THE BEST CYBERTECH OF 1997

1 BIG, BLOODY, BEAUTIFUL The shimmering landscapes of Riven. The blood-drenched corridors of Quake II. The eye-popping charms of Tomb Raider II's Lara Croft. Computer-gaming aficionados have never had so many titles to choose from--or so many megabytes to wade through (Riven alone fills five CD-ROMS). But impressive and sophisticated as the software has become, the industry still has a way to go. Pretty pictures don't necessarily mean great game play, nor does offering ever more destructive weaponry advance the cause of civilization. Sequels of last year's hits are nice, but our fondest hope for '98 is that someone will blow our minds with the Next Great Thing.

2 The AOL Roller Coaster Cyberspace's No. 1 online service was one long busy signal last winter, leading critics to predict gleefully the pre-Web relic's demise. Well, if you bought AOL stock in, say, January, you would have nearly quadrupled your money by Thanksgiving. Could AOL chairman Steve Case be the new Michael Eisner?

3 Tamagotchis Sneer if you wish; years from now we may find ourselves wistfully recalling these beeping, needy key-chain creatures not as '97's Pet Rock--or rather not just as '97's Pet Rock--but as technocultural landmarks: the first mutable digital life-forms to win our children's hearts. Let's hope their descendants don't learn to talk.

4 Sub-$1,000 PCs The theory went like this: as the price of whiz-bang computers falls, demand will rise even faster. Looks like the theory was actually right. By autumn PC makers from Compaq to Hewlett-Packard to IBM were offering robust multimedia machines for less than $1,000--and nearly a third of all new PCs sold fell into that range.

5 The Rise of Joel Klein The Justice Department antitrust tyro's first shot across Microsoft's bow (over the bundling of Windows 95 and Internet Explorer) served notice to Silicon Valley that there's a new, tech-savvy sheriff in town. Next in his scope: the looming battle over Windows 98 and a closer look at microchip colossus Intel.

6 Digital Snapshots Cameras that shoot pixels, not film, made the leap from pricey novelty to low-cost alternative to 35 mm this year, as nearly every cameramaker worth its viewfinder released quality digital cameras in the $250-to-$1,000 range, and sales nearly doubled. Next up? Deeper price cuts, please.

7 The Death of the CDA The ill-conceived and overbroad Communications Decency Act got the early grave it deserved. The Supreme Court, in ruling the smut bill unconstitutional, gave the First Amendment a firm foothold in cyberspace. Antiporn activists were not deterred, however; a more narrowly focused cda II has already landed in the Senate.

8 Deep Blue The IBM supercomputer decisively crushed human world-chess champion Garry Kasparov, dealing a humiliating blow to the self-esteem of carbon-based life-forms. At least until backpedaling commentators recalled the obvious: hey, the human race did build the damn thing in the first place.

9 DVD Players After too many years spent watching movie studios and the electronics industry haggle over the arcane details of this high-tech successor to the CD and the vcr, consumers are finally thrilling to its dazzling sound and pictures. dvd was worth the wait. Now where's the software?

10 Voice Recognition Until last summer, futurists thought voice recognition--software that lets computers understand ordinary speech--was decades away. Then Dragon Systems came out with Naturally Speaking, which comes tantalizingly close to actually working. Is your keyboard tomorrow's collector's item?