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."

Comments

ooh, printable version

[ampathee]

Offtopic, but I gotta say: linking directly to the printable version == nice work.
I hope it catches on.

Interesting article, but...

[SanityInAnarchy]

Meanwhile, high fees for Unix outraged Richard Stallman, a grad student who used it at the MIT artificial intelligence lab. Software, he decided, was an intellectual asset and should be free, like the published work of his fellow researchers. He set about building a set of tools called GNU that programmers could use to create their own software.

All respect goes out the window here. It wasn't price that pissed off Stallman, it was restrictions on his freedom. He doesn't care how much he has to pay for software, so long as he can do whatever he wants with it when he gets his hands on it.

And what pisses me off is having to read through the whole rest of the article first, then all respect goes out the window on the 3rd paragraph from the bottom.

Re:Interesting article, but...

[JackieBrown]

I was fortunate to skip to the end. That was enough to make the rest not worth reading. To change Stallman from an idealist to some who is just cheap made the article unforgivable.

Re:Interesting article, but...

[mellon]

There was interesting stuff in the article, but much of what he said was just inaccurate. He credits Unix with being the first operating system that did paging. I don't think so. Furthermore, what he said about Stallman's motivation isn't even accurate - Stallman came out of the MIT LISP Machine crowd, and (rightly!) thought Unix was primitive by comparison. He originally wanted GNU to have a filesystem like TOPS-20, with versions. And the original goal of the GNU project wasn't to make tools - it was to make a complete operating system.

I don't know how accurate or inaccurate some of the other things the article says are, because they are in areas that I don't know as well. But certainly what he said about the history of GNU and Linux was almost completely wrong in its details.

Re:Better choices - go back the originators

[Hard_Rock_2]

"What CPUs are designed to run Java" Lots. Your probably most familiar with the ones on your phone.

Re:VMware? A me too software...

[imemyself]

Yeah, but could those run other operating systems? Or run on relatively generic hardware for that matter? Virtualization may not be a new thing, but VMWare has really brought virtualization down from mainframes and big iron proprietary Unix to cheap x86/x86_64 boxes and Linux/Windows. (Though User Mode Linux might have been there before VMware, I don't know). And VMWare ESX could really change how datacenters are run with some of its stuff like VMotion. So, if you need to take a box down for maintenance - no problem, just move the VM's over to another box while they're still running. VMWare's enterprise products can do some really cool stuff, I'll be very interested to see what VMware does with it.

Easy: GCC

[ishmalius]

I can think of no single piece of software that has enabled more people to create wonderful things with only their imaginations and a bit of skill. Take all of the pieces of software you love, and divide them into two piles: "built by GCC" or "built by anything else." Then you will see how impressive it is. Although users never see it, they use it every day. How many terabytes of data are served daily on the net by GCC-built software? And even the scripting languages you love were likely themselves built by GCC. GCC is the invisible root of our information society.

Why not wikipedia?

[mcrumiller]

Dozens of people have already replied with different technologies, and they all use one reference medium: wikipedia.

Why is wikipedia not on the list? I consider this the best invention of technology ever--a method that combines the power of the internet with the minds of people.

Software? HUH?

[Ruff_ilb]

Java Language? Excel Spreadsheet? Google search rank?

These, although IMPLEMENTED through software, are not in and of themselves software - they're merely concepts (or in the case of Java, a language).

I like the list, but it's comparing apples and oranges. Surely, if the Java language makes the cut, other languages should make the cut too - C? BASIC? Don't try to tell me that Excel, or even Google search rank, is more important than C has been. And what about markup languages? No HTML?

And, if they're going to include OSes, WINDOWS doesn't make the cut? I'm sure I'll get shot around here for making this comment, but Windows has done wonders for bringing the computer to the masses. What about the software for the computer that INVENTED the modern GUI, the Xerox Alto, which also invented the WYSIWYG Text Editor? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto)

I'm sorry, this list doesn't quite make the cut, and it definitely isn't the "Witness the definitive, irrefutable, immutable ranking of the most brilliant software programs ever hacked."

Lotus 1-2-3 Macros -- everyman a programmer

[Tablizer]

Umm, excel? Try Lotus 1-2-3. Foolish coycat mortals.

One of the most amazing things I've seen is how Lotus 1-2-3 macros turned accountants and clerks into programmers (spehgetti perhaps, but it ran). Lotus did this by leveraging users *existing* knowledge of spreadsheets and menu keystrokes. Just toss in a Goto cell and an IF function into a keystroke recorder and you have a Turing Complete language. Complex billing programs were written by ordinary clerks. There has been nothing like it in scale before or since that I know of. Excel's programming language was only for the bravest of clerks and killed the trend.

Re:Excel was simply a clone

[Duhavid]

Excel is pretty good, but I dont see anything groundbreaking
or "great" about it, really. I would think 123 or Visicalc
would get it. I can understand the rational behind not
giving it to Visicalc in terms of not being complete, but
123 was. All Excel added was running with a native Windows
UI.

Re: Windows

[Anarchitect_in_oz]

If Excel is there for being the killer app that drives Personel Computer use in business, instead of the mainframe/terminal model before that.

Then that place should really be taken by VisiCacl for the Apple II.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisiCalc

Sure in the end Excel won the war for Windows.
VisiCalc Started the trend.

Re: Windows

[brian.glanz]

Windows "didn't really drive any TRENDS in computing" ... perhaps, but Windows drove COMPUTING as a TREND, and at that, a trend which is clearly here to stay. Which do you suppose is more important? Computing did not just happen as some inevitable result of the power in a PC -- hardly, users would never have gotten far building kits. Remember Gates' and thus MS' old maxim, "a computer on every desk!" and you'll acknowledge that computing did not just happen -- Microsoft and Windows and Office made it happen. Like it, or not.

BG

Re: Windows

[mvdwege]

Jeez, you really have drunk the Kool-Aid, haven't you?

What does Windows actually do? A bare Windows install is not capable of doing any useful computing at all, it is an Operating System. It is applications that do actual useful computing.

Granted, most applications are written to run on the Windows OS, but that does not make Windows the driver of computing for the masses, it is still the applications.

For business adoption, this was software like Lotus 1-2-3, dBase and WordPerfect. For home use? Games. Face it, most home users on this forum when discussing leaving Windows cite games as the factor keeping them on the platform.

The history of the microcomputer shows that is applications that drove adoption. The early 8-bit machines were sold to hobbyists who used them in little projects, and the generation of the ZX Spectrum and the Commodore 64 sold to families as replacements for the games console, with a little productivity on the side. Meanwhile, 8080 and Z-80 based machines sold to small businesses for WordStar and dBase II on CP/M, and when the IBM PC came and evolved, businesses upgraded to it and the new software available for the platform. It didn't hurt that the IBM name finally gave the microcomputer enough status to be treated seriously by more than SME's. Mac adoption started really heating up with its use in DTP, and Unix workstations sold on the strength of the high-end engineering and science applications that ran on them.

As the PC architecture became more versatile and powerful, and Windows started being more than just a DOS Shell, these separate markets slowly collapsed into one market, that of the Windows-driven Intel architecture, with lone holdouts in the Unix and Mac sectors. But a good objective look at history shows that it was not Windows that created this market. Microsoft merely rode the wave of success of the PC platform, and due to its massive install base was able to provide the most common API for application developers.

Windows being responsible for the whole microcomputer revolution is too silly to be taken seriously by anyone but Microsoft itself.

Mart