eWEEK Labs Picks the Top 25 Products of the Last 25 Years

eWEEK Labs Picks the Top 25 Products of the Last 25 Years

With a brand that said business machine and an open architecture that invited third-party innovation, the IBM PC transformed the IT industry.

eWEEK Labs Picks the Top 25 Products of the Last 25 Years – 2. Mosaic Web Browser

Influential out of all proportion to the number of users its had, the Mosaic browser launched the era of browsable content and the broad adoption of repurposeable markup language.

eWEEK Labs Picks the Top 25 Products of the Last 25 Years – 3. Apache

Archetype of open-source process and engine of the Web as we know it, Apache is both an ongoing project and an incubator for related innovation.

eWEEK Labs Picks the Top 25 Products of the Last 25 Years – 4. Intel i386 Processor

Defining a 32-bit standard and paving the way for desktop hardware virtualization in multitasking platforms, the i386 still casts its shadow (a mixed blessing) on PCs today.

eWEEK Labs Picks the Top 25 Products of the Last 25 Years – 5. XNS

Before there was Novell NetWare, Banyan VINES or 3Com 3+, there was the Xerox foundation that grandfathered innumerable pronouncements of Year of the LAN.

eWEEK Labs Picks the Top 25 Products of the Last 25 Years – 6. The Linux Kernel

Whether or not the Linux phenomenon should really be called GNU/Linux, the little kernel that could has catalyzed a trifold revolution of technology, process and market.

eWEEK Labs Picks the Top 25 Products of the Last 25 Years – 7. VMware x86 Virtualization

Building on Intels bare-bones foundation, VMware brought new levels of manageability to PC-based technology and redefined the enterprise data center.

eWEEK Labs Picks the Top 25 Products of the Last 25 Years – 8. Apple Macintosh

Streamlining the Xerox-developed WIMP user interface and supporting it with ingenious software and elegant hardware, the original Mac is still the essence of modern computing.

eWEEK Labs Picks the Top 25 Products of the Last 25 Years – 9. PGP

Putting strong encryption in the hands of everyman, PGP served notice to sovereign spooks that citizen crypto would forever after be an inconvenient truth.

eWEEK Labs Picks the Top 25 Products of the Last 25 Years – 10. Compaq Portable

Though its 34-pound weight broadened awareness of spinal disorders, the Compaq Portable created the modern road warrior.

eWEEK Labs Picks the Top 25 Products of the Last 25 Years – 11. Adobe PDF and Acrobat

With inspired innovation in platform-independent rendering of formatted content, Adobes PDF technologies and tools liberate users and business processes from the limits of paper.

eWEEK Labs Picks the Top 25 Products of the Last 25 Years – 12. Lotus 1-2-3

With user-interface innovation that gave rise to look-and-feel lawsuits, and with tight and fast code that imposed strict standards for IBM compatibility, Lotus 1-2-3 was often the compelling argument for buying a first PC.

eWEEK Labs Picks the Top 25 Products of the Last 25 Years – 13. Cisco IOS

Ciscos powerfully programmable platform kicked off a cascade of dramatic growth in network intelligence.

eWEEK Labs Picks the Top 25 Products of the Last 25 Years – 14. Ashton-Tate dBase II

With enough database rigor to be useful and enough programmability to build custom solutions quickly, dBase II led to displacement of many minicomputers by PCs.

eWEEK Labs Picks the Top 25 Products of the Last 25 Years – 15. Palm Pilot

With an almost Zen-like minimalism of both software and hardware complexity, the Palm Pilot was no more than users needed—and exactly what many wanted.

eWEEK Labs Picks the Top 25 Products of the Last 25 Years – 16. Linksys 802.11 Routers

Widely used, cleverly hacked, affordably acquired and deployed, Linksys Wi-Fi hardware energized the wireless-network tsunami.

eWEEK Labs Picks the Top 25 Products of the Last 25 Years – 17. Shiva LanRover

By no means the only product of its kind, Shivas LANRover is still a worthy exemplar of the VPN technology thats made public networks suitable for private transactions.

eWEEK Labs Picks the Top 25 Products of the Last 25 Years – 18. Phoenix BIOS

The basal ganglia of an IBM-compatible PC, Phoenixs BIOS sent in the clones.

eWEEK Labs Picks the Top 25 Products of the Last 25 Years – 19. Red Hat Linux

Fueling a business model with the energy of the Linux revolution, Red Hat served as an existence proof for open-source enterprise offerings.

eWEEK Labs Picks the Top 25 Products of the Last 25 Years – 20. Microsoft Visual Basic

Reinventing the developer experience of constructing interactive applications, Visual Basic paved the way for the crushing dominance of Windows.

eWEEK Labs Picks the Top 25 Products of the Last 25 Years – 21. Network General Sniffer

Dubbed the Kleenex of network analysis by members of eWEEK Labs, the Network General Sniffer defined its genre.

eWEEK Labs Picks the Top 25 Products of the Last 25 Years – 22. Lotus Notes

Perhaps still the leading demonstration of how to do collaborative groupware, Lotus Notes may gain new leverage as its creator takes up the technology reins at Microsoft.

eWEEK Labs Picks the Top 25 Products of the Last 25 Years – 23. Windows 95

Despite its 32-bit lipstick on the pig of 16-bit DOS, Windows 95 merged the world of the Web into the mainstream desktop computing environment.

eWEEK Labs Picks the Top 25 Products of the Last 25 Years – 24. Microsoft Office

Mashing up the formerly separate markets of word processors, spreadsheets and databases, Microsoft Office brought forth new synergies for users—and for malware writers.

eWEEK Labs Picks the Top 25 Products of the Last 25 Years – 25. Nessus

If the first generation of PCs was about empowerment, the second generation is at least as much about protection—and Nessus offers high-end defense for the midtier user.