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The Greatest Software Ever
soldack writes "Information Week has an piece on the 12 greatest pieces of software ever. It also notes some that didn't make the cut and why. Their weblog covers 5 others that didn't make the cut."
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12. The Morris worm 11. Google search rank 10. Apollo guidance system 9. Excel spreadsheet 8. Macintosh OS 7. Sabre system 6. Mosaic browser 5. Java language 4. IBM System 360 OS 3. Gene-sequencing software at the Institute for Genomic Research 2. IBM's System R 1. Unix
Ludwig Wittgenstein
No Lotus was a clone of Visicalc.
That's kind of the point, Sparky.
"Nobody owns the fucking words man." - James Dean
I guess the question remains is which wordprocessor. While there's Wordstar, Wordperfect, and Word that might be worthy, clearly TeX should be in first place and mentioned on his list. TeX is the father of all wordprocessors that followed, and the author Donald Knuth had such firm belief that programmers should be responsible for what they create that he paid for each bug found in the code.
This produced a completely error free program, and started a generation of programs that followed that would drive mechanical typewriters to extinction practically everywhere, and changed how we get printed text onto paper. Hence this is truly great software.
So TeX is a glaring ommission for this list, and probably should have been close to the top, if not number one.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
- He claims that the first version of Unix came with paging. To even credit the PDP-7 with paging capability is rather amazing. Unix used whole-process swapping until only much later in its development. If I'm not entirely mistaken, wasn't paging implemented in BSD3?
- He appears to claim that Unix invented time sharing! I don't think I have to elaborate on that, really...
- He also claims that "[Unix] would let two people use a computer at the same time." Not only is it false (it supported as many as there were terminals wired in), I also find it a bit funny that two-people time sharing would have been considered impressive at the time.
- He seems to imply that "Uniplexed Information and Computing System" was an actual, official name of the system. To begin with, "Unics" wasn't really meant to be expanded -- it was just a pun on the "Multics" acronym (that is, a pun on the acronym, not on its expansion).
- To mention that Unix was rewritten in C without mentioning that C was invented for that very purpose is of course not "incorrect", but I would argue that it is a rather important omission.
- He writes that the first C version of Unix was "Unix System III", while in fact it was, of course, Third Edition (V3). System III was a much later release (~1980?) by the USG.
There are probably many more errors, but I stopped reading when I noticed that my eyes were bleeding.Thank you for playing. Our hostess has a fine parting gift for you as you leave. If you return, please remember to always phrase your answer in the form of a question.
The correct question for: "Tbe first operating sytem written in a high level language" was: "What was MULTICS?"
On a whim, the judges decided that PL/I and BLISS both sucked, and The C Programming Language openly states that C isn't really a high level language, so they would also accept "What was the Lilith?"
Of course, the first truly high level language was Trebecktran, used to write the OS for me, the Trebecktron 9000!
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
That's simply incorrect. PL/I was chosen as the implementation language for MULTICS well before the first line of code was written. It was never written in assembly language. If you'd like to know some facts, consider reading a bit about the history of MULTICS.
Oddly enough, this is mostly true. Even though MULTICS was written in a high level language from the beginning, it wasn't very portable. It required a fairly heavy duty memory-management unit that most of the machines at the time simply didn't provide. It was a bit like a current x86 in protected mode, but in reverse. The x86 takes a virtual address and translates with with the paging unit to a linear address, then the segmentation unit (theoretically) does another translation on that to give a physical address. MULTICS required an MMU that took a segment-style address and translated it to a linear address, then a paging unit that translated that to a paged address.
Very few memory management units (then or now) provide that capability, and without it, MULTICS is pretty much dead in the water.
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
Did you read the article? He specifically mentions VisiCalc, and also states WHY he decided Excel should be on the list and NOT VisiCalc. From the article:
For software to be considered a success, it has to be up to handling the job it was created to do.
That axiom certainly applies to VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet software. It's great because it demonstrated the power of personal computing. The software put the ability to analyze and manipulate huge amounts of data into the hands of every business. But VisiCalc itself, despite representing a breakthrough concept, wasn't great software. It was flawed and clunky, and couldn't do many things users wanted it to do. The great implementation of the spreadsheet was not VisiCalc or even Lotus 1-2-3 but Microsoft Excel, which extended the spreadsheet's power and gave businesspeople a variety of calculating tools. Microsoft's claims that it makes great software are open to dispute, but the Excel spreadsheet is here to stay. Nearly everyone is touched by it.
See, there was more thought put into this than you may realize.