100
GREATEST OF ALL TIME4
NCSA MOSAIC (1993) If one application had a
more profound impact on modern-day computing than any other, it is
Mosaic, the fi rst web browser, which was developed by the National Center
for Supercomputing Applications. Before Mosaic, the closest you could
get to a graphical Internet was the occasional spot of ASCII art during your
Telnet session. In conjunction with the HTTP protocol, the interconnected,
fully graphical
World Wide Web
was born. Bits of
Mosaic code are
still found in most
major browsers.5
WINDOWS XP (2001) Is XP the best Windows of all time?
Windows 95 (#53) and 98 (#41) were both infl uential, even groundbreaking,
but the stability and speed of XP have already made it endure far longer than either
of those OSes. XP’s additional features, like Remote Desktop, device driver roll-
back, ClearType, and better multi-user support make it a must-have upgrade, but
the general reaction to XP’s successor, Windows Vista, really pushes XP into clas-
sic territory. The widespread rejection of Microsoft’s latest bloated OS will give XP
even more life than it might otherwise have had.3
INTEL PENTIUM II
(1997) With the Pentium II, Intel tried
something different, packing the CPU along
with a daughterboard and a heatsink inside a
slot-based package instead of an exposed-pin
socket. The trick let Intel separate the L2 cache
from the CPU, which increased cache size, while
keeping prices down. The Pentium II signifi cant-
ly outperformed earlier CPUs, particularly when
running then-hot “multimedia” functions. The
chip cemented Intel’s lead in the CPU market
until the rise of the Athlon 64 (see #27).2
3 DFX VOODOO 1
(1996) The PC graphics market used to
be even messier than it is today. When it got
its start in earnest in 1996, with 3dfx’s Voodoo
1 chipset, getting 3D graphics on your PC
meant having an add-in card in addition to your
standard VGA board and daisy-chaining them
together. But gamers will put up with a lot, and
the Voodoo 1 became an instant hit, power-
ing must-have titles like Quake (see #6), which
turned gaming from the pseudo-3D Doom
era into a new realm of complexity and real-
ism. Without the Voodoo 1, you’d
probably still be playing
Castlevania.1
USB (1996) No connector has proven more useful and reli-
able than USB, the fi rst step away from the dog-slow legacy of serial and
parallel ports. USB offered some unheard-of features for its time: the ability
to connect peripherals without turning off the PC fi rst (we call it hotswapping now),
daisy-chain up to 127 devices together, and draw power without a separate AC
connection. Though USB later upgraded throughput to 480Mb/s, it shrewdly kept
the same formfactor, which effectively relegated competitor FireWire exclusively to
DV apps and Macintoshes.ism. Without the Voodoo 1, you’d
probably still be playing
Castlevania.42 MAXIMUMPC DECEMBER 2007