As regular readers know, I'm a sucker for "The Best of..." tech lists, so this latest offering by PC World on Christmas Eve is honey to a tech bee. Titled "The 50 Greatest Gadgets of the past 50 years" (via memeorandum), it's much more ambitious than other such lists I've posted about before. As PC World explains:
"The rules? The devices had to be relatively small (no cars or big-screen TVs, for example), and we considered only those items whose digital descendants are covered in PC World (cameras, yes; blenders, no).
We rated each gadget on its usefulness, design, degree of innovation, and influence on subsequent gadgets, as well as the ineffable quality we called the "cool factor.""
Not to spoil it for anybody, but the number one and number two are the Walkman and iPod respectively, which is poetic justice.
They don't have some of the products you might expect, like the ones I posted about here back in September, including the HP 12-C calculator. I guess that one's a geeky, niche, acquired taste.
I've had the pleasure of having owned almost every one of the gadgets after the 1970s, so there aren't a ton of surprises here, just a lot of good memories.
It was nice to see number 9, the first practical USB drive by DiskonKey. Again, this is an area that I'm fairly excited about going forward, having posted on it fairly frequently (see here, here and here if interested).
What am I surprised NOT to see here?
I guess anything from the computer game software industry (besides the hardware that did make the list) would have been nice to see. Whether Pong, or personal favorite Infocom's Zork games, or Pac Man , or Civilization, or anything since. They seem to be focused more on the hardware than the software, which is fine.
On the hardware side, it would have been nice to have seen one of the first consumer GPS devices make the list. They've been the beginning of something that is yet to be very, very big. They're probably not as mainstream as PC World would like to see for the list. But then neither was the Sony Aibo, it's series of robotic canines, which came in at number 44.
You can access the COMPLETE list here, or see the list by decade here.
It's a great trip down memory lane and learn/re-learn a little bit of the history of technology .
apparently the h-p12c is not so much tech gadget as a religious icon.
Posted by: Ward | Sunday, December 25, 2005 at 08:03 AM