Top 100 list of IT products of the century

Adapted from an article in Computerworld

After Computerworld's blue ribbon panel of industry experts and participants in an online poll voted for the most important IT products of the century, we grouped related products and technologies into 10 categories. Here they are at a glance:

Big Iron

• ENIAC (1946)
• Univac I (1951)
• IBM System 360 (1964)
• Hollerith paper punch card (1887)
• Manchester University Mark 1 (1948)
• EDVAC (1947)
• IBM 1401 (1959)
• IBM Series 1 (1976)
• Digital Equipment PDP machines (1960)
• Digital VAX (1977)
• Wang word processing system (1971)
• Magnetic storage (1949)
• IBM Ramac (1957)
• Winchester hard disk (1973)
• Turing machine (1936)

On the Desktop

• IBM Personal Computer (1981)
• MITS Altair (1975)
• Apple II (1977)
• Xerox Alto (1972)
• Xerox Star (1981)
• Apple Lisa (1983)
• Apple Macintosh (1984)
• Sun workstation (1982)
• PC clones
• Portable PCs
• 3Com Palm (1996)
• Atari 2600 game machine (1977)
• Commodore 64 (1982)

Out of the Lab

• Transistor (1947)
• Vacuum tube
• Integrated circuit
• Intel 4004 (1971)
• Intel 8080 (1974)
• RISC processors (1974)
• Gallium arsenide chips
• Lasers
• Nanotechnology

The New Gutenberg

• Xerox 914 copier (1959)
• Fax machine
• Electric typewriter
• IBM Selectric
• Teletype teletypewriter (1920)
• Xerox 9700 laser printer (1978)
• Flat-panel display

Information Everywhere

• World Wide Web (1990)
• HTML
• Netscape Navigator
• Arpanet network (1968)
• TCP/IP protocol (1975)
• Commercial Internet (1991)

On the Air

• Broadcasting (1920)
• Television (1937)
• Transistor radio (1952)
• Wireless data networks
• Spread-spectrum technology
• Cellular phones

Before the Internet

• Packet switching (1961)
• BBN IMPS packet switch (1968)
• Ethernet (1973)
• 3Com EtherLink (1982)
• Cisco Systems router (1986)
• Asynchronous Transfer Mode networking

No More "Number Please"

• Strowger telephone switch (1889)
• Dial telephone (1896)
• Touch-Tone phone (1941)
• Four-prong telephone jack
• Answering machine/voicemail
• Modems
• Digital telephone network

Beyond Bits and Bytes

• Credit card (1946)
• Automobile
• Elevator
• Airplane
• Federal Express overnight delivery
• Gene splicing
• Human genome project
• Office cubicle (1964)

Software

• Electronic mail (including IBM Profs)
• Word processing software (including Wordstar, WordPerfect, Microsoft Word and Multimate)
• Electronic spreadsheet (including Visicalc, Lotus 1-2-3, Microsoft Excel)
• Relational database management (including Oracle and dBase II)
• Data compression
• Artificial intelligence
• Digital imaging
• Virtual reality
• Multics operating system
• Microsoft Windows (including Windows 3.1, Windows NT, Windows 95 and Windows 98)
• Novell NetWare
• Unix
• Linux
• MS-DOS
• CP/M
• Mac OS
• Digital VMS
• IBM CICS
• Cobol
• C
• C++
• Java
• Visual Basic

Last Updated on January 13, 2003

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