25 More Top Technologies - Clone PCs

25 More Top Technologies

eWEEK Labs Top 25 Most Influential Technologies of the Last 25Years--The entries we wish we could have included in our original list When eWEEK Labs dubbed 25 products as the most influential of the Although it may be hard to remember today, this Internet search site set the bar for Google and others to clear.

25 More Top Technologies - Amazon.com

Far more than just a bookstore, its become a pathfinder for electronic storefronts and Web service ecosystems.

25 More Top Technologies - Centronics Parallel Port

Hacked by hardware hobbyists into an interface for controlling anything.

25 More Top Technologies - Clone PCs

If we knew which brand was first, it wouldnt be the first clone. En masse, they made IBM a mere enabler.

25 More Top Technologies - CP/M and QDOS

An intentional exception to our 25-year limit, these were the spiritual and the actual parents (respectively) of what became MS-DOS.

25 More Top Technologies - Data General/One PC

Despite a screen that required a flashlight to read and a battery life measured in minutes, it defined the look of the modern laptop.

25 More Top Technologies - Domain Name System

It made the global network speak plain English. Sorry about that, world.

25 More Top Technologies - eBay

Redefining market efficiency, its influence may be second only to that of e-mail.

25 More Top Technologies - Ethernet (IEEE 802.3)

Invented, like so many things, at Xerox, it was popularized by 3Com as DIX (Digital/Intel/Xerox) and IEEEd in 1983.

25 More Top Technologies - Hayes SmartModem

Its AT command set for in-band control made digital telecommunication accessible to mere mortals.

25 More Top Technologies - Java

Smalltalk did it earlier, but Java was far more influential in making mainstream programmers think object-ively.

25 More Top Technologies - Laser print engine (Hewlett-Packard LaserJet, Apple LaserWriter)

Thank goodness, Canon-powered printers displaced the daisy wheel for office-grade hard copy.

25 More Top Technologies - LCD screens

Active-matrix color caught our eye on Apples PowerBook 540C in 1994 and went on to shrink the footprint of the desktop PC.

25 More Top Technologies - Motorola StarTac

Breaking the mold of the brick-sized cellular phone, it set todays expectations for pocket-sized personal communicators.

25 More Top Technologies - Microsoft GW-BASIC

Whether or not it damages a beginning programmers brain, without it there would have been no Microsoft as we know it.

25 More Top Technologies - Oracle relational database

The first DBMS to handle, with impressive superiority, massive record sets in pioneering PC Week Shoot-Outs.

25 More Top Technologies - PowerPoint

Love or hate the way its used, regret or ignore the passing of superior products, you cant escape the PPT deck .

25 More Top Technologies - Sendmail

Its influence cant be disputed, even if its not universally cheered (and its loopholes opened the door to the Morris Internet worm).

25 More Top Technologies - TCP/IP

Defying circuit-switched conventions, this combo wrapped the future of communications in a packet.

25 More Top Technologies - Turbo Pascal (Borland International)

Transformed expectations of programming tools price and productivity.

25 More Top Technologies - Unix

Its what GNU vehemently claimed not to be, with Linux loudly finishing that job.

25 More Top Technologies - USB

Made the PC-as-controller paradigm accessible to anyone with an opposable thumb.

25 More Top Technologies - VisiCalc

Another exception to our 25-year rule: Before IBM made PC hardware professional, VisiCalc made businesspeople want a PC.

25 More Top Technologies - WordStar

The mass-market archetype of a user interface so horrible, people learned it and never forgot it.

25 More Top Technologies - XML

Included by implication on our first Top 25 list, XML needs its own entry here to reflect its transformation of information.