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 /images/slide/188350_2.jpg Although it may be hard to remember today, this Internet search site set the bar for Google and others to clear.

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

Hacked by hardware hobbyists into an interface for controlling anything.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transformed expectations of programming tools price and productivity.

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

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

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

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

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