- Monday, 16 November 2009
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Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils - Hector Berlioz
The INQUIRER Top 10 Insanely Great Products
IT'S THE MOMENT that you say “oh god, yes”. The jaw literally drops and there’s a hiss of exhalation because it’s a such a sweet piece of kit, or a little feature that goes beyond the norm.
You can’t compare to the other stuff around because it just creates a new level. It’s like Shakespeare compared to Jonson, Dylan compared to Billy Joel, Opus One wine to Coke.
It’s a thing of beauty and a joy forever. To quote Steve Jobs, it’s insanely great.
Like all things of beauty, it’s in the eye of the beholder so this is inevitably a personal choice but we’re still calling it The INQUIRER Top 10 Insanely Great Products…
10. Word for Windows 2.0. It’s only a little thing but envelope printing – how cool is that when you click on the little icon? The Comdex press conference marked the only time I can remember journalists applauding features. Bill Gates dropped by and looked like he was seeing his first baby being born. It got a ton of installations even in beta and a generation of non-Mac users began dragging and dropping text. Suddenly, WordPerfect was toast - and Microsoft was flying.
9. Intel 386SX. After years of WordStar for DOS and struggling with Windows 3.0 on a 286, the world looked very different when viewed from a spanking new AST 4MB 386SX running at a racy 25MHz, even if it did need a RAM upgrade from 1MB to 4MB. 14-inch CRT, floppy drive, 30MB hard drive – what a beast. This was the chip that took PC users from CUI to GUI.
8. Logitech Trackman. Huge and imposing, this was the input device that said “power user not satisfied with a Microsoft mouse or dodgy cheapo alternative". Just one of many gorgeous Logi products.
7. IBM Thinkpad 750. OK so it cost the same as a family car but in its early 1990s day, this was a hugely desirable notebook and well worth selling the kidney for. Great screen, internal CD-ROM drive, eraserhead pointing device, and mean and moody as Johnny Cash in that classic black case.
6. Dell Latitude X1. Sleek, silver featherweight, fast, neat little front-loading SD Card reader. Yet it’s a Dell so it’s not too pricey. This was a machine to marry rather than lust over but sometimes you just know when it’s right.
5. Nokia banana phone. I no longer need the old brick. Gavin in accounts can I have it? Did I tell you I've been given the new BANANA PHONE?
4. Borland Sidekick. Who needs a multitasking OS when you have pop-up TSR DOS utilities as fast and smart as this? Windows PIMs were never as sleek and efficient.
3. Xircom pocket LAN adaptors. Awesome. So tiny and cute and timed to perfection, just as everyone was getting a LAN.
2. RIM Blackberry. Push email! Who would have thunk it? Killer app, unusual styling. And when you could actually use if for voice, twice as useful. Just one catch: you now work 24-hour days.
1. Palm Pilot. What the h&&& is that? Back when it was launched, this was like finding out that you could buy a working phaser. Hell, it even looked like a phaser. Early adopters wore it in their shirt pockets, the way kids pack soft-carton cigarettes to show off their street cred. Finally, pen input that works. Sorry Psion, your day is done. µ
See Also
The
INQUIRER Guide to Spin Doctors
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... of Yesteryear! 

How about writing the same kind of story for THIS decade?

;-)
Really?
i agree with this list. especially since i own one of them the latitude x1!
ceedee, don't you get it, there aint anything good this decade.
I remember the only time I ever brought anything from PCWorld, and that was the palm pilot at full retail too. If you had lived a technological life over the last 20 years, you would realise this is a good list.
The Voodoo 2 or iPod (Gen 1) could also probably be thrown in there.
would be unreasonably hard. From the top of my head, let's see, the ipod? No, it didn't really do anything any other mp3 player didn't already do, unless beveled edges is a feature... The... wait, I got something, The...The

Oh yeah, the Nintendo DS.

-pretty short list....
You mention a banana and a blackberry, but some other fruit seems to be missing from your list.
1) The Sinclair Spectrum
2) The BBC Micro
3) Elite, for the above.
4) The ARM processor
5) Fidonet
6) GNU/Linux - Debian and Ubuntu anyway.
7) The AMD Athlon - shame it didn't fit the BX6
8) 3DFX Voodoo Graphics.
9) Quake series.
10) Opteron

Wowl.. and I didn't mention PDP-11s, Crays, or Cambridge workstations once, or the Calrec Soundfiield Microphone.

..Oops.
Here are some things that would make me dribble if they were released in the next 10 years:

* real-time video processing software (and the hardware to go with it)

* AI that actually works!

* couriers that work past 5:00 pm and at weekends

* Neural interface (read my mind!)

* Hi-def video glasses to go with the neural interface

* Real-time language translation: speech in + out

* batteries that will run my laptop for a couple of days non-stop

* broadcast usenet 

* 1TB removable storage (lose all your files on one CD-ROM!)

* a useful household robot (if it can't make coffee, well ....)
You've missed something every geek who's any geek would have on the TOP of his (or her) list!!!!

The Coffee Maker!

Without coffee, none of these great things would have come to fruition!

Or better yet, an espresso machine...
Word 2.0 and no MacWrite? No Mac at all? No PowerBook or ThinkPad (or, specifically, the butterfly keyboard design) but the X1? No Video Toaster? 

I think the iPod was evolutionary, and not a wow, but the Rio PMP or Nomad Jukebox would certainly fit the bill.

The Palm was the first PDA that made sense to me, and Graffiti gives it a definite edge as you say, but surely the Newton, or earlier PDAs, were the wow bunch. If you use your rubric for inclusion, then the stunning Palm V seems to be the best choice.

I can't fathom half of the choices for this list, especially over products that are indirectly (or, in the case of Word 2.0, DIRECTLY) referenced.
What about the AMD Opteron 240?
That was the CPU that brought all us in the 64bit computing area.
Without it we would still have 32bit capabilities.
It even forced Intel into adopting 64bit.
This chip probably had the biggest impact on computing since the 386sx surfaced.

What about the Internet itself? That changed a lot too....
Some of the products you list are rather poor compared to other stuff.
Don't you mean 386DX? The SX was only a 16-bit chip like the 286. The SX in the P/N was often thought to have been an abbreviation for sucks! The performance of the 386SX was quite a bit slower than the full fledged 386DX chip. Although Intel sold a ton of them due to their lower cost.