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GREATEST OF ALL TIMEMAXIMUMPC DECEMBER 2007
72
MICROTEK MSF-300Z (1989)
Today, scanners are so cheap and
easy to produce they are practically given
away, but they were once expensive mon-
strosities that were nonetheless necessary
in the pre-digital-photo age.71
HITACHI 7K1000 (2007) One
3.5-inch drive. One terabyte of
storage. It took 13 years for the hard drive
industry to surmount its second “big” bar-
rier (see #18). Will we see petabyte drives
by 2020?70
LIQUID COOLING (2000) A bit
clunky, sure, but the thermal
benefi ts of liquid cooling are critical for
overclockers pushing their PCs to the
absolute limit.69
INTEL 440BX (1998) Intel’s
third-gen Pentium II and Pentium
III chipset represented the pinnacle of
motherboard technology for years: 440BX
boards regularly outperformed later mod-
els from Intel.68
DVD (1995) Do we enjoy being
able to cram 8.5 gigs on a disc?
Yes. But we LOVE
that our lives are free
of nasty VHS tapes.
Bonus: As a movie
technology, DVD
was released without
a serious standards
war surrounding
it—refreshing!67
LOTUS 1-2-3 (1983) You might
not have spent your formative com-
puting years futzing with spreadsheets, but
legions of suits certainly did, turning 1-2-
into the PC’s fi rst “killer app.”66
SOCKET 939 (2004) AMD’s
second-generation Athlon 64
socket offered a handy performance
boost thanks to its dual-channel 128-bit
memory interface. All at a reasonable
price, too.65
MICROSOFT WORD (1989)
WordPerfect is for sissies.
Microsoft Word may be bloated, but
there’s a reason it’s the industry standard:
It can do anything you want it to, as well
as thousands of things you need not
know about.64
3.5-INCH HARD DRIVE (1987)
Finally supplanting the old 5.25-
inch formfactor, the 3.5-inch hard drive
became an enduring standard that shows
few signs of slowing down.63
NVIDIA SLI (2004) The laws of
computing shouldn’t really let
you shove two graphics boards into a
PC and boost your performance, but
somehow they do. Nvidia’s unlikely tech-
nology (which various vendors had tried
to develop for years) has helped the
company decimate the competition in
high-end graphics.
AMD’s
second-generation Athlon 64
socket offered a handy performance
boost thanks to its dual-channel 128-bit
memory interface. All at a reasonable(1989)
there’s a reason it’s the industry standard:
It can do anything you want it to, as well