100
GREATEST OF ALL TIMEMAXIMUMPC DECEMBER 2007
25
HALF-LIFE (1998) The best-
selling PC shooter of all time,
and for good reason. Half-Life combines
groundbreaking graphics with an intrigu-
ing storyline, unique among FPSes and
spawned a new generation of immersive
fi rst-person games.24
IBM CGA CARD (1981) The
popular Hercules Graphics Card
gave you every color you could want,
as long as it was green. IBM’s CGA
standard upgraded you to 16 glorious
colors—profoundly changing our Castle
Wolfenstein experience.23
CABLE MODEM (1996)
Consumers initially fretted that
cable broadband’s “shared” connection
would cause prime-time traffi c jams, but
that never really happened. Cable’s supe-
rior throughput and better stability have
made it the broadband connection of
choice for the digerati, at least for now.22
DDR SDRAM (2000) For a
while in 2000, it looked like we
might be forced to shell out for pricey
RDRAM to prevent memory bottlenecks
in our PCs. DDR SDRAM saved the day
by doubling memory bandwidth at a rea-
sonable price.21
IBM PC KEYBOARD (1981)
The IBM 5150 (see #8) isn’t
notable for just its innards, it also had
one of the most reliable and usable key-
boards ever—a loud, mechanical beast
that was rated for over 100 million key-
strokes... per key.20
CREATIVE LABS SOUND
BLASTER 1.0 (1989) With no
real onboard audio system in most PC
clones, gamers needed an add-in card
to make sweet, sweet sound come from
their machines. Creative’s Sound Blaster
was an instant hit.19
LITHIUM-ION CELLS (1991)
Finally replacing low-power,
environmentally hazardous nickel-based
battery packs, lithium-ion made portable
computing a possibility for more than an
hour at a time, with the added excite-
ment of an occasional “exploder.”18
WESTERN DIGITAL CAVIAR 1GB
(1994) While IBM invented the
fi rst true gigabyte hard drive years earlier,
it weighed 550 pounds and cost $40,000.
WD broke the 1GB barrier for home users
in June 1994.17
FAST ETHERNET (1995)
Bumping old twisted-pair Ethernet
from 10Mb/s to 100Mb/s, Fast Ethernet
became the industry standard for wired
networking, fi nally killing off competitors
like Token Ring and 10Base2.16
NVIDIA GEFORCE 2 (2000)
Though architecturally a mess,
the GeForce 2 was the fi rst pixel-shading
GPU, bringing 3D graphics into the main-
stream with its advanced lighting tech-
niques and fi ltering features.