- The system that brought video game consoles back from The Great Video Game Crash of 1983 in North America (they were pretty healthy elsewhere) and ushered in the modern era of video gaming. Known in Japan/Asia as the Family Computer (commonly abbreviated as the “Famicom”), in South Korea as Hyundai Comboy (현대 컴보이) and in India as the Samurai with unlicensed clones made in Eastern Europe, India, the Middle East and in China, it was the console that brought in the oldest and longest lasting competitor in the Console Wars, Nintendo. It also served as the initial console for many of gaming’s oldest franchises, introduced the modern third-party licensing model for video games, and set the standards in control pads for consoles. It is still very much an icon of video games (less so the redesigned variant).
- Altair 8800 (Wikipedia)
The Altair 8800 is a microcomputer designed in 1974 by MITS and based on the Intel 8080 CPU. Interest grew quickly after it was featured on the cover of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics and was sold by mail order through advertisements there, in Radio-Electronics, and in other hobbyist magazines. According to Harry Garland, the Altair 8800 was the product that catalyzed the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s. It was the first commercially successful personal computer. The computer bus designed for the Altair was to become a de facto standard in the form of the S-100 bus, and the first programming language for the machine was Microsoft’s founding product, Altair BASIC.