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

What about Deathmaze 5000?

[maynard]

That was one of the first -- maybe the first -- 3D game on any platform. And this was first done on the TRS-80, with 128x48 black and white resolution! WOW! Now *that* had to have been one of the most important games... *EVER!* Who doesn't remember Deathmaze 5000?

Re:What about Deathmaze 5000?

[Anonymous Coward]

You may know the original Pentium version, Deathmaze 4999.994399399192934

Re:What about Deathmaze 5000?

[jimicus]

Who doesn't remember Deathmaze 5000?

I don't.

the list

[mincognito]

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

Re:the list

[Lord Apathy]

Tell me about. I remember 20 years ago when young lady was just getting into email she ask me if a virus could be spread by email. I just laughed and said no, it would never happen. It would require that email readers have the ability to execute code passed to them, and nobody would be stupid enough to write a mail program that would do that. Execute code passed to it from anyone.

......

Re:the list

[cp.tar]

no, it would never happen. It would require that email readers have the ability to execute code passed to them, and nobody would be stupid enough to write a mail program that would do that.

So what have we learned, kids?

Every time you hear a bell, an angel gets his wings.

Every time you say you don't believe in fairies, one fairy dies.

If you light a cigarette on a candle flame, a sailor dies.

And - most importantly - whenever someone says nobody would be stupid enough to do something, a programmer in Microsoft gets an idea.

Now, who knows what one has to say or do for a Microsoft programmer to die?

Re:the list

[ultranova]

Now, who knows what one has to say or do for a Microsoft programmer to die?

"Free, non-propriety standards compliance."

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:Excel was simply a clone

[gtoomey]

No Lotus was a clone of Visicalc.

Hello World

[Aokubidaikon]

Where's "Hello World"?

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:Better choices - go back the originators

[punkass]

What CPUs are designed to run Java.

That's kind of the point, Sparky.

DOH!!! He forgot the wordprocessor

[eclectro]

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.

Re:DOH!!! He forgot the wordprocessor

[poliopteragriseoapte]

I agree that it is simply amazing how few bugs there are in Tex. I do not think this is due to the fact that Knuth was paying people who found bugs. Rather, I believe the quality of TeX is due to Knuth's genius, and also not in small part to his idea of "literate programming".

There are better ways to put it, but in essence, literate programming means that you are supposed to write text that explains the algorithm or process; the code is like actions intersepsed in the text, but in a sense, the main product is the text, not the code.

I try myself to follow this style, having code that either reads obvious, or having large comment sections that explain what is going on, and all the background assumptions, so that the code is then obvious. It certainly had an influence on the amounts of bugs in my code, not to mention in my coworker's ability to understand what is going on.

In this respect, I believe a lot of OSS is sorely lacking. And the pity is that they lose developers in this fashion. As a personal story, some time ago I wanted to develop a plugin for Gimp to implement a particular effect, something I used to be able to achieve with a chemical darkroom. After three hours of staring at the code, and not being able to figure out for certain how to get to the pixels of an image, I gave up. I remember staring at hundreds of lines of C code, written in poor style, with very few comments (and what comments there were explained the obvious, instead of the background and the assumptions of the piece of code).

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.

My nomination...

[m00nun1t]

is tetris. No single piece of software has wasted so much time.

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.

Re:Java made the list

[SanityInAnarchy]

Huh. You're wrong about almost everything you said.

Java is not now, and never was, a toy programming language. It's used by, among other things, cell phones, large web servers, and of course the annoying web applets you used to see everywhere before Flash stole their cookies. As far as I can see, it has few remaining technological drawbacks, the only big one left for me is how insanely ugly the language itself is. But that's not because it's a "toy" language, it's because it's an industrial-strength language, designed to force the programmer to program correctly, even if it takes 3 times the code and 10 times the time.

Java is not little. It's freakin' huge, when you count all the standard libraries. And the verbosity makes your programs even bigger.

Java may have been essentially interpreted in the past, but it isn't now. Don't believe me? Look up gcj. Even if you don't count a JIT as "compiled", I think gcj pretty much ends that argument.

Java is standard, it just depends how you count. It's not an open standard (yet), it's a proprietary one. Still, that's better than no standard, which is about where most implementations of BASIC are.

Java is not good for learning the basics. BASIC is much better for learning the basics. But have you ever had to sit through "Hello, World" in Java? That was my first Computer Science class in college, ever:

class Hello {
    public static void main (String [] args) {
        System.out.println("Hello, world!");
    }
}

Oh, and it has to be in a file called "Hello.java", or it won't work. Case sensitive, too. And, of course, they had to explain every last detail.

I would have quit right there, except I already knew some 5 or 10 languages when I came to class, including Java, so instead, I got to explain it to everyone else.

So what did you get right? Well, BASIC was popular, and Turing probably was, I don't know. And Java did indeed make the list, and like every language, it sees some use by novices and students, as well as trained professionals. But counting all of that, you don't really have much point.

Don't get me wrong, I hate the language as much as the next guy, and bytecode isn't as relevant as it once was (or may be soon). I'd much rather see C make the list -- after all, C is Unix and Unix is C. But then, the list seems pretty arbitrary -- no mention is made of Mosaic being bug-free, but VisiCalc doesn't count because it was buggy, and Excel makes the list because it's less buggy.

Wow!

[Dolda2000]

I'm amazed! Never have I seen anyone be so thoroughly wrong about the history of Unix. I know this is Slashdot, so most people here should know these things, but just in case someone gets a wrong impression, I feel I should at least clear up a few things.

• 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.

Re:Wank wank wank

[Jerry Coffin]

They put down BSD 4.3 just so they wouldn't get flamed into eternity. But they didn't know the real reason why UNIX (not BSD 4.3 in particular) was so significant. It was the first OS written in a high level language, which was designed to write an operating system (prior to this point operating systems were written in assembly language for speed).

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!

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."

Re:Somewhere...

[IANAAC]

Like he's ever been laid....

Said the geek in the darkened basement.

Best Hello World ever

[MillionthMonkey]

public interface MessageStrategy {
    public void sendMessage();
}

public abstract class AbstractStrategyFactory {
    public abstract MessageStrategy createStrategy(MessageBody mb);
}

public class MessageBody {
    Object payload;
    public Object getPayload() { return payload; }
    public void configure(Object obj) { payload = obj; }
    public void send(MessageStrategy ms) {
        ms.sendMessage();
    }
}

public class DefaultFactory extends AbstractStrategyFactory {
    private DefaultFactory() {}
    static DefaultFactory instance;
    public static AbstractStrategyFactory getInstance() {
        if (null==instance) instance = new DefaultFactory();
        return instance;
    }
    public MessageStrategy createStrategy(final MessageBody mb) {
        return new MessageStrategy() {
            MessageBody body = mb;
            public void sendMessage() {
                Object obj = body.getPayload();
                System.out.println(obj.toString());
            }
        };
    }
}

public class HelloWorld {
      public static void main(String[] args) {
            MessageBody mb = new MessageBody();
            mb.configure("Hello World!");
            AbstractStrategyFactory asf = DefaultFactory.getInstance();
            MessageStrategy strategy = asf.createStrategy(mb);
            mb.send(strategy);
      }
}


In order to get through the lameness filter, I was forced to include this sentence that I would otherwise omit.

Re:Best Hello World ever

[MillionthMonkey]

Are you employed as a J2EE programmer, by any chance ?

Yeah, but I could have never written that straight through. I just began with the "naive implementation" and started cramming patterns into it. Plus I needlessly referred to concrete classes via interfaces wherever possible like you're supposed to. (Otherwise I might be tempted to stray outside the bounds of the interface and use implementation specific features.) Singleton and Factory were both no brainers. Strategy, though, was what really turned the program flow into a mess.

I initially posted it in a BS slashdot comment but this code actually became famous. It's all over the web. It appeared in one of the Patterns books as a warning of what not to do. I got a free copy from the author after I found this code in his online draft. There are also C# versions around if you need a Hello World in your Microsoft shop.

I hope to improve my Hello World in the next versions with even more patterns. Ones I'm looking at include Mediator, Proxy or Bridge, and Decorator (maybe to replace "." with "!" at the end of strings or something obnoxious like that, so I can name an interface "Excitable"). There may possibly be room for Visitor and a few others. Command and/or Interpreter would be nice but Interpreter might require a significant amount of code- using a library is unacceptable in a project like this one. Although that code then might need some more PATTERNS to help it out because otherwise it's hard to think of stuff that these patterns should be used for except for earlier infrastructure to implement previous patterns! (This would make the Hello World similar to projects I have seen in real life.) Maybe a stack- I'll push a Noun onto it ("World") and an Interjection ("Hello") that knows how to modify a Noun operand. Then I'll feed the stack to the Interpreter which will generate a MessageBody. That would really make a nice mess of things. If things get too complicated I'll have to jam a Facade in there somewhere.

A better list

[Animats]

We can do better than that. In no particular order,

• IBM's VM operating system. (1972) OS/360 was a nightmare, and not even the best OS of its era. Burroughs and UNIVAC were way ahead in operating systems in the late 1960s. VM, though, had paging, good security, hypervisor capability, and good performance. In the 1970s. And it's still in use.
• Backus' FORTRAN compiler (1957) The first good compiler. Optimizing, even. Better code generation than anything running on UNIX prior to the mid-1980s.
• QNX (1980) The first really good microkernel OS. Still in use, deep inside railroad signalling systems, machine tools, and nuclear reactor controls, where it has to work.
• NLS (1967) The first system with a mouse, windows, and a GUI. It took a mainframe to make it go in 1967, but all the key ideas were there.
• AutoCAD (1982) This is the program that replaced the drafting board. Huge increase in productivity. Ever ink in a drawing by hand? Redraw a drawing to make changes? Engineering companies used to have acres of people doing that stuff. No more.
• Bravo (1974) The first what-you-see-is-what-you-get text editor. Multiple fonts. Ran on the Xerox Alto. The ancestor of all modern word processors.

Those are older examples, each a major advance over previous technology. As the technology becomes more mature, the advances become smaller, but more widely deployed.

Re:Wank wank wank

[Jerry Coffin]

so was Multics written in assembly

Yes, at least initially.

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.

The idea of the first portable operating system escaping the editors of this article is unforgivable.

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.

true!

[dghcasp]

/bin/true!

The ultimate example of the Unix philosophy of doing one thing, one thing only, and doing it right!

No arguments, no parameter lists, no side effects, just true!

Such a beautiful example of Unix doesn't just happen; it takes work! Let's look at /bin/true on a Solaris 2.10 box:

ss027$ grep '@(#)' /bin/true
#ident "@(#)true.sh 1.6 93/01/11 SMI" /* SVr4.0 1.4 */
ss027$

Don't let anyone tell you the Unix way is the easy way; it took Six Whole Versions for Sun to get true correct! No wonder Windows is so full of bugs - they're trying to do hundreds of things. If they'd only adopt the Unix philosophy, they might have gotten it right in only ten tries! (Ten, because all the smart people work on Unix.)

Worship the true!

Re: Windows

[Ayanami Rei]

DOS more than Windows. If any Windows, Windows 95.
Windows had enormous business impact and created a software ecosystem, but it didn't really drive any TRENDS in computing.

DOS might get a mention because it was critical in brining the PC to everyman. But then, the same could be said for the Macintosh OS if DOS never caught on.

Here are the breakdowns of software and major influence/contributions:

12) Morris Worm - Internet Security
11) Page Rank - "Search" (Internet utility in general)
10) Apollo Guidance System - Fault Tolerant / Embedded Computing (also historical significance)
09) Excel - Profound effect on business, put power in the hands of many professionals.
08) Mac OS - GUIs
07) Sabre - The proof of concept of large-scale BI, CRM and other "Enterprise Systems"
06) Mosaic - The Web
05) Java - Popularization of VMs and distributed/network computing
04) System 360 - Operating Systems
03) IGR - Pure wizardry and human impact (although I might posit that TeX or the Orbitz boking system could go here too)
02) System R - _the_ database.
01) BSD Unix - The Internet

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.

Notepad

[Wolfier]

Where is it?  It is the most stab

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:Somewhere...

[TapeCutter]

"Like he's ever been laid...."

It's common knowledge that he's screwed millions of people.

Re: Windows

[FuegoFuerte]

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.

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