February 19, 2005
The Top 100 Gadgets of All Time - by Mobile PC Magazine
What defines a "gadget" anyway?
* It has to have electronic and/or moving parts of some kind. Scissors count, but the knife does not.
* It has to be a self-contained apparatus that can be used on its own, not a subset of another device. The flashlight counts; the light bulb does not. The notebook counts, but the hard drive doesn't.
* It has to be smaller than the proverbial bread box. This is the most flexible of the categories, since gadgets have gotten inexorably smaller over time. But in general we included only items that were potentially mobile: The Dustbuster counts; the vacuum cleaner doesn't.
Hey nate, isn't that the MP3 player you showed me the other day (see number 8)?
Since this is filed under Nerdliness, I feel I may pick the following nits:
60. ABACUS, 190 A.D.
Nearly 1,800 years before the first electronic calculators, the Abacus let its user multiply, divide, add, subtract, and calculate square and cube roots ... in both decimal and hexadecimal.
This is suprising but true: the top two beads in an abacus let you count from 0 to 15 in each place. Try it out! [java]
59. SEXTANT, 1731
Yar, matey! Whar we be? Fetch me a sextant, get a fix on the North Star, and you'll know your latitude right quick. The sextant's mirrors and precision scales were the state of the art for accurate celestial navigation for more than two centuries. Avast, ye GPS-usin' gobs! Now how about some rum and a lime?
A sextant is typically used to sight the sun, not the north star.
#9 is right. Yar's Revenge kicks ass.
This list contains "yar" twice at positions 9 and 59.
sG is correct, I have a Rio 300 player that was won in a contest sponsored by my college paper and the band Man or Astroman? It was a hard word jumble that I knew I didn't do correctly when I turned it in, but they said it was "close enough." I took this to mean that few or no other people had entered, and when I actually won the drawing this suspicion was vindicated. By the way, the model number was PMP 300 which is now being used by some company for their Portable Movie Player line of video-walkmen. Of course, mine is the original PiMPin' player, still kickin' it with an extra 32MB Smartmedia card bought from eBay.
I have a working 77th-ranked Hasbro Lite-Brite with all the pegs, about 20 patterned peg sheets (flowers, cartoons, etc) and ~10 'blank' peg sheets that is available for adoption to a good home.
I have a 28th-ranked Kodak Brownie camera (just like the one in the photo) in decent shape that is available for adoption to a good home.
I have a Ven-Tel mod.103 300 buad acoustic coupler modem, similar to the 16th-ranked Acoustic Data Coupler 300 Modem but a few years newer, that is available for adoption to a good home. Get your war game on.
I have a Polaroid Land Camera Super Shooter Plus, Polaroid Land Camera ColorPack II and a Kodak Pleaser Instant Camera, all direct offspring of the 11th-ranked 1948 Polaroid Land Camera, available for adoption to a good home.
Dibs on Lite-Brite!
(channeling javelina)
I have an insatiable need to accumulate crap in my house that I never use and just takes up space. This cursed desire is available for adoption to a good home.
Ned can sing the praises of the Leatherman. I also need to brag that my aunt programmed the cassiopea. She retired as a multimillionar at the age of 40. She only stayed that long because she liked her job.
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Also to buy: the Helmet of Certain Death!
posted by mrflip at 06:08PM CST on February 19