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Everybody loves lists psychologists tell us... if only to argue with them. PC World has released a list of what it calls The 50 Best Tech Products of All Time and I want to enter my dissent. This is left coast/SV navel gazing of the worse kind.

First, although the headline of the PC World press release says best "of all time," the first sentence indicates that the editors have only gone back and reviewed the mere few years of what they call the PC era (it is PC World after all). Since there was nothing unique about the PC era as opposed to all of the information technology that came before it other than the invevitable and ongoing downsizing of footprint, it is not surprising that I can quickly identify products that predate the PC era: Wordperfect, Compuserve, Tetris (I think I remember it floating around on mini networks), and Red Hat Linux. Smarter guys than I can probably trace the laser printer, the Hayes Modem, and a few other entires back to their proper pre-PC-era roots.

I think the editors mix up the PC with workstations where convenient. The software technology fork between the mini and the workstation, Multics descendants and Unix descendants, hierarchical timesharing and peer to peer networking, support for dumb and smart clients, and so forth is meaningful. The ability to squeeze circuits on to smaller and smaller bits of silicon is just physics.

Which is why I debate Red Hat Linux's placement on a list of great PC era inventions. Linux is Unix. Granted it was written to run on the 386 but that is not the same as saying it part of the PC era. Unix was the workstation operating system developed in the late 60's and throughout the 70s as the un-Multics. Linux is just the natural descendant of that process. In particular, Red Hat Linux is marketed as a server operating system (and was from the beginning I believe), rather than as personal operating software such as DOS or CP/M.

Agree or disagree? Great, let me know via the comments button below.

Posted by dennisb in OSS Culture |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us

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