Specifications

25 YEARS OF PC MAGAZINE
2002
What product had
you wating in line?
Send your memories
of hot technology
to pcmag@ziffdavis.
com with “PC Mag
Anniversary” in the
subject line.
56 PC MAGAZINE NOVEMBER 6, 2007
Our future robot overlords owe their evolution to
Rosie on The Jetsons. Colin Angle knows she set a
stellar example. From the day iRobot began, the
cofounder and CEO was constantly asked, “When
are you going to clean my fl oors?”
For years, Angle and his team—including
cofounder and CTO Rodney Brooks, Panasonic Pro-
fessor of Robotics at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology—learned a lot about cleaning. But their
bots never made it to market. Costs were too high. It
wasn’t until they broke the magical sub-$200 barrier
in mid-2002—and fi nally garnered deals with cata-
log retailers—that the Roomba hit America’s fl oors.
The Roomba was the fi rst truly useful consumer
robot—sorry, Sony AIBO—and is the most success-
ful yet. Two million have been sold. The new iRobot
vacuums are even more versatile: some clean a
workshop, others scrub a kitchen fl oor.
Angle says iRobot’s secret is doing everything
possible to make a product better. His staff “accel-
erates the destruction of Roomba, so we can see it
fail—and improve it.”
INNOVATORS Colin Angle
RIDING A WIRE-
LESS WAVE
When did phones
stop being phones
and become . . .
computers? We
dove into wireless
data headfi rst in
May with a Wireless
Super Guide, exam-
ining e-mail devices,
call-forwarding ser-
vices, PDA modems,
and the promis-
ing Stinger phone
platform. It didn’t
create the “wireless
ecosystem” Micro-
soft envisioned,
but mobile phones
became our most
personal comput-
ers anyway. PC Mag
even hired an ana-
lyst (hello, Sascha
Segan) just to keep
track of it all.
I got to Egghead Software in Altamonte Springs, Florida, around 6 p.m [on
August 23, 1995]. They opened up at midnight to sell Windows 95. By 11 p.m. the
crowd was really large. People had come in from all over central Florida. The most
unusual group had desktop computers in their van. They planned to install it all
night long during their trip back to the University of Florida. I took the next day
off to install the new Windows OS myself.—James L. Cioccio, Kansas City, Missouri
READERS RESPOND When Windows Was Loved
PRODUCT FLASHBACK
Creative Labs Sound Blaster
Audigy Platinum eX
$250
lllll
Requires Intel Pentium 266 MHz, 64MB RAM, Windows 98SE or higher
Requires Intel Pentium 266 MHz, 64MB RAM, Windows 98SE or higher
PROS
PROS
External break-out box adds more ports than anyone should need.
CONS Pricey, complex setup, takes up two PCI slots.
BOTTOM LINE Creative Labs has topped itself once again.
Creative Labs has topped itself once again.
“For three years, the Creative Labs PCI audio cards dominated the mar-
ket. The company ups the ante with its new Audigy series . . . [it] makes
a huge difference in the quality of your PC sound output, and it is in your
best interest to take full advantage of it.”—Rich Brown, January 15, 2002