Which is the most significant (important) console in history?

[Ganoncrotch]

Nuvendil said:

Ganoncrotch said:

You must know that the dreamcast shipped with a modem installed from day 1? The Xbox was not the first platform to start online play.

Being first doesn't always equate to being the most influential in am area.  As I said in the very next sentence, online gaming was a novelty type concept on consoles, not much used or talked about except in a small handful of games.  And the Dreamcast wasn't the first attempt either.  The Famicom modem, the Sega Net Work System, the Sega Channel, the Xband, the Sega Net Link, the Apple Pippin, the N64DD, all these were attempts dating back to the 3rd Gen to bring online gaming of some form to consoles.  And all failed, all forgotten, all merely novel ideas.  It was the Xbox that changed that, that made online gaming a necessity.  The clearist indicator is the behavior of the market.  The Dreamcast launched before the GC or PS2 with its online functionality, yet neither of those two competitors bothered to have online functionality at launch.   The Xbox comes along with its online functionality and the games that take advantage of it and very shortly afterwards both competitors are playing catch up to them in that area and the next generation comes along and all consoles have built in online functionality.  

All of the consoles you mention here require addons to give the console functionality, the Dreamcast was the first console built with the modem installed out of the box as I said.

As for not being the first but most influential? No, that like others said here, the X360 was the machine which bought online play to the mainstream gamer, not the original console, which didn't even have online for the first year of availability.

To suggest that future consoles having features from previous generations means that those previous gens created the "norm" just doesn't work unless you are going for revisionist history, consoles use what is available technology at the time of their release to try to get the most out of the system. The original xbox just wasn't the first machine to be designed with online in mind, nor was it the most influencial in bringing it to the mainstream.