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 It's been an eventful year for digital technology and the Internet: big-time mergers and acquisitions (R.I.P. Netscape), the stunning turn-around of Apple, DOJ vs. MS, Starr's presidential porn report online, CDA II, the e-commerce boon, the portal craze, Windows 98 (the Emperor's New OS), the list goes on and on. In the realm of computer and consumer electronics hardware (where we Street Techies pass lots of our current), there were also significant changes, though evolutionary, not revolutionary. A few standards, such as the V.90 standard for 56.6 modems, were finally resolved, while others, such as recordable DVD (will it be DVD-RAM, DVD +RW, or DVD-RW?) remained in contention. There were encouraging signs of some companies offering improved "out-of-box" experiences, while others seemed just as clueless as ever. In thinking about the technologies that made a difference (for the better) -- the ones that represent the kind of advances and innovations that Street Tech wants to champion -- we decided to start an annual awards tradition. So... here goes... The envelope please:
<CUE DRUM ROLL> 10 LCD Flatpanel Displays Flatpanel displays are not really ready for the consumer market (who wants to pay over a thousand bucks for a monitor?), but they're quickly moving into consumer radar range. By year's end, there were some models available for as little as $800. With the cheaper models, screen quality is not maintained over different resolutions and across the entire screen surface, but this will likely change as more expensive models drop in price. It may be year-end '99 or later before you see a flatpanel on your desktop, but one is certainly destined to end up there.
Prime examples: Compaq TFT500 ($1,200) 9 LEGO Programmable Brick (RCX 1.0) OK, so it may be a stretch to count the new LEGO MindStorms product line, with it "programmable brick" microcomputer, as one of the top ten tech innovations of the year, but we're doing it anyway (hey, it's *our* website). Based on tech developed at MIT's Media Lab, the RCX 1.0 is the first affordable and easy-to-use embedded microcomputer for making your own mobile toys, robots and any other gizmos you can dream up. We're excited by the possibilities of the distributed development of software, hardware hacks and innovative uses of this tech thanks to the Internet. One guy already used two MindStorm sets to create a tele-operated robotic arm that moves as his arm and hand moves. Try doing that with any other toy building set! Prime example: LEGO MindStorms Robotics Invention System ($199) 8 Portable MP3 I have seen the future of music and it's in a little flash memory cigarette pack that fits in my shirt pocket. MP3 (or "MPEG3") (the compression algorithm that allows near-CD quality music to be downloaded over the Net at reasonable speeds), got a real boost by year's end, thanks to the introduction of portable players such as the MP-Man and Diamond's RIO PMP300. The Recording Industry Assoc. of America (RIAA) freaked (since lots of music is pirated via MP3) and tried to put the brakes on Diamond. So far, it hasn't held. The real party-pooper may turn out to be the Fraunhofer Institute, a German research group that owns the patent on the core MPEG3 algorithm. They want royalties on all MP3 encoder/decoders. The amount that they're asking could greatly raise the price on MP3 tech and chill this burgeoning market. Prime example: Diamond Multimedia RIO PMP300 ($199) 7 Cheapo digital cameras, scanners, printers and CD-R drives This was certainly an exciting year for anyone who'd long been lusting after peripheral devices they couldn't previously afford. Digital cameras dipped down as low as $150 by year's end. You can now get a very decent scanner, with passable OCR, for under $100 (some under $50!). Printers just keep getting better *and* cheaper. Mid-priced high-quality machines have reached a point where, coupled with a $400-500 mega-pixel camera, you've got a FotoMat on your desktop. CD-R machines that let you burn your own audio and CD-ROM discs also moved into consumer range, with prices as low as $300 for an internal drive.
Prime examples:
Agfa 307 digital camera ($150) 6 iMac When the iMac hit the market, I remember remarking to a friend that if Apple and it's iCEO (that's "interim CEO"), Steve Jobs could pull this off, it would be one of the most amazing business turn-arounds in history. Well, Apple is far from back to its glory days, but after perilously circling the drain to the point where even die-hard Mac loyalists where ponying up for Pentiums, the Mac is definitely back. The iMac was released to standing ovations and thunderous jeerleading. It looked like a cool object d'art, was a serious little first-timer machine at a working class price, came loaded with great software and had cutting-edge technology such as USB. But it also lacked a disk drive, serial or parallel port connections, AppleTalk support, and it had very little upgrade capability. Bollocks!, cried the Mac faithful. Luser toy!, cried the PC diehards. But in the end, Apple had the last word, as the marketplace spoke by swiping out its credit cards. For its Object Value, its controversial break with tradition, its market stir, its usefulness to newbies and low-intensity users, and yes, its balls, the iMac gets our vote for the Internet appliance of the year. Prime example: iMac ($999) 5 DVD Nineteen ninety-eight was also the year that DVD broke out. You know a new tech standard has popped into the mainstream when members of the Street Tech posse actually pay cold hard cash for gear (as opposed to the evaluation units we get loaned for review). Some of us now have DVD decks in our living rooms and DVD-ROM drives on our desktops. And how do we like our DVD devices? As Andrew Sasaki put it in his review of the Sony DVP-S7000 player: "[It] has pushed me past the point of no return. If I can help it, I will never go without a DVD player again. I've become used to razor-sharp freeze frames, great picture quality and fantastic sound." Look for prices to cleave in half during 1999 and for the emergence of DVD-RAM... and DVD +RW... and DVD-RW... In other words, you may want to wait another year 'til a recordable DVD standard shakes out.
Prime example: Sony DVP-S7000 DVD Player ($600) 4 USB Even though the USB (Universal Serial Bus) peripheral bus standard fell somewhat in the Emperor's New Tech category, it's still a step in the right direction beyond older serial and parallel bus technologies. Its significant features: A) transfers data at up to 12 Megabits/second, B) can be daisy chained (with up to 127 devices on a single port), C) can use power from the computer's power supply (so that peripherals do not need their own AC power), D) allows hot-plugging peripherals (plugging and unplugging while the computer's on). Drawbacks: A) USB is shared bandwidth so too many bandwidth-hogging devices on the same USB connection can slow everything down, B) As more peripherals get added, "hubs" are needed to add more USB ports and to boost AC power, C) USB sound devices obviate the need for a sound card (and many other special cards), but without a sound card, you can't play audio CDs on your PC, D) You need to be using Win98 to use USB without incident. You can use builds of Win95 (with downloaded USB drivers), but many users (especially the less tech savvy) reported problems. E) USB manufacturers had a hard time getting their products to market and keeping the store shelves stocked, but things seemed to be on track by Christmas time.
Prime example: Compaq TFT500 w/USB hub ($1,200) 3 Gigabit Ethernet The latest, greatest version of Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet can pump data through a local area network at 1 billion bits per second (a.k.a. one gigabit). It can coexist peacefully with 10- and 100BASE-T Ethernet, allowing these slower Ethernet components to feed into a Gigabit Ethernet backbone. Think of it as regular Ethernet on steroids. Unfortunately, it's expensive, like 100BASE-T was compared to "regular" Ethernet a few years back. While designed to be carried over fiber optic lines, Gigabit Ethernet can also travel over older Category 5 copper cabling for short distances. This, and its ability to work with existing Ethernetworks, makes it very attractive for upgrading LAN infrastructures. Information: Gigabit Ethernet Alliance 2 AMD K6-2 with 3DNow! Gopod bless AMD. They took on the monolith of Intel and have not only prevailed, but they've got Intel on the defensive. While Intel was all set to abandon the old Socket 7 in favor of the Slot 1 motherboard (used for the Pentium II cartridge), AMD breathed new life into the old board. Without the need for new motherboard architecture, and with a chip equipped with extensions to enhance floating point operations in 3D games, the K6-2 helped create a bull market for under-$1500 machines. Just as '98 was the year that people began to trust in online transactions, it was also the year computer buyers became comfortable with non-Intel CPUs, namely AMD products. And just wait 'til next year when AMD rolls out its K6-3 with 256K on-die L2 cache running at full processor speed and the K7 processor at 500(plus)MHz with a 200MHz system bus! Prime example: TigerDirect K6-2 333MHz system with 128MB SDRAM, 10.2GB hard drive, 8MB AGP graphics card, 15" monitor w/printer and scanner ($1350) 1 Linux/Open Source Linux and open source are software and not hardware, so it may strike some as odd that we've made it *the* Top Tech of the year (since Street Tech almost exclusively covers hardware). We just couldn't help ourselves. After decades of existing mainly among a small priesthood of deep geek developers, Linux headed for the mainstream in 1998. Hell, it even had Microsoft breaking a little sweat. The Open Source philosophy represents many of the things that attracted us to computers and the Internet in the first place: freely distributed software and software tools that can be customized, extended and re-distributed throughout the Net by highly-motivated and talented users. It's the same kind of innovation by dedicated super-brights that made USENET, the Internet and the World Wide Web possible. But it's not this early hacker ethos that's made Linux break in '98, it's that it's damn good software: clean, robust and stable. Netscape responded to the success of Linux open source and open source guru Eric Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar paper by releasing the source code to its Communicator browser. Software giants, including Sun, Novell, Oracle, IBM and others, announced Linux support in '98. Novell's even thinking about opening up portions of its NDS (Novell Directory Services) code. We at Street Tech can't wait to see what '99 holds for Linux in particular and the open source movement in general.
Information: OpenSource.Org - Gareth Branwyn [12/31/98] Thanks to the yakker regulars in Shop Talk who helped me brainstorm this article. A special tip o' the propeller beanie to Andrew Sasaki. If you have comments, other tech you would have voted for or cheap shots to fire, come join the conversation in the Reviews Discussion Conference in Shop Talk.
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