News The 50 Greatest Gadgets of the Past 50 Years

[Prodigy]

The 50 Greatest Gadgets of the Past 50 Years

We're living in the golden age of the gadget. Don't believe it? Check your pockets. Odds are you're carrying a portable music player, an electronic organizer, a keychain-size storage device, a digital camera, or a cell phone that combines some or all of these functions. And you'd probably be hard-pressed to live without them. So here are the top 50 gadgets of the last 50 years.

[Prodigy]

Table of Contents

_________________________________________

1. Sony Walkman TPS-L2 (1979)
2. Apple iPod (2001)
3. (Tie) ReplayTV RTV2001 and TiVo HDR110 (1999)
4. PalmPilot 1000 (1996)
5. Sony CDP-101 (1982)
6. Motorola StarTAC (1996)
7. Atari Video Computer System (1977)
8. Polaroid SX-70 Land Camera (1972)
9. M-Systems DiskOnKey (2000)
10. Regency TR-1 (1954)
11. Sony PlayStation 2 (2000)
12. Motorola Razr V3 (2004)
13. Motorola PageWriter (1996)
14. BlackBerry 850 Wireless Handheld (1998)
15. Phonemate Model 400 (1971)
16. Texas Instruments Speak & Spell (1978)
17. Texas Instruments SR-10 (1973)
18. Diamond Multimedia Rio PMP300 (1998)
19. Sony Handycam DCR-VX1000 (1995)
20. Handspring Treo 600 (2003)
21. Zenith Space Command (1956)
22. Hamilton Pulsar (1972)
23. Kodak Instamatic 100 (1963)
24. MITS Altair 8800 (1975)
25. Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100 (1983)
26. Nintendo Game Boy (1989)
27. Commodore 64 (1982)
28. Apple Newton MessagePad (1994)
29. Sony Betamax (1975)
30. Sanyo SCP-5300 (2002)
31. iRobot Roomba Intelligent Floorvac (2002)
32. Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer (1999)
33. Franklin Rolodex Electronics REX PC Companion (1997)
34. Lego Mindstorms Robotics Invention System 1.0 (1998)
35. Motorola DynaTAC 8000X (1983)
36. Iomega Zip Drive (1995)
37. Magnavox Magnavision Model 8000 DiscoVision Videodisc Player (1978)
38. Milton Bradley Simon (1978)
39. Play, Inc. Snappy Video Snapshot (1996)
40. Connectix QuickCam (1994)
41. BellSouth/IBM Simon Personal Communicator (1993)
42. Motorola Handie Talkie HT-220 Slimline (1969)
43. Polaroid Swinger (1965)
44. Sony Aibo ERS-110 (1999)
45. Sony Mavica MVC-FD5 (1997)
46. Learjet Stereo-8 (1965)
47. Timex/Sinclair 1000 (1982)
48. Sharp Wizard OZ-7000 (1989)
49. Jakks Pacific TV Games (2002)
50. Poqet PC Model PQ-0164 (1990)

[Prodigy]

1. Sony Walkman TPS-L2 (1979)

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."

The first Walkman (also branded as the Stowaway, the Soundabout, and the Freestyle before the current name stuck) featured a cassette player and the world's first lightweight headphones. Apparently fearful that consumers would consider the Walkman too antisocial, Sony built the first units with two headphone jacks so you could share music with a friend. The company later dropped this feature. Now, more than 25 years and some 330 million units later, nobody wonders why you're walking down the street with headphones on.

Learn more in Sony's history of the Walkman

[Prodigy]

2. Apple iPod (2001)

If the Walkman is the aging king of portable media players, Apple's iPod is prince regent. It rules the realm of digital music like no other device: According to the NPD Group, more than eight out of ten portable players sold at retail by mid-2005 were iPods. Yet when the $399 iPod first appeared in October 2001, it was nothing special. It featured a 5GB hard drive and a mechanical scroll wheel, but worked only with Macs.

A second model released the following July offered a 20GB hard drive, a pressure-sensitive touch wheel, and a Windows-compatible version. But the third-generation player, which appeared in April 2003, proved the charm: A 40GB drive, built-in compatibility with Windows and Mac, support for USB connections, and a host of other small improvements made it wildly popular, despite its relatively high price and poor battery life. Now the fifth-generation iPod threatens to do the same thing for a new breed of portable video players. The iPod is dead; long live the iPod.

 

Read more in Dennis Lloyd's Brief History of the iPod.

[Prodigy]

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. For the first time, users flummoxed by their VCRs (#29) could record an entire season of shows with a few clicks of the remote. And yes, it may be cheating to count these two products as one, but they appeared at virtually the same time, and each brought different yet important strengths to the DVR table.

 

TiVo undoubtedly won the brand-recognition competition: When Janet Jackson suffered her infamous "wardrobe malfunction" at the 2004 Super Bowl, thousands of viewers "TiVo'd it"--over and over and over. ReplayTV, on the other hand, was more aggressive with commercial-skipping and networking features. In any event, the success of these products may be their undoing, as digital video recorders become a standard feature of cable and satellite set-top boxes. Eric W. Lund has more than you'd probably want to know about earlier models of both.

[Prodigy]

 

4. PalmPilot 1000 (1996)

The PalmPilot 1000 was everything the Apple Newton MessagePad (#28) wanted to be: a "personal data assistant" small enough to fit in your shirt pocket, with enough RAM (128KB) to hold a then-impressive 500 names and addresses. The handwriting recognition actually worked (once you mastered the arcane Graffiti software), and best of all, you could sync your data with a PC or Mac desktop application. The brilliance of the Palm concept was its recognition that people wanted a supplement to their computers, not a substitute. Subsequent models grew smaller and more powerful, but were basically refinements to the original PalmPilot's elegant simplicity.

[Prodigy]

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. The boxy CDP-101 wasn't especially sleek, and at $900 it was priced for audiophiles, but it ushered in the age of digital sound--no more hisses, scratches, pops, or skips. Now, with SuperAudio CD and DVD-Audio offering vastly superior sound, and MP3 downloads dominating music sales, CD players may eventually join turntables and 8-track machines (#46) as relics of our audio past. But they will sure have sounded good while they lasted.

 

For more, read a contemporary review of the CDP-101.

[Prodigy]

 

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--most notably the Motorola Razr (#12). No phone of its era was more portable than the StarTAC: You could clip the 3.1-ounce unit to your belt and go anywhere, which made carrying a cell phone a lot more appealing. The StarTAC let you plug in a second battery to extend your talk time, and was the first phone to sport the vibrate option used in Motorola pagers (#13). Another plus: As the first clamshell-style phone, it looked a little like the communicators from Star Trek. Beam us up, Scotty.

 

[Prodigy]

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. The Atari 2600 was the first successful console to use game cartridges, which allowed consumers to play multiple games on the same system and created a huge market for crude-looking but addictive titles such as Space Invaders and Pac Man. The Atari's games may not have looked much like Grand Theft Auto, but its influence can be felt in today's Xboxes, PlayStations, and GameCubes. AtariAge has more details. Pong, anyone?

[Prodigy]

 

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. The SX-70 combined simplicity with immediacy, making it the direct forebear of today's low-end digital cameras. More than 30 years later, its design still turns heads, and some fans still use it.