2000.
31. iRobot Roomba Intelligent Floorvac (2002)
A robot that does housework? Sign me up! With more than 2 million users, the Roomba is considered by many to be the first commercially successful domestic robot.
32. Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer (1999)
The first mainstream optical mouse earned its place on our list by eliminating one of computer technology's most pervasive annoyances: the accumulation of gunk inside a mechanical mouse.
33. Franklin Rolodex Electronics REX PC Companion (1997)
The REX redefined the notion of portable. This credit-card-size device was powered by two watch batteries, measured just a quarter of an inch thick, and was designed to fit into a notebook's PC Card slot.
34. Lego Mindstorms Robotics Invention System 1.0 (1998)
A do-it-yourself robotics system for the masses, Lego Mindstorms made building machines more fun than should be allowed. An interactive community helped promote different designs and creativity, so you were never at a loss as to what to do with all of those Lego pieces and parts.
35. Motorola DynaTAC 8000X (1983)
This early "portable" phone measured more than a foot long, weighed close to 2 pounds, and cost a whopping $3995.
36. Iomega Zip Drive (1995)
This little blue external storage drive, roughly the size of a paperback book, was an instant sensation, giving average computer users their first taste of easy backup and relatively rugged 100MB storage media.
37. Magnavox Magnavision Model 8000 DiscoVision Videodisc Player (1978)
Before the DVD, or even the CD-ROM, there was the laserdisc--the first commercial optical video disc. Philips's Magnavox Magnavision Model 8000 DiscoVision Videodisc Player was the first consumer player for MCA's pioneering DiscoVision-format laserdiscs.
38. Milton Bradley Simon (1978)
The Simon toy (not the BellSouth/IBM Simon Personal Communicator, began flashing its lights in 1978, at the height of Saturday Night Fever disco-mania. Appropriately, Milton Bradley premiered its memory game at one of the most famous discotheques of all time, Studio 54 in New York.
39. Play, Inc. Snappy Video Snapshot (1996)
Before PCs came with composite video inputs, before TV-tuner cards became de rigueur, before USB-connected video input devices became ubiquitous, there was the Snappy
40. Connectix QuickCam (1994)
How techie were you in the mid-1990s? Found at your desk--typically astride a huge 17-inch CRT monitor--this fist-size grey globe signified connectedness. You were part of the QuickCam generation, embracing Internet video in its infancy, sending short, choppy, and highly pixelated greyscale moving images over (most likely) the office or college LAN.
41. BellSouth/IBM Simon Personal Communicator (1993)
Not to be confused with the Milton Bradley game Simon, the Personal Communicator was the first mobile phone to include a built-in PDA. Jointly marketed by IBM and BellSouth, the $900 was a combination phone, pager, calculator, address book, calendar, fax machine, and wireless e-mail device--all wrapped up in a 20-ounce package that looked and felt like a brick.
42. Motorola Handie Talkie HT-220 Slimline (1969)
The first portable two-way radios introduced during World War II weighed up to 35 pounds apiece, but the HT-220 weighed just 22 ounces--in part because it was the first portable radio to use integrated circuits instead of discrete transistors.
43. Polaroid Swinger (1965)
In the mid-1960s, no gift for teens and preteens was cooler than the $20 Polaroid Swinger instant camera.
44. Sony Aibo ERS-110 (1999)
Sony's $1500 robotic pet, it was cuter than your average mutt and a whole lot smarter. Advanced artificial intelligence allowed it to learn from its environment, as well as sit, stand, roll over, and act puppyish.
45. Sony Mavica MVC-FD5 (1997)
Yes, it wasn't the first digital camera, but it was the first that saved photos on a platform that every PC user knew and loved: the ubiquitous 3.5-inch floppy.
46. Learjet Stereo-8 (1965)
They're the butt of jokes these days, but 8-track tapes and decks changed car audio forever. The Stereo 8, which first appeared as an option on Fords, had minimal controls and was often mounted under the dashboard with ugly U-brackets, but aesthetics weren't the point.
47. Timex/Sinclair 1000 (1982)
Invented by British gadget king Clive Sinclair and marketed in the United States by Timex (which knew a thing or two about affordable gizmos), this everyman's computer sold for a rock-bottom $100.
48. Sharp Wizard OZ-7000 (1989)
It didn't quite fit into a shirt pocket, and its non-QWERTY keyboard wasn't the most intuitive of input devices. Newton MessagePad, the first Sharp Wizard helped popularize the concept of a small, lightweight electronic address book and calendar, thereby becoming the granddaddy of the modern personal digital assistant.
49. Jakks Pacific TV Games (2002)
For decades, the Atari 2600's black joystick has symbolized the raw spirit of early console video gaming. How fitting, then, that the joystick itself evolved into an entire videogame console in 2004, when a small toy company called Jakks Pacific launched the phenomenally successful TV Games line.
50. Poqet PC Model PQ-0164 (1990)
Years before the Pocket PC, there was the Poqet PC. About the size of a videotape, the Poqet was pricey ($2000), but it ran off-the-shelf applications and could go for weeks on two AA batteries. Highly praised during its brief life, the Poqet vanished from the market after its manufacturer was acquired by Fujitsu.
posted by simonsaint at
1/15/2006
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