The 25 Greatest PCs of All Time - 2

Here’s the No 19 - No 14. (Data Source: PC World)

No. 19 - Apple iMac, Second Generation (2002)

Do you recognize this “lamp”? I think it’s one of the best computers Apple has ever made. It remains a high point in PC design history. But it’s only in the market for two years.

No. 18 – HP OmniBook 300 (1993)

It’s one of the first sub-notebooks. The system stored Windows 3.1, Excel 4.0, Word 2.0, and MS-DOS 5.0 in ROM memory rather than on a hard drive. It also had a unique integrated mouse that popped out of the notebook’s right side on a thin piece of plastics. The design eliminated the need for an annoying mouse cable, but the mouse was very small. It came with basic 386SXLV CPU, mono 9” VGA screen, 10MB flash drive and up to 9 hours of power. The price started at USD$1,950.

No. 17 – Toshiba T1000 (1987)

This notebook made Toshiba to the fore of mobile computing. It brought DOS in a truly portable size. It accommodated a full-size 82-key keyboard, a 720KB 3.5-inch floppy drive, 512KB of RAM (yes, it’s 512KB, not 512MB) and an internal modem. The unit also had MS-DOS 2.00 in ROM, which eliminated the need to have two floppy drives, as some notebooks of that era had.

No. 16 – Tandy TRS-80 Model I (1977)

This is the first computer to be truly marketed to masses: over 200,000 units were sold. It cost $600 for a 4KB of RAM and a version of the BASIC language, and it stored programs on tapes.

No. 15 – Shuttle SV24 Barebone System (2001)

For so many years, the PC was all about the big beige box (IBM did have black boxes), but Shuttle came up with a toaster-size design for do-it-yourself. The box was only half or 1/3 size of normal desktop PC cases, but come with a compact ATX motherboard with integrated audio and graphics and a 150-watt power supply. You only needed to supply the processor, memory and storage. It was the dream computer of some girls around me.

No. 14 – Atari 800 (1979)

Atari shipped its first computer – Atari 800 – after unleashed its first video game console. Part game machine, part productivity enhancer, the USD$999 Atari 800 was the first home computer to feature a custom video co-processor in addition to its CPU.

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