[bsanr2]

Penicillin. But then, he wasn't trying to make money off of it.

And basically anything Nintendo pushes as a console gimmick. It's not that the tech immediately goes from research to broadly accessible, but rather that they tend to take old tech that no one saw as having profitable consumer applications and find one for it. In that way, as far as consumers are concerned, it goes from unknown to widely-used without making a stopover in early-adapter purgatory.

[dpratt71]

Penicillin, maybe? But I wonder how quickly it became readily available outside of the Western world.

And I see that Nintendo has apparently sold an extremely impressive number of consoles (https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2019/11/nintendo_has_now_s...). But even if everyone only bought one console each, that's only about 10% of world population.

This may be a little unfair, but I do wonder if there isn't a tendency to consider a technology to be widely available when it becomes available to you and the folks farther back in the line don't count or aren't relevant.

[bsanr2]

To say that a single company's products being used by even a single digit percentage of the world population doesn't meet the requirements to ve considered "widely available" is a stretch.

In any case, you said "important," not "widely available," and yes, Nintendo's products are hugely important. Many of today's technological advancements can be traced back to their proving that a given use case for a primitive version of a given technology was viable.

[dpratt71]

Whether it's a single company (or product) or multiple is beside the point. If a technology is only available to (say) 1% of the population, I don't think that qualifies as being widely available.

I will also note that my original comment was in response to someone who is "more interested in tech for the other 95%".