The 100 Most Important Tech Products, Events, and People of 2009

Posted 12/28/2009 at 11:00am | by The Maximum PC Staff and Paul Lilly

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The hot gear, tech, people, and events that shaped an incredible year

A lot has happened in the last 12 months. At the start of the year, iTunes was still peddling DRM, Yahoo and Microsoft were at bitter odds over the latter’s takeover attempts, Nvidia had the fastest consumer videocard, and the ”cloud” was still a burgeoning concept. Oh, how times have changed. Follow along as we relive and reflect upon some of the most memorable moments, products, and people to impact computer users over the last year.

100: Best All-in-One Liquid Cooler: Corsair Cooling Hydro Series H50

Air cooling not doing enough for you? Water cooling too complicated? All-in-one liquid-cooling solutions are popping up like daisies, and our favorite is the Corsair H50. Quieter and less complicated than the competitors, it delivers performance surpassing the best air coolers for just a little more moolah. Factor in an easy install and this is a no-brainer.

99: New Jersey Resident First to Be Arrested for Domain Name Theft

On August 3, Daniel Goncalves, a 25-year-old computer technician, allegedly hacked an email account, stole login information, and falsified PayPal transaction records in an elaborate scheme to claim ownership of P2P.com, a domain valued at $160,000.

This arrest marks the first for domain theft, which has been difficult to prosecute because of the technical and legal complexities of the domain registrar system. Unfortunately for Goncalves, the owner of P2P.com was a former prosecutor for the Justice Department with a background in Internet payment processing.

98: Samsung Demos Awesome 24-SSD RAID

You’d have to be crazy to build a 24-drive RAID array. Crazy like a fox, as Samsung showed us when the company strung together 24 SSDs to create 6TB of solid state storage, with a theoretical throughput of 2GB/s. The video of the escapade got more than 2.6 million views, and even though the drives weren’t all technically on the same controller (two RAID controllers along with all of the motherboard’s onboard ports were used), it proved that SSDs are serious business.

97: Vandals Sever Fiber Optic Cables in Silicon Valley—Disconnect Many

AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon subscribers all suffered when vandals lifted a manhole cover, went underground, and slashed up to 10 fiber optic cables. The ensuing outage affected landline (including 911) and cellular networks, as well as Internet access. As a result of the September 11 terrorist attacks, AT&T’s networks were declared National Critical Infrastructures because of their role in national security. AT&T offered up a $100,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the culprits, but no one has been charged.

96: Walt Mosspuppet Is the Only Tech Journalist in the World

Hoggworks Studios’ plushy impersonation of the Wall Street Journal’s technology columnist is the best fake tech luminary since Fake Steve Jobs. In a series of web videos, the egomaniacal puppet slurs angry rants about Microsoft and Google while unabashedly praising Apple—often while inebriated.

95: Pirated Wolverine Movie A Huge Hit A Month Before Its Theatrical Release

Twentieth Century Fox got its undergarments in a bunch when an “incomplete and early version” of ‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine’ leaked to the Web a month before it appeared on the big screen. Missing effects didn’t seem to bother the hundreds of thousands of viewers who downloaded the movie in a 24 hour span. But what really pushed Fox over the edge was when 10-year Foxnews.com entertainment columnist Roger Friedman posted a review of the leaked film with rhetoric that seemingly made light of piracy. Friedman was promptly terminated.

94: Woman Arrested under New Cyberbullying Law

Missouri citizen Elizabeth Thrasher took her vendetta too far by posting a fake "Casual Encounters" Craigslist ad for a 17-year-old girl. Because a recent law made cyberbullying a criminal offense, Thrasher was arrested on felony charges.

According to the complaint, Thrasher allegedly posted the 17-year-old girl’s cell phone number, email address, and a photo obtained from her MySpace page. If convicted, Thrasher, who is currently out on bail and forbidden to access the Internet, could receive a $5,000 fine and up to four years in prison.

93: Facebook and Twitter Worth $12 Billion

Through several rounds of funding, two of the fastest-growing social networking hotspots on the web came to be worth nearly $12 billion combined. That’s especially remarkable in Twitter’s case, considering it doesn’t yet have a strong business model for making money. But that doesn’t matter to investors, who see the potential in a service that increased its membership 15-fold from one year ago. And Facebook doesn’t appear to be slowing down in the slightest as it leaves MySpace in the dust.

92: Google Shocks Android Mod Community with Cease and Desist

Google threatened popular Android ROM developer Cyanogen with legal action because he included some proprietary Google apps—like Market, Gmail, and YouTube—in his ROMs. Google was entirely in its legal right to stand firm on the issue, even if popular opinion is that it should have turned the other cheek. For a while, it looked like Google’s stance would put an end to third-party ROMs, but it didn’t take long for Cyanogen to start churning out ROMs without including the closed-source apps.

91: Best GPU before the Radeon HD 5870: Nvidia GeForce GTX 295

With a pair of GT200 GPUs, each boasting 896MB of GDDR3 memory, and a sexy black plastic enclosure, the GTX 295 sat atop our high-end GPU recommendation, at least until ATI launched the Radeon HD 5870.