Ten Applications That Changed Computing

bfire writes "The term 'killer app' gets tossed around quite liberally these days. Nearly every piece of software released seems to be pitched as having the potential to send shockwaves throughout the IT world. In reality, there have been precious few applications which have truly changed the computing industry over the years. This article lists some of the top ten true killer apps that changed computing, from Phil Zimmermann's gold standard in encryption, PGP, to Dr Solomon's groundbreaking anti-virus toolkit, to Mitch Kapor who took the idea of VisiCalc for Apple and created Lotus 1-2-3 for DOS." Typical for top-10 lists, the choices seem pretty arbitrary — what changed your corner of the computing world?

Comments

MS Paint

[ciderVisor]

MS Paint

Re:MS Paint

[gringofrijolero]

No way man.. Solitaire!

Re:MS Paint

[hey!]

I remember going to the Harvard Coop the week that the Macintosh was introduced, and seeing people jammed around them, trying out something that was unlike anything most of us had ever seen before.

It was MacPaint.

What made it different is we'd never seen that combination of abstraction and direct manipulation before. Some of us knew what a light pen was, and had some vague idea you could do things like manipulate a model of something, but the thing about this app was that it presented analogies you could manipulate. They weren't literal models (like Microsoft's amazingly misbegotten "Bob"). They were things boiled down to the essence off what might be usable for the task: palettes that weren't palette shaped; "windows" that contained scrolling surfaces that were somewhat like a sheet of paper. And there were other things that were, well, new, but somehow logically fit with these idealized analogies: drop down menus, and scrollbars for example. They were easy to grasp (both literally and figuratively) because they were a kind of meta-analogy; they were simple mechanisms you could figure out because they somehow worked on the same principles of the things that were analogies. They were like analogies that didn't refer to anything we knew, but we kind of grasped they style of the thing.

Re:MS Paint

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is it rated as funny? I think MS Paint is quite useful. I am a Mac user and cannot draw a simple picture after I have (re)installed the OS (I am using Tiger, I don't know Leopard or *Slow* Leopard)! Sure I can download Seashore, but why don't Apple just include a free image editor?

Re:MS Paint

[spydabyte]

Yeah, we can definitely see that you grasped this product quite well in your very concise description.

Re:MS Paint

[mdwh2]

I'm outraged that Minesweeper made the list, and not Solitaire!

Re:MS Paint

[carlzum]

I had a similar experience at a mall when I was a kid, in a Sears I think. There had been computers on the shelves of Radio Shacks and electronics stores like "Crazy" Eddies (showing my age) for years. But those machines drew about as much attention as a typewriter. The Macintosh displayed the Mona Lisa created in MacPaint, and people gathered around it in amazement. It may not have been a significant application in business or entertainment, but it demonstrated everything revolutionary about personal computers like no other application. Users saw pictures instead of monochromatic words, the program was controlled without a keyboard, windows and icons made it seem intuitive and approachable, unlike cryptic text commands.

For everyday people in the suburbs, it was a glimpse of the computing experience that would become ubiquitous in the next 10-15 years. The people crowded around weren't awed by the pictures on the screen, they were amazed by how powerful home computers were becoming. They studied me and my friends playing around, looking for clues to what exactly we could do with it.

Frankly, it was a profound experience. Those machines soon replaced bank tellers with computer screens, letters with email, encyclopedias with Google, and on and on. For a lot of us in middle-America, that possibility first dawned on us when we saw MacPaint 25 years ago.

Re:MS Paint

[hey!]

Well, it's one of those things you take for granted if you grew up with it. But it really is remarkable how weird GUIs are. They're a kind of visual language, and like with regular language a heck of a lot of what we take for granted is just tradition.

Imagine everyone you ever heard of spoke different Germanic languages; you might think that there's a huge difference between Dutch and English, but there's no intrinsic reason that we couldn't be speaking some Sino-Tibetan language instead. That's kind of what the difference between something like Gnome and Windows GUIs are like. They share vastly more than they differ by, and all the common bits work (more or less) but I often wonder how much of those bits are, well, a bit arbitrary.

Any really fundamental improvement in UI conventions will almost certainly be something that takes a lot of unconvincing words to describe, but somehow makes sense when you use it. Gestural input is an example with potential. I just haven't seen the application that makes it really, really important to put into the common UI lexicon. Nothing as compelling as, say, the checkbox/radio button dichotomy. But it might exists, and if it does you'll have to use it to understand.

Re:MS Paint

[Higgs_Bozon]

Just one word:
FATBITS.
I have been known to eat them for lunch.
- Bunny. (tee hee)

Re:MS Paint

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm...
First this:

But it really is remarkable how weird GUIs are. They're a kind of visual language, and like with regular language a heck of a lot of what we take for granted is just tradition.

Then this:

They share vastly more than they differ by, and all the common bits work (more or less) but I often wonder how much of those bits are, well, a bit arbitrary.

Finally:

Nothing as compelling as, say, the checkbox/radio button dichotomy. But it might exists, and if it does you'll have to use it to understand

I can see three possible conclusions:

1. You're a humanities student, possibly into postmodernism
2. You're truly passionate about HCI
3. You need to put the bong down. You're going all meta on GUIs

Re:MS Paint

[Anenome]

I use a mouse-gestures plug-in for Firefox, it's absolutely awesome, wouldn't surf without it: "Mouse Gestures Redox 2.0.3"

Re:MS Paint

[InfoJunkie777]

I agree with this poster 100%. I personally must have logged 100's of hours back in the 1990's. I totally SUCKED at minesweeper, and played it about 4 times. I also observed many dozens of fellow workers wasting their company time on solitaire, but never minesweeper. {BTW ... love your sig. Very inventive}

Re:MS Paint

[Anonymous Coward]

No way man.. Solitaire!

Notepad ?

Re:MS Paint

[faffod]

I used to sell Macs in '84. I once gave a demo to a group of guys that came in from CERN. I showed them Mac Paint and Mac Write, I copied and pasted between the two apps and they were fascinated. At one point someone asked about the price and I quoted the price in French Francs. Someone asked what that was in Swiss Francs, and one of them had a watch with a built in calculator so he spoke up and asked for the conversion rate. Meanwhile, I pulled down the apple menu and brought up the calculator and typed in the same numbers. I cut the converted price and posted it in the Mac Write document I was typing. The guy with the watch calculator was frozen staring at the Mac. So was the rest of the group. I found out after the demo that they were part of the UA1 team that had just won the nobel prize in physics. Just a simple calculator that could easily integrate with other apps left them completely speechless. Today an application that doesn't support infinite undo is not worthy of a second look, but back then the notion of a GUI, with [limited] multi-tasking, was amazing even to guys who had access to most advanced technology.

Re:MS Paint

[SlashWombat]

I remember an IBM seminar for OS2 that asked the question "How many of the audience open windows 2.1 just to play Solataire?" ... and about 95% of the audience put up their hands.

It wasn't really until reliable WYSIWYG editors came about that windoz really began to get popular.

Re:MS Paint

[SlashWombat]

As someone who can speak both Dutch and English, I find that the two are very intimately related. In fact, Dutch reminds me of old English. (IE: The counting structure used in Dutch beyond twenty reverses the sequence used in modern English, but was used in Old English ... EG: Four and twenty black birds ...)

But I do agree with Hey!'s description of the GUI interface. Intuitive indeed, which is what has made computers accessible to the unwashed mass's. Most people today cannot even begin to spell correctly, so imagine their problems with DOS/UNIX like operating systems!

Re:MS Paint

[donaldm]

No way man.. Solitaire!

Out of all the casual games ever made Solitaire would have to be the most played throughout the world with an almost infinite replay value. Of course it would also be the most time wasting application ever made as well. Personally "Minesweeper" is one of those games you end up playing at least once then very quickly get bored with and rarely ever play agian. :)

Re:MS Paint

[jebrew]

When did reliable WYSIWYG editors come out?!?!? How did I miss this?! I'm still using VS2005 and it crashes at least once a day!

Re:MS Paint

[ichthus]

"This file is too large for Notepad to open. Would you like to use Wordpad to read this file?"

Um, yes. Yes I would. ALWAYS! YES!

Re:MS Paint

[Hognoxious]

Comparing notepad to wordpad is like saying emacs is better than vi.

Re:MS Paint

[ari_j]

A saying becomes cliche if it contains sufficient truth: A picture's worth a thousand words.

Or, in the internet vernacular: This thread is worthless without pictures.

Re:MS Paint

[ichthus]

No no no. I wasn't making a comparison, or stating a preference. Maybe you never used win3.1/95/98.

This was a common error message when trying to open a simple txt file. Windows would complain that notepad wasn't capable of opening such a large file, so it would offer to open it in Wordpad instead.

Re:MS Paint

[wastedlife]

Wordpad handles many text files better as well, and not in a emacs vs nano/pico vs vi way or anything. For example, it might be Cisco using UNIX linebreaks or something, but if I tftp a config file to my workstation and try to open it in Notepad it is entirely broken. Not so in Wordpad. Then again, I find Notepad++ to be a much better text file editor than either, especially when working with a programming or markup language.

Re:MS Paint

[Anonymous Coward]

As a speaker (or student) of most of the Germanic languages, I'm a little confused about what your analogy was trying to prove. *I* think most of the languages are quite similar, in both vocabulary (Dutch-Swedish) and grammar (German-Dutch).

Perhaps you were trying to point out that something completely new, completely random, grew up or flourished in the midst of what was otherwise a homogenous (and boring) atmosphere. In that case, maybe it's better to liken the development of the GUI to the "anomaly" of Hungarian in the middle of Slavic and Germanic Indo-European languages, or Basque in the heart of Romance lands.

Although really, the GUI spontaneously being created would actually be much more like Nicaraguan Sign Language, but that's a little more obscure.

Re:MS Paint

[Xest]

This is why I think the Office 2007 UI is actually a good thing, many hate it but it simply seems to boil down to the fact that it's not what they're used to. The problem is, what they're used to is as you say only as it is for tradition.

The previous style of UI that is so prominent in applications across many platforms, OS' and types - that of your file menus, your toolbars is a decades old design, and it was really one of the first designs dating back to even console applications to an extent. It seems unlikely to me that with improved computing power, greater knowledge and the fact that it's unlikely we got the GUI right the first time around that more work should be done to look at a better way of doing the day to day UI of most applications so that we can start phasing in a much better method.

Microsoft did actually put a hell of a lot of money and research into the Office 2007 UI and I've found when you bother to give it a chance it really does let you be far more productive. It has some quirks that need sorting out certainly, but for a first iteration of a new UI it's not that bad. That said it's not even really that different, they've effectively just merged the file menu and the toolbars into one, realising there was duplication there, whilst also moving more commonly used features to your fingertips as you work and allowing auto-previewing of pretty much everything simply by hovering over menu options. They also seemed to have made a lot of common tasks that you'd previously have to automate yourself that could take a while to do via macros or just plain brute force into actual features that can be activated at the click of a button.

I think we can go much further than this, do I have an idea what? No, not really. There are suggestions that to improve the UI means improving the input - doing away with the mouse and switch to touch and gesture based methods, but I don't think we need to do anything that drastic. I think really we just need our UIs to be a bit more intelligent and again I think this is what Microsoft has tried to achieve (again, opinions vary on how successfully) - why have buttons sat cluttering a toolbar greyed out when you can't use that feature making it harder to spot the feature you want when you could just do away with them altogether in that context and have the UI better represent what you can actually do?

I'd rather not get into a debate about whether the Office 2007 UI is good or not, but I think it's worth considering the idea that what Microsoft was attempting - making the UI more intelligent, more suitable for the task at hand was a good step, a step that when you consider human distaste of change was quite risky but quite important also. I know other companies have made strides in UI improvements also, but I use Office 2007 as my case study here because Office is probably one of the most used application suites in the world, so a change there has more reprecussions than something perhaps still highly successful but in a smaller market (i.e. the Wii).

Re:MS Paint

[Hognoxious]

Well I have, actually.

Anybody with any sense uses wordpad to start with. It's marginally less shit.

Re:MS Paint

[tnok85]

At one point someone asked about the price... ...I cut the converted price and posted it in the Mac Write document I was typing. The guy with the watch calculator was frozen staring at the Mac. So was the rest of the group.

Just a small insight, they were most likely gaping at the price of the unit, just as we do today when we look at buying an Apple.

Re:MS Paint

[I_M_Noman]

they've effectively just merged the file menu and the toolbars into one, realising there was duplication there

You do realize that every toolbar button is a duplication of a menu choice, don't you?

Re:MS Paint

[I_M_Noman]

Maybe you never used Windows 3.x, but there was no Wordpad until Windows 95.

Re:MS Paint

[jonnycando]

uh, German does the same thing with numbers, so, "vier und zwanzig" Amseln gebacken in einem kuchen. dative case all that? Oh so hard to remember!

The boot-up splash screen

[Anonymous Coward]

Rather than seeing all the techie stuff scrolling by the screen, I think the Windows NT splash screen with its "loading" progress bar did a lot to NOT scare people who were normally scared of computers.

Re:The boot-up splash screen

[0100010001010011]

Um, you mean like the Mac?

Ah the days of watching the Extensions loading.

Re:The boot-up splash screen

[Chris Tucker]

"Ah the days of watching the Extensions loading."

I found the march of Extensions and Control Panels imbued an almost Zen contentment as each one of those little gems added more and more usefulness to the Mac OS.

And with enough of them, you had time to grab an extra cup of that sweet, sweet office coffee as the machine booted for the first time in the morning.

Re:The boot-up splash screen

[postbigbang]

1. WordStar/WordPerfect/Word
2. Visicalc/SuperCalc/123/Multiplan-Excel
3. AutoCad
4. dBase/Oracle7/MySQL
5. Duke Nukem/Wolfenstein 3D/Quake
6. Zelda.....WoW....etc with a branch to Second Life
7. Mozilla/Apache/Tomcat/II6 ad naseum
8. C/Java/php (note the absence of VB)
9. Napster/xTorrent/Amazon/iTunes/eBay/and other Business Distribution online apps
10. McAfee/Norton/AVG/etc.

Ten is too short a number for categories, but these IMHO all started billion dollar industry segments

Re:The boot-up splash screen

[EsJay]

That's an excellent list. Sadly, you oughta add VB.

Re:The boot-up splash screen

[that this is not und]

The caffeine jag after the fifth reboot of the morning, however, was never so sweet.

Occasionally real work could get done.

Re:The boot-up splash screen

[machine321]

And even more time to drink that coffee as you rebooted while holding down shift when one of them fuxxored the system.

Re:The boot-up splash screen

[rtb61]

Of course the only software missing in that list is Linux and it's central role in the birth and continuing growth of open source software. Hard to figure out what you would drop from the list to give it space. Obviously it has far greater influence than a minesweeper honourable mention but, then again you don't have an email client or email server on the list.

So where is multitasking, multiuser, etc. whilst in the background and not 'seen' by users it forms the basis of all shared computer activities.

Re:The boot-up splash screen

[knorthern knight]

> Of course the only software missing in that list
> is Linux and it's central role in the birth and
> continuing growth of open source software.

I'm a linux fanboi too, but the list is *APPLICATIONS* not operating systems.

Re:The boot-up splash screen

[Chris Tucker]

Nah! Once you finally got the load schedule tweaked just right, via Conflict Catcher, startup freezes were a thing of the past.

I was able to get my Mac safely loading a ton of Extensions and Control Panels after a day of messing with the load order. Once that was perfected, it never bombed or froze on startup.

I was also able to sneak a copy of SoundJam MP onto that same Mac. The streaming audio kept me sane for the few months of the horribly boring temp gig.

Re:The boot-up splash screen

[jamesmcm]

You mean GNU/Linux? Since it was the GNU project that was the birth of Free Software.

Re:The boot-up splash screen

[amn108]

Operating systems are applications of computers. Your ignorance is boring.

Re:The boot-up splash screen

[moonbender]

...
9. Napster/xTorrent/Amazon/iTunes/eBay/and other Business Distribution online apps

...

Ten is too short a number for categories, but these IMHO all started billion dollar industry segments

Actually, number 9 also threatens to shut down a billion dollar industry. ;)

Re:The boot-up splash screen

[bsDaemon]

I know, right! Without VB, how would we ever trace an IP address?

Re:The boot-up splash screen

[slyrat]

1. WordStar/WordPerfect/Word 2. Visicalc/SuperCalc/123/Multiplan-Excel 3. AutoCad 4. dBase/Oracle7/MySQL 5. Duke Nukem/Wolfenstein 3D/Quake 6. Zelda.....WoW....etc with a branch to Second Life 7. Mozilla/Apache/Tomcat/II6 ad naseum 8. C/Java/php (note the absence of VB) 9. Napster/xTorrent/Amazon/iTunes/eBay/and other Business Distribution online apps 10. McAfee/Norton/AVG/etc.

Ten is too short a number for categories, but these IMHO all started billion dollar industry segments

I like this list but I still think that some mention of a good quality text editor should be in there. I was thinking VI/EMACS/Visual Studio/etc. Essentially the tools that helped create all these great apps.

Re:The boot-up splash screen

[Anonymous Coward]

> Operating systems are applications of computers. Your ignorance is boring.

Ha!

I love you you whippersnappers just redefine something you don't understand, so you can pretend you're right!

Re:The boot-up splash screen

[ari_j]

I don't know that those changed my world so much. They may have been killer apps or billion-dollar industries, but my life has been changed by more simple, fundamental things:

1. GW-BASIC. When I discovered that the games I was already playing were right there for me to tinker with, an entire new world was opened to me. From there, I wanted to do more and more, and ended up learning about C and C++, compilers, etc. GW-BASIC was the program that opened the door into the world of programming for me.

2. Compuserve. That was the dial-up service that we found when I was young. The time on it was so very limited due to long distance fees, but the information that suddenly became available was a real eye-opener. My internet addiction started before Compuserve gave me internet access.

3. IRC. Once I was really on the internet, I could get all sorts of information by browsing through Yahoo's categories. But what connected me to the world was IRC. I was using IRC for a long time before ICQ came around and started the instant messenger craze. I even held off on getting an ICQ account for long enough that I got an ID in the 500,000 range, because I didn't see the point of it. After all, I had IRC. At any rate, IRC was how I connected to the outside world. Until I discovered MUSHing, my interaction with people from around the world, exposing me to ideas and conversations I may never have had in my corner of the world, was through IRC.

And that's really it. Everything else has, for me, been incremental or within one of those paradigms. (1) Control and program the computer. (2) Access information with the computer. (3) Communicate instantaneously with others using the computer. Producing documents was what the computer was all about, and since I grew up with them more or less around it has never surprised me or opened new doors for me to be able to edit images, put them into documents, or the like. That was just a logical extension of being able to type a document with XyWrite back in the day.

Re:The boot-up splash screen

[amn108]

Wake up you crashtest dummy - an operating system is an application of your computer. It is a classic English word. It is in fact you and all the other nerds who very much want to redefine what 'application' refers to - in their case some sort of software running on top of an operating system and which is not a game. However it is accurate that both games and so called 'application software' are all applications of an operating system.

Ignorant illiterates, is it any wonder you fight about "which programming language is better" and "which one is the fastest", when they cannot be classified as either fast or 'good', because as most linguists learn, each language allows best expression of a particular domain, and neither can it be fast nor slow, it is whatever runtime parses such language expression that displays the quality of speed and effective parsing. And is it any wonder you can't write decent code, you are like children with lisp, mangling terms and "re-inventing" them. As far as I am concerned, just about the only body i would trust with writing source code is a space agency or some sort of overly cryptic and serious mission critical contract bearer. All the rest of us are just playing in the mud with our "object oriented programming" and our 'applications'.

And mods, thanks. I deserve the 'flamebait' label.

Re:The boot-up splash screen

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot Quattro-pro. It was pretty cool.

Re:The boot-up splash screen

[yoden]

For me, it was more like "c'mon, don't crash now...!" (being 6 years old, I did some unfortunate things to that mac...)

Re:The boot-up splash screen

[Hognoxious]

an operating system is an application of your computer.

No it isn't.

It is a classic English word.

So is "arse". Does that mean arses are applications too?

And mods, thanks. I deserve the 'flamebait' label.

Actually you don't, but in the absence of "moronic" and "laughably ill informed" we have to make do with what we've got.

Re:The boot-up splash screen

[Anonymous Coward]

Wake up you crashtest dummy - an operating system is an application of your computer. It is a classic English word. It is in fact you and all the other nerds who very much want to redefine what 'application' refers to

Ha! again. It's really delicious to see you call someone else 'ignorant' while waving your own ignorance like a flag.

There's a reason developers divide systems programming from application programming - because if systems are considered applications, it's pointless even making a distinction. It would all be just "programming." Applications are programs that apply to specific problem domains. Systems support applications in a general-purpose way.

Thanks for playing, tuck your head back between your ass-cheeks, and shuffle off to Lamerville!

Re:The boot-up splash screen

[amn108]

What planet are you from? More importantly what is your spoken language, coz it aint English.

Everybody but you knows that an operating system is an application of computer hardware (to let a human operate it conveniently).

As for the rest of your acidic blabber, i will just leave it.

P.S. What does 'arse' has to do with ANYTHING I have said? It is just a place you are pulling your worthless remarks from.

Re:The boot-up splash screen

[amn108]

There's a reason developers divide systems programming from application programming - because if systems are considered applications, it's pointless even making a distinction. It would all be just "programming." Applications are programs that apply to specific problem domains. Systems support applications in a general-purpose way.

I can see what you are trying to stress here, but you are far too narrow-minded in your attempt at explaining the status-quo. Only a most generic system can be considered distinct from being an 'application'. Such system however is an abstract. Real systems, no matter how generic they are, are supported by a base. An operating system is supported by the hardware it is designed to operate, and is thus a 'hardware application' or simpler put a 'computer application'. That was my original message. I tend to loose temper and for that I must apologize. Let us now all chill. The ignorance must stop though, and I am confident this time around I explained VERY CLEARLY where is the difference and likeness between systems and applications. You tend to narrow the definition to a point where it serves purpose only as part of a very niche subdomain. I broaden it enough so that we all can be confident about talking about the same thing when we think we do. I think a broader view never hurt anyone, while the opposite case has been known to happen far too often.

Windows is an example of computer application, more precisely defined as an 'operating system', a system indeed. An operating system is hence an example of computer application. Pure logic, now what is the problem?

Re:The boot-up splash screen

[CrashNBrn]

I recall being subjected to Telnet on the Mac's when I visited College friends in the states (early 90s) and it crashed and crashed .. oh yeah crashed :-) And if it didn't crash, there was this odd "freeze" behaviour, that you might as well consider a crash - required a restart.

Oddly enough, when I used DOS (NCSA) Telnet all the way up til 1999, it never crashed once.

Re:The boot-up splash screen

[Anonymous Coward]

The ignorance must stop though, and I am confident this time around I explained VERY CLEARLY where is the difference and likeness between systems and applications. You tend to narrow the definition to a point where it serves purpose only as part of a very niche subdomain. I broaden it enough so that we all can be confident about talking about the same thing when we think we do. I think a broader view never hurt anyone, while the opposite case has been known to happen far too often.

And thus, you show you really have no idea what you're talking about.

Just keep on arguing, maybe someday you'll be right (but not today).

Re:The boot-up splash screen

[amn108]

Are you stupid? What word in the paragraph you did not understand? If you have no time to read, you should definitely not have time to reply.

Re:The boot-up splash screen

[Anonymous Coward]

You're arguing from what the dictionary says "application" can mean. I'm arguing from established usage in the industry. We have this thing called "context," you know.

Sorry, dude, but you are flat-out wrong. Operating systems are not applications programs, though most OS distributions now include applications as part of the package.

Look it up in any book on computer science. Look it up on Wikipedia fer chrissakes:

"Application software is any tool that functions and is operated by means of a computer, with the purpose of supporting or improving the software user's work. In other words, it is the subclass of computer software that employs the capabilities of a computer directly and thoroughly to a task that the user wishes to perform. This should be contrasted with system software(infrastructure) or middleware (computer services/ processes integrators), which is involved in integrating a computer's various capabilities, but typically does not directly apply them in the performance of tasks that benefit the user.
...
Typical examples of 'software applications' are word processors, spreadsheets, media players and database applications.

Re:The boot-up splash screen

[amn108]

C'mon do you really expect me to bow down before your Wikipedia quoting skills? The good news is the article is in fact very good, it just seems to me you just read it right to left :-) There are so many ways you can interpret it, not in the least because of the very issue here - mangling terms. But I see there is no agreement here. That is fine, sometimes the point is to agree on disagreeing.

Re:The boot-up splash screen

[Anonymous Coward]

> That is fine, sometimes the point is to agree on disagreeing.

A mature, reasonable person would just say "oh, I didn't fully understand what the term meant - thanks for educating me." but you won't do that, because it would bruise your ego too badly. Don't worry, the day will come when somebody will throughly beat you with a humility stick!

Re:The boot-up splash screen

[amn108]

A mature, reasonable person would understand that the world is not black and white. And I tried to settle with explaining you that. The problem with people like you is that there are too many of you, who believe in bruised egos and the world where they educate everyone who objects to their malfunctioning reason. Why should you educate me? Because you quote Wikipedia articles? Have you actually read any serious material on the subject? And if you did, how do you prove it? Student chooses the teacher, not the other way around. Time will come, perhaps I will beat you with a stick myself.

Being an anonymous coward, coming and frantically checking whether your little opinion has been disputed and retaliating beyond measure fits your profile perfectly though. Next time, get a user account, so you will not miss on useful education. Only ignorant fools quote wikipedia, while educated people write those articles instead.

Now you can finally shut up, I hope. But by all means, have the last word, where you try to explain me once again how I should heed to your wisdom. We have failed to convince each other, but I no longer try to convince you, so I said let us agree on disagreeing, which was a way of saying let us both shut up. But on Internet there is only one rule, it seems - the rule of the last word. Have it.

Re:The boot-up splash screen

[Anonymous Coward]

> A mature, reasonable person would understand that the world is not black and white.

I understand that - I also understand that in industry, specific terms are used for a reason... one which you seem to miss completely.

> Why should you educate me?

Because you are ignorant of industry terminology and don't know what you're talking about?

> Because you quote Wikipedia articles?

I only pointed to Wp because you very obviously didn't even bother to do the most basic research into the topic you claim authority on.

> Have you actually read any serious material on the subject? And if you did, how do you prove it? Student chooses the teacher, not the other way around.

I went to college for computer science, and learned what the terms actually mean. I don't have anything to prove; I'm just going to let "self-taught" bozos like you continue to spout off in arrogance and ignorance!

> Now you can finally shut up, I hope. But by all means, have the last word, where you try to explain me once again how I should heed to your wisdom.

For the last time, it's not MY wisdom - it's accepted usage which you seem quite oblivious to! GOD I hate having to work with ass-clowns like you... you're sooooo much smarter than everyone else. In fact, you're so smart, you'll come up with some tortured logic to somehow preserve your conviction that you're right!

Well, you're not. You are completely wrong about what application software is. Suck it up.

P.S. I post anonymously because the mods are usually on crack

Re:The boot-up splash screen

[Hognoxious]

"an application of computer hardware" is a completely unidiomatic expression; no eductated native speaker would use it. Even if it wasn't, you should learn that certain words used in a specific technical context have a meaning different from their common meaning as used by laymen like yourself.

http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/A/application.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_applications
compare with
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_system

http://www.yourdictionary.com/application

http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/51745

Do you see word, excel and powerpoint on here? http://marketshare.hitslink.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=8

What does 'arse' has to do with ANYTHING I have said?

One, you claimed that because a word exists, it means you're free to invent meanings for it. When (or if) you grow up you'll lear that it's called "giving a counter example".

Two, everything you said and ever will say is shit, because you're the worst kind of thick bastard - the kind who doesn't realise it.

So on the evidence, it's you that can't speak English, you arrogant little pillock.

Re:The boot-up splash screen

[amn108]

Umm, exactly why should I be looking for "word, excel and powerpoint" on that page?

Re:The boot-up splash screen

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you stupid?

Because if you lump operating systems in with applications, applications would be lumped in with operating systems.

Re:The boot-up splash screen

[Anonymous Coward]

No, they wouldn't. There are different kind of applications - word processors, compilers, chess players, and operating systems to name a few. Not all [kinds of] applications are operating systems obviously, even assuming the opposite statement - "operating systems are applications" - is valid.

"to apply" - "to make use of", "to put to use", "to employ for purpose" etc. Look it anywhere, I am not even going to sweat to put a link here.

So, an "operating system" applies computer hardware. A "desktop application" applies an operating system. A fusebox is a system that applies several other systems, most notably the electrical grid system.

Granted, we don't use such language orally much, but for everything that is worth anything in the delicate field of computer science, particularly formal grammar and parser theories and documentation of these theories, I would say it is goddamn important not to mutate and dillute the semantics of potentially ambiguous terms more than you already have (and are pretty happy about, probably never having written any such documentation yourself).

I never said it is actually useful to refer to operating systems as "applications". What I was stressing was that the statement "operating systems are applications" is valid semantically and logically, and its validity might prove to be useful in many contexts, Slashdot discussions being one of them.

Also, as you can see, the terms "system" and "application" are far from being mutually exclusive, also part of my point. All operating systems are applications but not all applications are operating systems obviously.

Now, you may think I am a looney, but logic is a bitch. The funniest part, and I mentioned this once already, that ALL your references are absolutely correct. Indeed "application software" refers to word processors, etc etc. What I am getting at is there is more meaning to applications than usually implied. Is it so hard to see?

I am not up for more verbal acrobatics here and insults (and I sincerely apologize for mine, i was naturally furious), so I am unsubscribing myself from more of the same by posting anonymously.

Re:The boot-up splash screen

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, you may think I am a looney, but logic is a bitch. The funniest part, and I mentioned this once already, that ALL your references are absolutely correct. Indeed "application software" refers to word processors, etc etc. What I am getting at is there is more meaning to applications than usually implied. Is it so hard to see?

Of course it's not hard to see. The problem is that it's unprecedented, unwarranted, non-standard usage of the term.

Walk into any software production house and tell the senior programmers that operating systems are applications. They'll look at you like you're nuts, or maybe just shake their heads and walk away.

Applications are meant to "apply" to specific problem domains. Operating systems do not - they are an enabling technology, a supporting abstraction layer. Nobody runs an OS just to run an OS, because it doesn't solve any problems (unless you're a Linux fanboi who just likes dicking around in low-level system software).

One last time, you don't know what you're talking about, and that's why you look like a fool deriding others for their 'ignorance.'

Redefining Addiction

[DJLuc1d]

World of Warcraft... Who needs to leave the house anyways ?

Re:Redefining Addiction

[donaldm]

World of Warcraft... Who needs to leave the house anyways ?

Prior to WoW we had games like Hack that had highly detailed ASCII graphics. Boy was that a great time waster I only got out of the dungeon once.

Re:Redefining Addiction

[Anonymous Coward]

Boy was that a great time waster I only got out of the dungeon once.

Let me guess, your "<" key didn't work?

On One Page

[russlar]

http://www.itnews.com.au/Tools/Print.aspx?CIID=146459

All on one page

[Anonymous Coward]

All on one page printer link: here.

Tie for first...

[viyh]

For me it's either "vi" or "screen".

Re:Tie for first...

[fermion]

Seriously.

I leanred ed on a teletype. vi changed everything.

Shape table on the Apple were the next big change in my life.

Although I am sure 123 and all the clones are interesting, and Excel does deserve a place of it's own, visicalc changed the way I think.

Same thing for Mathematics.

I am not going to say anything about WYSIWG editing, because I truly think that combining content and presentation is a bad thing. It was a good idea, but it shouldn't be done on a regular basis. For any non trivial project, content and presentation has to be kept separate. I blame the fact that it isn't for all the bad code in the world.

Autodesk inventor was an excellent way to migrate from the drawing board to the computer. However Solidworks and later Inventor actually provided the means by onw which should draw on the computer. There is no reason to pretend that the computer is a drawing board.

It is kind of the same with C++. Lets us look at coding by modeling the world, but does not hide the code of the model behind arbitrary gibberish.

Anti virus software is very important because it allows us to used the cheap PC. Without it we have to buy the drones expensive computers.

Re:Tie for first...

[RiotingPacifist]

emacs has a mode for that!

Re:Tie for first...

[viyh]

Get off my lawn! *shakes fist* :P

Re:Tie for first...

[TheRaven64]

Interesting that you speak against WYSIWYG for combining presentation and content, but in favour of VisiCalc, which does exactly the same. It's a shame Microsoft copied 123 and not Improv.

Re:Tie for first...

[Kz]

when Improv appeared, excel was already a best-selling on the mac.

Re:Tie for first...

[Xtifr]

TECO, dude, TECO! Oh, and get off my lawn! :)

Re:Tie for first...

[Xtifr]

Given that vi and emacs both date back to 1976, according to Wikipedia, I'm not sure who is supposed to be on whose lawn here. :)

For me it's compilers

[OrangeTide]

The earliest C and Pascal compilers on a home computer really changed the landscape of who had access to serious software development tools. I believe this is what made the difference and created a vibrant Shareware scene.

Re:For me it's compilers

[jd]

True enough. I'd also put Norton Guides or the ORIGINAL Norton Utilities ahead of Norton Anti-Virus. Basil's CopyAll and Ripoff 9 changed things in the anti-piracy scene, rendering most copy protection obsolete and forcing vendors to make software people were willing to pay for. For a while.

Zork I, Wizardry and (gasp!) Microsoft Flight Simulator changed the expectations of the gaming market, and ultimately the gaming market dictated the hardware produced.

Superior Software Speech! was the first serious attempt at an all-software speech synthesizer. That, in turn, started opening the computing world to whole new markets. (There would be no car navigation systems today without these kinds of pioneering efforts.)

Although RiscOS isn't technically an application, it did shatter the mythology that home computers could not multi-task or be user-friendly.

Re:For me it's compilers

[jd]

Oh, and MUD I. Without which, there would be no MUDs, MUSHes, MMORGs, or much of any other gaming online.

Re:For me it's compilers

[eulernet]

Nope, the compilers that revolutioned compilation were Borland's Turbo compilers (and Megamax compilers on 68K platform).
Compiling took only a few seconds, even on the slowest computers.
Before that, it was painful to compile even the smallest piece of code.

TurboPascal also provided an impressive debugger, compared to Microsoft's Debug at this time.

Later, Watcom introduced 32 bits compilation on PC.
And it seems that Delphi was the leader before MS bought all the team to create .NET.

Re:For me it's compilers

[Stormwatch]

Zork I, Wizardry and (gasp!) Microsoft Flight Simulator changed the expectations of the gaming market

As usual, Microsoft didn't create anything new: FS was licensed from subLOGIC.

Re:For me it's compilers

[that this is not und]

I'd also put Norton Guides or the ORIGINAL Norton Utilities ahead of Norton Anti-Virus.

It's a book:

"The Peter Norton Programmer's Guide to the IBM PC."

Calls out all the DOS interrupts and how to code with them, etc.

I think of 'Peter Norton' now as a bitmap on a box. That all he is. That's all he needs to be, of course, because he's done enough, and earned his reward.

Re:For me it's compilers

[OrangeTide]

Perhaps you are arguing that the IBM PC wasn't a home computer? When I say early Pascal and C compilers I'm including Borland's inexpensive and professional quality products. P-code "compilers" for TI/99, Atari ST, etc were no more than educational tools in my opinion.

Re:For me it's compilers

[techno-vampire]

Nope, the compilers that revolutioned compilation were Borland's Turbo compilers

No. Like it or not, the compiler that was most important was the first COBOL compiler. Why? Because for the first time, you could take a deck (punched cards, remember?) of source code, compile it on different computers with different instruction sets and architectures and end up with programs that gave the exact same results for the same data.

Re:For me it's compilers

[faffod]

Good point, but wrong language. ForTran outdates Cobol. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_programming_languages

Re:For me it's compilers

[jd]

Norton Guides was a TSR program for DOS that allowed you to get context-sensitive programming information. I found the assembler guide to be an essential tool. The Guides may have used material from the book, but unless you know something about TSRs that I don't, the book wasn't what was running on my computer. :)

Re:For me it's compilers

[Hognoxious]

I had Norton Utilites back in the win95 days, and it blew chunks wholesale. I had one of his books for win95, I forget which, and that was crap too.

Re:For me it's compilers

[jgrahn]

Although RiscOS isn't technically an application, it did shatter the mythology that home computers could not multi-task or be user-friendly.

That was in 1988, according to the Wikipedia. The Commodore Amiga was released in 1985 or so, with the extremely popular cheap home computer model A500 in 1987.

(No that the Amiga shattered any mythology, either. The mainstream preferred to pretend anything but the IBM PC and MS-DOS was a toy, best ignored.)

Re:For me it's compilers

[Cederic]

Sadly I recall only too well the 15 minute compilation times using Borland Pascal 7 on a 386 that stopped me getting any useful work done.

The Turbo compilers were fast, the debugger was excellent, but for any significant code-base a full recompile was far from 'fast'.

Re:For me it's compilers

[R.Morton]

For me I would have to say Debug that came with DOS really good program for hand assembly on any 2/3/486 Computer from back in the day, Could not afford VBdos or Quick Basic 7.1 PDS at all :(.

R.Morton

 

Lotus 1-2-3?

[gilgoomesh]

The article gives the nod to Lotus 1-2-3 over VisiCalc? Great -- award the theives and ignore the innovations that *actually* changed the world. Nice job.

Re:Lotus 1-2-3?

[HateBreeder]

There's an earlier (#7 i think) mention of Microsoft Office.... I thought Excel was part of office, making either point #3 or #7 redundant.

Re:Lotus 1-2-3?

[Anonymous Coward]

How did they ignore VisiCalc?

Re:Lotus 1-2-3?

[phantomfive]

Lotus 123 gets mentioned a lot in these types of lists because it was the first killer app for the IBM-PC (and probably because it made the creators a dumptruck load of money). Visicalc was missing a lot of essential features that Lotus123 ended up having. Or so people say, personally I still have absolutely no need for a spreadsheet program.

Re:Lotus 1-2-3?

[deniable]

FTFA:

The first major spreadsheet application was VisiCalc for the Apple. But when IBM got into the PC market Mitch Kapor, who knew the VisiCalc developers, took the idea and built Lotus 1-2-3 for DOS. Today that would have landed him a shedload of legal fees but instead he built Lotus into a US$3.5bn company.

Re:Lotus 1-2-3?

[colinrichardday]

MS Office got the nod not for its components, but for how they worked together.

Re:Lotus 1-2-3?

[AshboryBass]

Here's a great list of software innovations by David A. Wheeler:
http://www.dwheeler.com/innovation/innovation.html

In line with your comment, he focuses on the innovations rather than with what specific applications they became popular.

Re:Lotus 1-2-3?

[mark-t]

So 123 might be the first spreadsheet to have made its developers rich, but what has that got to do with actually changing computing, really... on a global scale?

Visicalc did it first. Before Visicalc, the only people who had computers were hobbyists and computer scientists. When visicalc came out, people who previously had never even imagined owning their own computer were suddenly interested. I remember hearing one story of an accountant who was watching a visicalc demo that was taking place in a window display. After watching what it could do, he went inside, and said "I just saw that box do in a few minutes what I spent days setting up!", so he slams down his Visa gold mastercard and buys an Apple ][+ computer and Visicalc at the same time. Suddenly, you didn't need to know a lot about computers to own one.

If Visicalc didn't forever change computing, then I can't imagine what ever did.

Re:Lotus 1-2-3?

[jedidiah]

It makes sense to mention the apps that caused computers to be sold.

In this respect, Lotus123 wasn't just a "knock off" like MSOffice was. Lotus
built a market rather than just coming along and muscling in on someone else's
market once it was built.

Although any mention of Lotus123 should include Viscalc as the progentior.

This is why Netscape should have been mentioned in place of Mosaic.

Mosaic was nice in it's own way and helped start the ball rolling but
it was Netscape (like Lotus) that ultimately brought the idea to the
masses.

Re:Lotus 1-2-3?

[publiclurker]

There was a computer shop about 2 blocks from my high school. While I was in there looking at an Atari game, I saw a guy come in and said a friend told him about this Visicalc thing. About 5 minutes later, he was carrying a computer out the door.

Re:Lotus 1-2-3?

[westlake]

The article gives the nod to Lotus 1-2-3 over VisiCalc?

The fundamental problem is that the Apple II was an eminently lousy platform for office work - and never gained much traction there.

Re:Lotus 1-2-3?

[centuren]

Mosaic was nice in it's own way and helped start the ball rolling but
it was Netscape (like Lotus) that ultimately brought the idea to the
masses.

Netscape was also a major commercial application that was released as open source, certainly the first of that kind that I noticed. I'm not saying it changed everything; I certainly don't buy the "without this there would be no ______" line for any program (because without "this" there could just have easily been something else that lead to "______"). Still notable, IMHO.

Re:Lotus 1-2-3?

[91degrees]

Absolutely. The application overshadowed the platform. People would go into stores and ask to buy "A Visicalc" (the stores being sufficiently used to this that they'd sell them an Apple computer with the software).

Re:Lotus 1-2-3?

[Tablizer]

The fundamental problem is that the Apple II was an eminently lousy platform for office work - and never gained much traction there.

Ironically, it's what propelled Apple to the 2nd spot for a year or two. It used to be 3rd in sales, behind TRS-80 and PET (world-wide). But VisiCalc gave it a jump ahead. The "Rise and Fall of Commodore" describes how biz people would come into early computer shops and ask for "a VisiCalc machine", which was only on Apples at first. Apple would probably be a dead company today if not for VisiCalc, because it largely funded Mac R&D.

In fact, the reason it was done on Apple first was that the TRS and PET were tied up on other projects at the development shop, leaving only an Apple machine.
         

Re:Lotus 1-2-3?

[ildon]

Your innovation is irrelevant if it doesn't reach the masses and is forgotten about in a couple months/years.

Re:Lotus 1-2-3?

[TheRaven64]

Mosaic gets far too much credit. It was almost a direct copy of WorldWideWeb, right down to the UI. It just added the img tag (which it did in a stupid and broken way, putting the fall-back text in an attribute instead of the text, so that non-graphical browsers still had to be aware of the tag to render it correctly, breaking the spirit of HTML).

Re:Lotus 1-2-3?

[VGPowerlord]

Although any mention of Lotus123 should include Viscalc as the progentior.

If you'd read the article, you'd notice that VisiCalc is mentioned in the Lotus 123 description.

Re:Lotus 1-2-3?

[Hognoxious]

Before Visicalc, the only people who had computers were hobbyists and computer scientists.

ORLY? I'll give you a pass on Bletchley Park, but computers were in commercial use well before PCs were even a dream.

Re:Lotus 1-2-3?

[mark-t]

Of course they were in commercial use.... I said *PEOPLE*... as in people owning their own private computers. Prior to visicalc, the only people who owned such things in their own homes were hobbyists and computer scientists. In the space of about a year or two, everything changed. Forever.

Re:Lotus 1-2-3?

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny how it's stealing now, but when you illegally download it you can't help but force down everyone's throat the old "zomg its not stealing its infringement!" line.

internet explorer

[postmortem]

activeX malware and exploitation worms made huge difference in our lives

Re:internet explorer

[sakdoctor]

Bonzi buddy.

How did people live before they had a malware purple ape on their desktop?

Re:internet explorer

[superslacker87]

Oh the days of ignorance and when system administrators didn't bother locking out the computer from installs. I installed that at work back in 2000 and was on Amazon surfing for a book called The Multiorgasmic Man: Sexual Secrets Every Man Should Know. Bonzi Buddy popped up and naturally my speakers were blaring and decided to tell the entire cubicle section I was in what I was looking up.

Re:internet explorer

[jd]

They were too busy dealing with the Cascade and Headbanger virus to care.

Re:internet explorer

[auLucifer]

I remember back in the mid-late 90s before bonzi buddy became the little purple ape. It was a series of short animations staring a squirrel, or something similar, that would interact with your desktop. He'd suffer relationship issues, duke it out with a regular adversary and play with your mouse (I think. I'm sure some of the episodes were interactive). He never asked for your personal details, never contained viruses and was nothing more then an animated series.

Ah those were the days

Re:internet explorer

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

...and was on Amazon surfing for a book called The Multiorgasmic Man: Sexual Secrets Every Man Should Know

Was it any good?

Re:internet explorer

[superslacker87]

Never bought it, honestly.

Re:internet explorer

[mattack2]

According to Wikipedia, it was a green parrot.

(Never having to use Windows regularly, I had to look up what you guys were talking about.)

Re:internet explorer

[Anonymous Coward]

Good book, all should read it.

Re:internet explorer

[rantingkitten]

You may jest, but consider how much money some people have made by making careers of removing that crap from people's Windows computers. Bonzi Buddy and his malware ilk have helped many freelancers and consultants earn a tidy sum. Even today, if I need a little extra cash, I might take a quick twenty minute, 100 dollar job purging crapware from some Windows machine.

Re:internet explorer

[auLucifer]

A green parrot? Man I must be getting old

Re:internet explorer

[Opportunist]

Ahhh, yes, the good old days when the people who installed malware on their computer and the people who had to suffer from it were still the same...

Sometimes I'm tempted to create an "old school" virus that trashes the infected machine instead of pestering everyone else on the internet, just to educate people, of course.

Re:internet explorer

[westlake]

activeX malware and exploitation worms made huge difference in our lives

Have they really?

I sometimes wonder.

Of the billion or so PC users on the planet, about 900 million or so run Windows. They are productive at work. They have fun at home.

It struck me that over the past no "household appliance" has troubled me less over the last fifteen years than the Windows PC.

Re:internet explorer

[Moleculo]

Actually, why hasn't someone done a benign version of that already? (Or have they?) A virus using whatever infection vectors true malware does, with no payload other than a message that informs the user exactly how they got infected -- "If this was a real virus, you could've lost your data when you opened that suspicious email attachment/allowed ActiveX from this sketchy website/failed to secure port XX with a firewall." White-hat involuntary pentesting but on the global scale of something like Conficker.

Re:internet explorer

[westlake]

I was on Amazon surfing for a book called The Multiorgasmic Man: Sexual Secrets Every Man Should Know
Was it any good?

If it was, would he be spending his weekends posting to Slashdot?

Re:internet explorer

[Opportunist]

Dunno, but do you really think it would have any kind of impact? People would gasp for a moment, then realize nothing was "really" damaged, then go on with their unthinking click-the-monkey-and-win behaviour.

MMOs taught me something. If you don't lose anything when you die, you don't try to avoid it...

Re:internet explorer

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been a Mac user for a few years, and I'm out of the loop on that sort of stuff. Where can I find some guides for learning to do this? I could use the money.

-- laid off programmer

Re:internet explorer

[yerktoader]

I never got anything extra for my hour long(or more) call times when I helped a customer uninstall Bonzi Buddy. Man, those assholes...If I had lived near their offices I would have personally kicked at least one if not the entire staff [cartman voice]sqwaa, in the nuuhts[/cartman voice].

I once spent well over an hour trying to fix this this eldery woman's PC. It was one of the first times I tried - and we were an ISP, so this wasn't our deal at all but she was old and I knew few others would try. Having no luck with the add/remove programs, I went to the website...The website said to uninstall/reinstall. But of course that didn't work. So I went to the "contact us" section, which referred customers to an email address. So I did a whois on their domain and found an address and a phone number. I called the phone number, went to the tech support section, which promptly informed customers to their "support" section of the website - yeah, the single paragraph of uninstall/reinstall. So I called back and went through every other option on their phone system until I found an area with a lot of sub-options...I finally got through to a voice after about 20 minutes of trying, five of those dedicated to digging through that one subsection....All the while with the very patient and nice but confused and unhappy elderly woman on the other line.

When I finally got this person, I told him the name of the very large cable company I worked for, and the infinite number of PC's I had encountered that were severely damaged or outright tanked from their malware. I informed him that I had the lady's phone number, and she had mine - if there was any trouble getting the software removed, I promised to assist her in contacting all of the relevant entities such as the BBB, BSA and more...Needless to say the problem was fixed.

Re:internet explorer

[ClosedSource]

On the other hand, those who created the insecure Internet do suffer for it, so perhaps there's some justice after all.

Re:internet explorer

[Anonymous Coward]

Even today, if I need a little extra cash, I might take a quick twenty minute, 100 dollar job purging crapware from some Windows machine.

You mean a Windows machine with crapware takes just twenty minutes to load?

Re:internet explorer

[Tenebrousedge]

In order to spread like a virus, you need to behave like a virus...do you want your computer playing irritating sounds and spamming the internet? What exactly distinguishes Conficker and a 'benign' botnet?

Re:internet explorer

[BitZtream]

Yet you apparently didn't learn that you shouldn't be doing that at work, especially in cubicals, especially with speakers turned on.

You got lucky and missed out on the 'Hey everybody, I'm looking at gay porno' one apparently.

Re:Internet Explorer

[Cederic]

Sorry, going off-topic here.. You actually pro-actively pay your ISP on a monthly basis? Instead of, I don't know, setting up an automated periodic electronic payment for the correct amount?

I'm finding myself confused and bewildered.

Re:Internet Explorer

[drinkypoo]

I like to maintain the illusion of choice. Also, sometimes I like to use one payment source, sometimes another. In any case, I'm normally able to do it via the web with a few clicks.

Re:Internet Explorer

[ascendant]

surely the user agent switcher works?

Re:internet explorer

[Anonymous Coward]

How the heck do you disinfect a Windows machine in 20 minutes? You have to nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure. Seriously format / clean install.

Re:internet explorer

[thexile]

This bring back memories when my country only news outlet reported Bonzi Buddy as a great software and even tell viewers to install. Purple ape was cool.

Killer? Really?

[eldavojohn]

The term 'killer app' gets tossed around quite liberally these days. Nearly every piece of software released seems to be pitched as having the potential to send shockwaves throughout the IT world. In reality, there have been precious few applications which have truly changed the computing industry over the years.

Gosh, all this time I thought the term "killer app" meant that it was on course to unseat the long disputed champion of that application realm--you know, kill something. Prime targets being those applications that rested on their laurels as king of the hill for far too long. I guess I was wrong. I suppose there's no point in continuing to complain that 'killer' is just a marketing word used exclusively to generate hype but, sure, let's throw it retroactively over the apps that historically impressed and 'wowed' us the most.

I'm outraged

[goldaryn]

Whither, Mavis Beacon?

Re:I'm outraged

[ciderVisor]

Next, they'll say Betty Crocker isn't real, either.

Re:I'm outraged

[TinBromide]

I love mavis beacon. 45WPM by the 2nd grade!

Re:I'm outraged

[Higgs_Bozon]

illegitimate niece of Aunt Jemima, I am told.

Re:I'm outraged

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

I think I'm the only person to not like Mavis Beacon. Everyone wanted to play Mavis. Kids loved it. But me? I wanted to actually type something worthwhile and in the process, learn how to type. So, I worked on my science reports. Worked out pretty well for me, actually. WPM Doesn't really matter if you type as fast as you can think. Unless you're in such a niche job that you actually are typing in printed text into a word processor.

Re:I'm outraged

[elrous0]

She's busy on her new series "Mavis Beacon Teaches Unemployment."

Re:I'm outraged

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I have a copy of "Mavis Beacon Gets RSI" somewhere in my closet...

Number One is Correct

[rolfwind]

If they're saying it bought about the World Wide Web, aka the internet (to most nontechy people). I wouldn't say it wasn't inevitable without mosaic, but since it was first, it probably can be credited with making the computer a must-have device in the home, perhaps even superior to the TV in time to come. That surge also probably helped bring the computer prices down to what we have now instead of looking at $1500-2000 systems as midrange/economical, as well as allowing niches like netbooks and smartphones.

When decades of history pass, the memorable inventions that changed the world will personal computer (not strictly the PC as known today), then the WWW (via Mosaic), and I daresay wikipedia in chronological order.

There are a lot of other important apps, but none that touched so many lives directly and in a positive way.

Re:Number One is Correct

[ciderVisor]

I think it's easy to forget just how amazing Yahoo was initially. A huge tree of knowledge that could be expanded by Joe Public. The main difference between it and Google (or Alta Vista before it) was that it relied on human editors rejecting crap links rather than automated spiders and clever algorithms.

Is there room today for an ad-sponsored user-submission, human-edited Yahookipedia ?

I miss the old Yahoo categorized listings. Do they still exist in some shape or form ?

Re:Number One is Correct

[Anonymous Coward]

I daresay wikipedia

Meh. Wikipedia is only interesting in that it's a big part of the centralization of content on a few big websites, and the general relinquishing of control over your own stuff that is the key to "Web 2.0" user-generated content. The Web is a very different place now than it was in the late 90s, when the good information was mostly on .edu sites which you found through shitty search engines, and everyone carved out their own little fiefdom on a GeoCities page. In some ways, I miss that.

Wikipedia gets really interesting if you look at the other languages, which are mostly independent of the English Wikipedia. The German one is particularly high-quality, with less fancruft bullshit and more serious information, particularly on history and science. Nonetheless, each one is controlled by its own mostly anonymous group of wankers who control information as it suits them in a manner which is very much obscured. It's a nifty tool for now simply because it's convenient and mostly accurate, but it's not the way forward.

Something more like a traditional encyclopedia, with a clearly identified expert or two acting as an editor of each article, would be far more interesting. There are, for example, vast swaths of historical research barely covered by Wikipedia, English or otherwise. I rather suspect that most people qualified to write about such things are entirely uninterested in slapping up a decent article, just to see it deleted, vandalized, or incorrectly edited by the self-appointed mob. There's a ton of information out there in books, information which should be on the web, but will never be in Wikipedia.

Re:Number One is Correct

[Random Destruction]

I miss the old Yahoo categorized listings. Do they still exist in some shape or form?

They sure do!

Re:Number One is Correct

[gmuslera]

Probably the only hit in a long list. Definately graphical www was one of the most world changing app, and Mosaic (or something similar around that dates) started it all. My list would include also fast compressors (pkarc? pkzip?), wiki, spreadsheets, some other parts of the basic internet infrastructure (sendmail, bind), perl, and probably Lisa desktop.

Of course, there are history (like in the 1st apps that marked that something was the way to go) and things that put that trend to the masses. In the second acception, i would put Windows, Netscape, Wikipedia, MySQL and Linux.

Re:Number One is Correct

[tbuskey]

I'd put email up before web. I started on the internet in 1986. There was no www, no gopher. There was email, ftp, telnet and usenet.

Only companies doing government work or colleges could connect.

FWIW, Mosaic was spun into Mosaic Communications after everyone left for Netscape. Mosaic was licensed to various companies, including Microsoft. Mosaic was the basis of Internet Explorer.

Instant Messanging?

[Ryan Stortz]

This article seems to have forgotten some of the biggest players in the social revolution of the business PC.

ICQ (and later AIM) should be on the list. How many people here can still remember their original ICQ number? How many are running something similar right now?

Re:Instant Messanging?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right, ICQ for sure.

64930086

haven't used that for about 10 years but can still remember it clearly.

Re:Instant Messanging?

[crafty.munchkin]

Oh god. I can still quote my ICQ number and I haven't even logged in for something like 10 years!

Re:Instant Messanging?

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember it? I'm still using it.

Re:Instant Messanging?

[Anonymous Coward]

> ICQ (and later AIM) should be on the list

They shouldn't, but IRC should.

Re:Instant Messanging?

[Tokerat]

Not gonna lie, I'm logged into ICQ right now. It's not my original number, though, and NO ONE ever uses it.

Re:Instant Messanging?

[mdwh2]

I can remember my ICQ number from 10 years ago, but I can't remember the usernames I've used for other IM programs more recently to that...

Re:Instant Messanging?

[rantingkitten]

I hear ICQ is still amazingly popular in some places, like Brasil, and large portions of Eastern Europe. Actually, I used to work with a girl from Bulgaria, and she used ICQ exclusively, because that's all her friends ever used. When I asked her about it she was somewhat surprised to hear that it was no longer popular in the US.

Re:Instant Messanging?

[smcn]

71799749. But I don't use any instant messaging anymore.

Re:Instant Messanging?

[Random Destruction]

wow thats a big icq number, noob :D

2951034

Re:Instant Messanging?

[vikarti]

I don't need to remember. I still use it -:) Together with Jabber and (work related only) Yahoo Messenger p.s.ICQ(but not 'official' client and this is causes issues periodically) is very popular in Russia

Re:Instant Messanging?

[Anonymous Coward]

I not only still remember it, I still use it.since 97 or 98.

Re:Instant Messanging?

[convolvatron]

zepher was perfectly useful before aim existed.

Re:Instant Messanging?

[centuren]

wow thats a big icq number, noob :D

2951034

How is that your ICQ number is a whole digit shorter than mine, but your Slashdot ID is 8 times larger? Your geek credentials are now suspect.

Re:Instant Messanging?

[ClosedSource]

I can't remember mine. I used ICQ a little but rapidly got bored with it. I guess it's a generational thing. I still think IM combines the worst parts of the phone and email (interrupting, but still requires typing). Of course, send collisions are unique to IM.

Re:Instant Messanging?

[VGPowerlord]

ICQ Number? 775498.

Don't bother messaging it, though, I haven't used ICQ in at least 5 years.

Of course, part of that is because numbers are a lot easier to spam, and Pidgin doesn't seem to have good spam blocking for ICQ.

Re:Instant Messanging?

[Zontar The Mindless]

wow thats a big icq number, noob :D

2951034

1009212.

Read 'em and weep, sonny boy. :)

Re:Instant Messanging?

[Anonymous Coward]

Compuserve CB simulator was the first major, commercial chat application and the father of all others. ICQ was pretty lame and not very groundbreaking, IRC pre-dated that by a long shot.

More recent ones

[Darkness404]

1. Firefox, it showed that it was possible to reopen the browser to innovation and standardization after the rise of IE.

2. Ubuntu (yes, its not an application), it gave Linux to the masses and made it, for the first time in many years, to get a popular brand of computers (Dell) preinstalled with something other than OS X or Windows

3. BitTorrent, Limewire, (the original) Napster and other P2P technologies, took out the last hurdle in independent content distribution, bandwidth.

4. Skype and other VOIP technologies, let people abandon phone companies for the first time while letting them talk to landlines and cell phones alike

5. AIM, MSN, IRC and other IM services took e-mail and made it much better

Re:More recent ones

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think you understand what a killer app is

Re:More recent ones

[vux984]

5. AIM, MSN, IRC and other IM services took e-mail and made it much better

Say what now?

So the problem with email is that it wasn't fast enough, but that the telephone was 'too realtime'?

Or was the problem with email that we didn't have to create accounts with the provider of the people we wanted to talk to?

Or was the problem that we didn't have enough smiley icon sets in our lives?

Seriously, how did IM make email better?

Re:More recent ones

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't type backspace on a real time phone call. Besides, if it wasn't for IRC we wouldn't have one of the most prime humor engines, bash QDB

Re:More recent ones

[artor3]

Email was too slow, and being on the phone with multiple people all over the world simultaneously was too impossible.

Re:More recent ones

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Firefox, it showed that it was possible to reopen the browser to innovation and standardization after the rise of IE.

No, Mosiac. I love Firefox and all, but did it really break new gorund in the same way as Mosiac?

2. Ubuntu (yes, its not an application), it gave Linux to the masses and made it, for the first time in many years, to get a popular brand of computers (Dell) preinstalled with something other than OS X or Windows

Yes, it's not an application.

3. BitTorrent, Limewire, (the original) Napster and other P2P technologies, took out the last hurdle in independent content distribution, bandwidth.

BT yes, the rest did pave the way but were flawed. Also, what about IRC and DCC?

4. Skype and other VOIP technologies, let people abandon phone companies for the first time while letting them talk to landlines and cell phones alike

I'll give you this one.

5. AIM, MSN, IRC and other IM services took e-mail and made it much better

Not compared to SMS (honourable mention in the piece). Far more ubiquitous to the public (in Europe at least). Genuinely changed the world.

Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.

Yes, but there is (-1, Overrated). Mod this karma whore down.

Re:More recent ones

[mdwh2]

Firefox, it showed that it was possible to reopen the browser to innovation and standardization after the rise of IE.

It wasn't the first of the post IE/Netscape browsers - at the least, there was Opera.

Not that I think this counts as being a killer app. People didn't buy computers to run Firefox (or Opera). The web would have still carried on without them. Yes, I love Opera, and Firefox is okay too, but this isn't anywhere near on the same scale as the initial development of the web and web browsers.

Ubuntu (yes, its not an application), it gave Linux to the masses and made it

So shouldn't every other OS get listed there too? Why is a version of Linux a killer application, and no other OS?

Re:More recent ones

[mattwarden]

2. Ubuntu (yes, its not an application), it gave Linux to the masses and made it, for the first time in many years, to get a popular brand of computers (Dell) preinstalled with something other than OS X or Windows

So?

Re:More recent ones

[jedidiah]

Ok then...

Replace "Ubuntu" with "apt-get".

There's your "killer app".

Re:More recent ones

[ClosedSource]

Sure, it's possible with IM to be "on the phone" with multiple people all over the world simultaneously. It's just if you actually want to communicate with all of them, that you have a problem.

Re:More recent ones

[Ragzouken]

Email wasn't interactive enough and the telephone wasn't free enough.

Re:More recent ones

[Anonymous Coward]

> Why is a version of Linux a killer application, and no other OS?

Because it's brown.

Re:More recent ones

[Dark_Gravity]

Replace "Ubuntu" with "apt-get".

There's your "killer app".

Would that be a "killer apt"?

Re:More recent ones

[ChrisMP1]

No. No it would not.

Re:More recent ones

[Deliveranc3]

Apt-Get isn't magic juice. It just solved the dependency issue Linux users were experiencing. This ongoing dependancy tree kludge (which Linux advocates coach as a feature because it assists with forking projects, which is of course useless to package usability) is still ongoing, most libraries are still only used by one package cementing the difference between OS and application. Sourceforge never addressed the fact that it needed a seperate system for users and developers otherwise it would have been the one stop open source shop.

Now if Apt had thought to centralize the config files, maybe wrapping a nice little gui around the more common options (Value sliders, colour palettes, arguement drop downs with little blurbs) it would have been a killer app.

My 10:
1. Windows, without which usability would have never even occured to programmers.

2. BBSs, hey let's get these computer thingies talking.

3. GIF Rendering, well it takes a lot of spae but sometimes an image IS worth a lot of words (millage may vary).

4. GCC, Machine Code, while awsome(!) is hard to read, and libraries would be kinda clunky. GCC just by virtue of having some standardization really brought programming to the masses.

5. IRC, Annonymity on the webs.

6. Microsoft Office(and precursors), Computers can put industries out of work... when was the last time you dictated something.

7. Napster, ideas and information can be free... with some caveats.

8. OpenGL, no no no... fuck YOU microsoft.

9. Databases, building on the difference between information and the concrete.

10. Software kludge, necessitating increases in consumer level computing and using capitalism against conservatives to empower individuals.

There's a bunch more core technologies, but too many of the stuff listed is just about tying shit together and making it work... not the end product or the development of new paradigms.

Re:More recent ones

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft Office(and precursors), Computers can put industries out of work... when was the last time you dictated something.

This is my favorite. Remember memoranda? Back in the day, most office employees did not know how to type. It was a specialized clerical skill, so if you needed to send a letter or memo, you dictated it to a clerical assistant who typed it up.

So along come computers on every desk, and now e-mail has replaced casual correspondence and office memos.

The computer solved the problem not by making the process easier, but by forcing everyone to learn to type. Love it! :)

SSH

[TCM]

SSH

Re:SSH

[QuantumG]

The ultimate irony of OpenSSH was that it came along at almost the exact moment when it was no longer all that important. Everyone used telnet or rsh before OpenSSH became a killer app. People used OpenSSH primarily out of a fear over password sniffing on broadcast ethernet. Before that, switched networking had taken over. No-one was using T connectors and terminators by then.. and switching hubs were cheaper than broadcast hubs for UTP and active ARP attacks hadn't been demonstrated. Still, its amazing that such a good implementation of ssh came along when it did.

Re:SSH

[Anonymous Coward]

SSH

you shut up!

Re:SSH

[Kamineko]

Sorry, we'll keep it down.

Re:SSH

[Zero__Kelvin]

They already mentioned PGP. The magic behind PGP and SSH are the same (Asymmetric Key Exchange) and PGP predates SSH, so PGP is the right call.

Re:SSH

[Agent ME]

With wireless networks, that problem is mostly back. (I think WPA can encrypt different clients on a network with different keys and get around this problem though.)

Re:SSH

[Zero__Kelvin]

"The ultimate irony of OpenSSH was that it came along at almost the exact moment when it was no longer all that important."

It will surprise many a computer security professional that SSH isn't all that important.

Re:SSH

[Anonymous Coward]

IPSEC can also be used...

Re:SSH

[Wrath0fb0b]

Before that, switched networking had taken over. No-one was using T connectors and terminators by then.. and switching hubs were cheaper than broadcast hubs for UTP and active ARP attacks hadn't been demonstrated. Still, its amazing that such a good implementation of ssh came along when it did.

So the irony is that people were fooled into a false sense of security by switched networks on the theory that you can trust the network only to deliver your packets to the intended addressee? How is that ironic? It's just foolishly confusing a performance issue with a security promise -- if that were ironic then the whole internet would be a pile of sarcastic innuendo.

Oh, shit.

Re:SSH

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, who needs secure remote access these days anyway?

Re:SSH

[QuantumG]

Ummm.. no.. the irony is that the attack ssh was designed to combat was already out of vogue by the time OpenSSH became available.. and yet people still picked it up.

Speaking of false sense of security, it took a long time for people to come to grips with the fact that just because you're using ssh doesn't mean you're invulnerable. The vast majority of admins continue to believe that their password cannot be sniffed by an attacker on the same host as them, because they think in terms of packet sniffing, not pty sniffing.

Re:SSH

[convolvatron]

just as aside, the great thing about the telnet/ssh switch is that for once, the new thing was
even more scriptable and painless to use than what i used every day. i couldn't care less about
the security implications, but really rsh was so retarted, and port forwarding so useful
in the nacent age of fucking nats and firewalls, it made sense.

Re:SSH

[QuantumG]

That was one of the key strengths of ssh.. it was basically a fancy version of rsh and rcp with a bunch of legacy cruft kicked to the curb and a few things "done right" that had always been wrong. This is the strategy that subversion has taken to replace CVS.

Re:SSH

[MoxFulder]

Sorry, we'll keep it down.

oh wow, *whooosh*

hes not telling you to be quiet, hes talking about SSH. its like Telnet.exe but in my opinion telnet is a WAY BETTER IDEA cause it comes with windows XP, but ssh doesn't and you have to download ssh.

otherwise theres nothing else really good about ssh, its just like telnet.

Re:SSH

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, who needs secure remote access these days anyway?

(Score: -1, Idiot)

Re:SSH

[Kaitnieks]

I'd say *whoooosh* yourself :D

Re:SSH

[MoxFulder]

Meta-whoosh (-;

I'm gonna pat myself on the back and conclude that I do a sublime, pitch-perfect impression of a semi-coherent, semi-informed Windoze fanboy.

Re:SSH

[Anonymous Coward]

You did indeed do that. Rather impressive, actually, although trolling on slashdot is probably the only use for that skill. It might be better to include a /sarcasm tag next time.

Re:SSH

[Zardoz44]

Thank goodness for git... Seriously. SVN as the "killer" form of something? Only productivity.

Re:SSH

[QuantumG]

It has killed CVS.. not that this was hard.

Re:SSH

[Anonymous Coward]

Rather impressive, actually, although trolling on slashdot is probably the only use for that skill.

/g/ would appreciate it immensely.

Re:SSH

[Anonymous Coward]

what about remote access to a host over an untrusted network... like the internet?

Re:SSH

[Anonymous Coward]

As long as you trust the network of course. Besides, many places still used hubs for the last step a decade after the first release of openssh.

Re:SSH

[TheRaven64]

Switched networks don't guarantee this. There are trivial attacks (ARP floods, for example) that will cause them to fall back to broadcast mode for long enough to steal a password - the last telnet hold-out I knew had this happen to him on a campus network and switched a couple of years ago. You also seem to be under the impression that people only used telnet over local connections. When I started university in 2000 people were using ssh to connect to campus machines from home via a modem. There were often around 20-30 hops, and I had my password harvested by using insecure POP3 - telnet would have been equally vulnerable.

Re:SSH

[Anonymous Coward]

SSH tunneling is great though. Someone also mentioned 'screen' earlier. These two, plus Slime+Swank+Emacs for lisp development = *drool*

Re:SSH

[QuantumG]

Yeah.. that's the point though.. people jumped at the use of ssh but continued to use pop3 for YEARS. It was entirely a feel good exercise.

Bit torrent .. duh!

[Anonymous Coward]

Crap list. Bram Cohen invented the bit torrent protocol which has changed my life

Internet Explorer

[drinkypoo]

My ISP uses Intuit for payment and last month I could pay with Firefox on Linux but this month I have to use IE (and IE6 in IES4Linux doesn't work.)

Die, Microsoft. Die.

Pagemaker over both Photoshop and Quark Xpress

[tverbeek]

While their comments about Photoshop and Quark are more or less valid, they overlooked an app that was more important than both of their claims: Pagemaker. Photoshop may have saved Apple in the 90s, but that never would have been an issue if Pagemaker hadn't put the Mac on the map to begin with in the 80s. Pagemaker was to the Mac what Lotus 1-2-3 was to the IBM PC: the sine-qua-non reason to buy one. And although Quark came to dominate the desktop publishing industry (for a while), that honor would be beside the point if Pagemaker had not created practical DTP to begin with.

Re:Pagemaker over both Photoshop and Quark Xpress

[samkass]

Agreed. PageMaker on the low and and later FrameMaker on the high end virtually drove the entire industry for awhile. In fact, Photoshop may not have had a place to live if PageMaker hadn't created a zillion newsletters to put photos in. After all, the professionals could afford LetraSet ColorStudio, which was Photoshop's functional predecessor. But at a few thousand a pop, small shops couldn't afford ColorStudio to adjust the photos going into the PageMaker newsletters, thus the "low-end" Photoshop was born.

Re:Pagemaker over both Photoshop and Quark Xpress

[christurkel]

FrameMaker was a game changer for me -- to bad it was withered to one platform now.

Re:Pagemaker over both Photoshop and Quark Xpress

[writermike]

I can tell you it affected my life a great deal when I worked in prepress (commercial printing). Everyone called it Ragemaker.

Re:Pagemaker over both Photoshop and Quark Xpress

[EsJay]

Jeebus, who brought up Quark? PageMaker was killing long before Quark became popular.

Re:Pagemaker over both Photoshop and Quark Xpress

[zjbs14]

Came here to say this. I assumed that any killer app list would have (Aldus) PageMaker on it. Putting Quark on there without even a nod to PageMaker is really just sloppy.

Re:Pagemaker over both Photoshop and Quark Xpress

[Necroloth]

grrrr... don't ever mention Pagemaker to me! In my previous job, we had to write up pdf's using Pagemaker and it was just the most horrendous program I've used since WinME! It used to hog resources like a fat person with cake, copy and pasting images was a big no no unless you wanted to risk corrupt pdf's... in fact, it randomly used to just not pdf properly for no reason! I tried telling the bosses to let us use anything but Pagemaker... use Publisher or something else newer that was much easier and quicker to use but they wouldn't have any of it as there were a lot of files that would need updating. On the plus side, I used to have 10minute breaks whilst it tried pdf'ing a 50page document, unfortunately the only girls to chat up to were old enough to be my grandmother - and you're one sick puppy if you make a comment about that... else I've not succumbed to the average level of desperation on Slashdot! :p

Re:Pagemaker over both Photoshop and Quark Xpress

[tverbeek]

The fact that one of the list-makers says he used Quark in first grade probably indicates the problem: they simply don't know the history they're trying to analyze. OK, they did the research to identify a "first e-mail program" and they'd heard about the importance of 1-2-3, but missing Pagemaker and failing to immediately go with Mosaic as the Most Important Browser (since both Mozilla and IE are descended from it, one way or the other) are simple mistakes that would've been avoided by just knowing what was going on 20-30 years ago.

Re:Pagemaker over both Photoshop and Quark Xpress

[JhohannaVH]

Except that I ran Pagemaker & Framemaker on a Sun workstation back in the day. *face palm* It was so long ago, I'll be damned if I can even remember what model - but it was *way* early 90s, 92/93. The experience garnered me what I needed to get a temp job doing graphics illustration on a Macintosh for the Air Force Academy - on a text book on rocketry. :D See, it *IS* rocket science!

Re:Pagemaker over both Photoshop and Quark Xpress

[Grizzled Old Scout]

Yeah, I had a similar thought. The authors never seem to settle their criteria on whether they are going to acknowledge the true innovators (as a poster above mentioned regarding the authors' choice of Lotus 1-2-3 at the expense of VisiCalc) or rather the popularizers who brought those innovations to the mainstream, in the process bringing millions of others into the computing. To me there's really no right or wrong answer, but the inconsistency the writers showed in this regard is a bit irritating.

What, they don't want your money?

[Nicolas MONNET]

What do they tell you if you tell them you can't use IE?

Re:What, they don't want your money?

[jonnycando]

They shall probably say "duh" not realizing there is anything else. As the chorus harmonizes...."Die Microsoft Die!"

Re:What, they don't want your money?

[drinkypoo]

I don't know yet. It gets better actually, it's also telling me I need to be logged into quickbooks, like I'm the vendor or something. Pure class. A nursery I know that uses Quickbooks just had their system commit seppuku a day after a remote upgrade install, but that's probably coincidence... right?

Re:What, they don't want your money?

[jonnycando]

Hmmm the plot thickens...do keep us posted!

Seriously?

[rampant mac]

In the last 20 years, the web browser has done the most to change the way we use computers.

Re:Seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, if you RTFA, you'd see that the number 1 application is precisely a web browser. Unless you are being sarcastic~

Re:Seriously?

[alannon]

Did you read the article? Did you look at what #1 was? I encourage you to look again.

Re:Seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you read the summary? Did you see the part where it asks people to list what changed their corner of the computing world? I encourage you to look again.

Re:Seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

In the last 20 years, the web browser has done the most to change the way we use computers.

Yeah, otherwise this forum would be called something like alt.altrecsoc and we'd be using threaded news readers, volunteer moderators, and killfiles.

All the web has really done is replace other functional media for all the same things we used computers for: communicating with friends, family, and businesses; looking up reference information published by others; etc.

I guess I have the minority view that the web (particularly HTTP and HTML) is more coincidental than necessary for the expansion of computers into society. It was really just the lucky one to arrive simultaneously with the big expansions of networking as a commodity business. There was already a huge upswing in connectivity between customers and businesses and researchers due to e-mail, usenet, FTP, subsidized internet capacity, and accelerating modem speeds for the end-user connections.

Hell, I can remember downloading Postscript catalogs and papers from commercial and university FTP servers, providing nice compact yet perfectly typeset materials to view with Ghostscript or print locally. In my memory, it was Altavista which really kicked off the modern web in terms of starting to find things via search instead of via references in topical newsgroups and e-mails. And Altavista was first and foremost driven by the desire to demonstrate the power of 64-bit DEC Alpha servers running large databases with huge (for the time) amounts of RAM. It could have supplanted gopher and archie instead of crawling HTTP... it was a truly qualitative leap based on the amount of RAM in the server allowing a brute-force service that previously sounded impossible.

Re:Seriously?

[ClosedSource]

Right. We no longer have to go to computer swap meets to get CD porn.

"hello world"

[scotch]

No matter how you measure it (number of copy cat programs, efficiency and failure rates, importance to computer science), this program tops them all. Where would we be without it?

Re:"hello world"

[i_ate_god]

We would be at foobar...

Re:"hello world"

[kperson]

Yeah, and "testing, one, two, three" is the most important thing ever spoken into a microphone.

Dark Castle and Oregon Trail

[gardyloo]

Those two games introduced me to computers (in my elementary school classroom). I had no idea before that.

Re:Dark Castle and Oregon Trail

[JayDaddy]

Whoa now, if those are coming into the discussion how can you possibly forget Lemonade Stand? Personally the one that made the most difference to me was QBasic. Very easy to understand programming language that came free on all the machines I had access to. True it wasn't very useful in the end, but it opened up my imagination as to what I could do with a computer to no end.

Re:Dark Castle and Oregon Trail

[WindBourne]

That is ok. Before your generation, it was early leisure suit larry that introduced a lot of kids to computer games.

Re:Dark Castle and Oregon Trail

[JayDaddy]

Wow, that takes me back. Didn't even have Internet access at the time so actually had to figure those games out on my own (a lost art nowadays)

Re:Dark Castle and Oregon Trail

[westlake]

Those two games introduced me to computers

Oregon Trail still ranks high on the Amazon best seller lists.

Games like Flight Simulator, Commander Keen and King's Quest demonstrated that the IBM PC was a viable gaming platform.

The geek still cherishes the notion that whatever success Linux achieves in the office can be carried over into the home.

But these markets diverged much earlier and more decisively than he remembers.

Re:Dark Castle and Oregon Trail

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't even count how many hours Oregon Trail kept me occupied through 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th grade.

Re:Dark Castle and Oregon Trail

[silent_artichoke]

Maybe you should have been doing your math homework instead of playing games.

EDLIN

[badc0ffee]

I would rather use console switches in binary, but I used a early line editor (years ago) to write my own editor. Besides, rumor has it, EDLIN was the only program actually written by Bill Gates.

Re:Trolls permanently buttplugged

[narcberry]

Change can be good or bad, here's my top 10 list:
AOL
Cygwin
Exchange
MS Office
MySQL
phpBB
Quake/Unreal/Half Life
The Sims/World of Warcraft
Win95/X .NET

Turbo Pascal

[JoeD]

In a day when serious compilers cost $300 or more, most people used the free Basic that came with DOS.

Then Turbo Pascal came out at $49.95, and proved that there was more than a niche market for compilers.

Re:Killer? Really?

[tverbeek]

Yeah, I'm afraid you're wrong. Sorry. When the term popped up about 30 years ago, "killer app" referred to an application that was so remarkable and must-have that it "made" the platform it ran on. VisiCalc was the killer app for the Apple II; Lotus 1-2-3 was the killer app for the DOS/PC platform; Space Invaders was the killer app for the Atari 2600; Pagemaker was the killer app for the Mac; etc. What killer apps "killed" were competing platforms, such as 1-2-3 killing the Apple II and TRS-80 in the business market.

Photoshop

[p51d007]

I use it almost daily. Every time a new version comes out, it's noooooooooooooooooo....I just got use to this version! CS4, took a little while to find where they rearranged everything.

mozilla netscape navigator

[jeremycobert]

my family thought AOL was all there was until i bought a copy of mozilla and got to show them the whole web that they had been missing. i bought a book about the internet (it may have been internet for dummies). a local ISP finally got a connection and we dropped AOL around version 2. thank you mozilla. it still makes me chuckle thinking about buying netscape... good times.

TJ-2, Spacewar, RS-1, FORTRAN, MacWrite

[dpbsmith]

1) TJ-2. Written by Peter Samson for the PDP-1, it is at least a plausible candidate for "first word processor." It used a text input file, with command reminiscent of later word processing program "dot commands," although the commands were identified by an overbar character rather than a period. It produced two-column output with justified lines, and had provision for hyphenation. Because the PDP-1 facility had output equipment based on IBM electric typewriters, the output was "letter-quality." It showed a generation of hackers that computer software could be used to edited and print finished-looking text.

If not TJ-2, then TYPSET/RUNOFF, which must have been used by tens of thousands of people at universities to perform what today would be called "word processing."

2) Spacewar! Another PDP-1 program, a plausible candidate for "first video game," and certainly introduced thousands of people to the idea that computers could be used purely for fun. A somewhat subversive idea, since commercial facilities rented PDP-1 time at something like $60 per hour.

3) Bolt, Beranek and Newman's RS-1, or perhaps its antecedent, Prophet. It was not a spreadsheet, but it was, nevertheless, an easy-to-use and powerful system for medical and scientific research calculations, with "tables" as its fundamental data type, and flexible vaguely SQL-like commands for extracting data from them and performing statistical tests and calculations on them. I don't know whether Bricklin and Frankston ever saw it, but I suspect that it was "in the culture" and influenced Visicalc in a very general way.

4) FORTRAN. Unlikely as it sounds, it was a breakthrough in computer ease-of-use. Long before computers started to make headway amount the general population, they first had to make headway in the scientific community among people who were not computer experts. It was FORTRAN that brought computing within the grasp of the average scientist. It also, oddly enough, became a breakthrough in portability and the loosening of IBM's monopoly power, at least in the academic community.

5) MacWrite. Or, if you prefer, the earlier Gypsy word processing program for the Xerox Alto. Gypsy was probably the first WYSIWYG word processor that could display multiple fonts and images. MacWrite was the program that first showed hundreds of thousands of people to that style of editing. In my case, I was utterly blown away by the ability to create superscripts that were actually in smaller type than the main text.

Before MacWrite, WYSIWYG meant only that the word processing commands could be hidden, and that lines on the screen broke at the same places as the printed copy. Before MacWrite, I never saw a system that show justified text as justified on the screen, or that showed multiple columns on the screen, or showed headers, footers, and footnotes in their proper places on screen.

Satan.

[Anonymous Coward]

SATAN (SANTA) by Dan Farmer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Farmer) most certainly changed the face of computing security.

My personal list:

[drolli]

-Borland Pascal: One of the first complete affordable OO IDE environments with well organized UI elements
-matlab: finding the eigenvalues of a Schroedinger equation numerically takes roughly three lines of code
-macsyma/maxima, mathematica: automate handling of symbolic expressions
-perl: the web 2.0 language before web 2.0 was named web 2.0
-emacs: Still the most feature-rich editor. The number of "emacs-like" clones which try to capture its core functionality without the bloat is impressive.
-tex/latex: If you make a book, there is nothing better.
-man: i think there was a time when manuals came on paper only
-gopher: the web before the web.....

talk

[Reality Master 201]

I still prefer good old fashioned talk to modern instant messaging.

The old days.

Re:talk

[tuxidriver]

Heartily agree. Talk (at least on VMS) was a great little app.

Re:talk

[Reality Master 201]

Yeah, vms. I miss my tube time at the ol'VT-100.

Not a program, but...

[BlueParrot]

Edsger Wybe Dijkstra

Re:Not a program, but...

[Ragzouken]

Transistors

IRC?

[Animaether]

Granted, the earlier networks didn't have NickServs so you had to /whois to semi-make sure the person you were talking to was actually the person you think you're talking to, but in terms of instant messaging, IRC is certainly by far a predecessor to all of the IM apps.

and I'm guessing there were near-instant messaging utilities for BBS's back in the day; I know I chatted with a SysOp once through... Terminat, I think?
Ahhh, Bi-Modem protocol... no carrier indeed.

Re:IRC?

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember in Uni long time ago. we use "talk" command to chat...

Re:IRC?

[TheRaven64]

It's a question of UI. IRC was a multi-user chat system that supported direct chats. ICQ was a single-user chat system that supported multi-user chats. This changed how people used them. Far more people were willing to leave themselves logged in to ICQ while doing something else than did the same with IRC.

Re:IRC?

[Anonamused Cow-herd]

Far more people were willing to leave themselves logged in to ICQ while doing something else than did the same with IRC.

That has less to do with the application and more to do with connection methods. For the period in question, leaving IRC on would tie up your phone line. Now, most people have always-on connections, so leaving something running in the background isn't a problem at all. In fact, I've run IRC 24/7 for years, and most IRCers I know of do the same. It even has a term: "idling" a chan.

Re:IRC?

[TheRaven64]

Not really. ICQ launched in '97, when modems were still very common. I used ICQ with a modem to chat to friends while browsing the web, but I wouldn't have left myself idling in IRC, not connected to a channel, just waiting for people to initiate one-on-one chat with me (can you do that with IRC, or are nicknames associated with channels?) and the same was true of a lot of other people. ICQ took up almost no screen space while you weren't chatting and would notify you when anyone logged in or wanted to talk to you.

Re:Killer? Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Great, I hate the term even more ... so full of hype it kills entire platforms. Lame.

Not an application, but...

[SmlFreshwaterBuffalo]

Clippy definitely changed my life. If not for little Clippy, I would still be trying to format that letter. I think everyone here can agree that the ability to detect when a letter was being written was nothing short of magic.

Re:Not an application, but...

[supernova_hq]

ahh good old
if(regex(document, "^Dear( [A-Z][a-z]+){1-3},\r\n\r\n\t"))

Re:Not an application, but...

[Random Data]

Dear God, I wish this fucking paperclip would go away...

Industry Changing?

[bokmann]

I'm sorry, but for something to be considered 'industry changing', we should consider the first instance of an app with that capability... for IT is the app that truly 'changed the industry' to the point where it spawned imitators that may be more successful.

By that standard, Visicalc, PageMaker, and MacWord absolutely need to be on this list.

Re:Industry Changing?

[try_anything]

Agreed. Half the apps the author chose were just winners in markets created by other products. If Microsoft Office had never existed, office computing would not have skipped a beat. Everyone would have adopted something very similar, possibly superior, on the same timeline. The fact that the author favored Mozilla or even Firefox reveals that he is too impressed by winners. What did Firefox change? Would web browsers have stopped evolving and improving without Firefox? Not likely. I used an ancient version of Mozilla earlier today, in fact, and frankly, if we were still stuck on 2002-era Mozilla (with a modern Javascript implementation) the web wouldn't be much different.

For Oracle, the article says,

Oracle, founded in 1977, was able to come of age right around the time database systems became both affordable and necessary for enterprises.

In other words, right place, right time, the product itself was inevitable but Oracle came out on top.

By that standard, Usain Bolt totally changed Olympic sprinting. Without him, it would be a bunch of slow fat guys, right?

Re:Industry Changing?

[Phroggy]

Well, to be fair, Firefox is significant precisely because of its success: were it not for Firefox, we might all be stuck using IE6 today. Firefox's growing popularity among web developers contributed to web developers designing their sites to work correctly in a browser that attempts to support W3C standards. Firefox's growing popularity among users (which wouldn't have been possible if most popular web sites didn't work in it already) led users to put pressure on the remaining companies whose sites were still broken. This change is what made Safari, Chrome, and indeed IE8 possible; if it weren't for Firefox's influence on the web, these other browsers wouldn't be able to display many sites correctly.

Of course, the other reason we have IE8 today is that Microsoft restarted IE development after Firefox gained significant marketshare. They're a few years behind, but they're trying to catch up.

Re:Industry Changing?

[try_anything]

Standards have nothing to do with it. Browsers are supported on the basis of market share, nothing else. In other words, there's no chance that a sizeable number of people would be left without a working browser. Maybe we'd all be stuck with IE6 (and slightly crappy IE6 renderer-clones on Linux, like we have OpenOffice and KOffice for MS Office docs) -- but what would have been radically different about that? It would suck a little bit not to have tabbed browsing and AdBlock, and a few other amenities like keyword search might be missing, but would that change the web experience so much?

Besides, according to Wikipedia's market share numbers IE had over 90% of users during 2002-2006. I managed to rely on Mozilla and Firefox during that time period, so Firefox's success was not a prerequisite for alternative browsers to work "well enough."

Re:Industry Changing?

[Phroggy]

Standards have nothing to do with it. Browsers are supported on the basis of market share, nothing else. In other words, there's no chance that a sizeable number of people would be left without a working browser. Maybe we'd all be stuck with IE6 (and slightly crappy IE6 renderer-clones on Linux, like we have OpenOffice and KOffice for MS Office docs) -- but what would have been radically different about that?

Standards aren't important to end users, but they're critical to developers. Standards provide documentation. Microsoft's documentation for Internet Explorer was incomplete, and IE6 was full of bugs. If Microsoft's documentation for IE6 was complete and the implementation matched the documentation, then that could have been the standard, but that wasn't the case.

Re:Industry Changing?

[try_anything]

Standards aren't important to end users, but they're critical to developers.

I'm having a hard time seeing that as an argument that Firefox changed computing. Firefox is an end-user application. Even in the darkest days of IE dominance, end users could choose from several browsers that worked decently enough. Gmail debuted in 2004, at the height of IE's dominance, so IE didn't prevent innovation and evolution in web programming, either.

Even for web developers, better compliance with standards hasn't changed things that much. Professional web designers still have to make sure everything works in IE6. They depend heavily on cross-browser libraries that hide browser incompatibilities, and they still regularly run across discrepancies, even between different highly-standards-compliant browsers. The web designers who sit near me at work test against IE6, IE7, IE8, Firefox 2, Firefox 3, and a couple versions each of Mozilla, Opera, and Safari. Plus they make special mobile versions of lots of pages, highly optimized for iPhone but also tested against BlackBerries.

And yet I still see professionally-done pages that don't render correctly in Linux Firefox. dominos.com is unusable under Linux Firefox, for example. Whether that's a bug in the page or Firefox or Flash or Firefox's embedding of Flash, it shows that web standards haven't changed the basic rule of cross-browser rendering: if the developers are committed to testing and tweaking their code against a browser, then it will work with that browser. Otherwise, it's a crapshoot.

So, given the continuing need to make everything work under IE6, it seems like the only thing that web standards changed is that there are now four or five decent rendering engines instead of two or three. You still can't be a web designer without being a student of browser quirks. Even if you attributed the entire HTML/CSS/Javascript standardization phenomenon to Firefox, it still wouldn't qualify as one of the top ten apps that "changed computing."

Re:Industry Changing?

[Phroggy]

I'm having a hard time seeing that as an argument that Firefox changed computing. Firefox is an end-user application. Even in the darkest days of IE dominance, end users could choose from several browsers that worked decently enough.

There were several browsers that worked decently enough for most sites, but things like online banking were quite often inaccessible to the average user. Since the average user is only dimly aware of what a browser is, the idea of switching back and forth between browsers is just too much for them, and IETab wouldn't be an option either (they don't know it exists and wouldn't understand how to configure it).

It's because of Firefox's increasing popularity, both among the general public and among web developers, that these IE-only sites getting updated to work in non-IE browsers. They didn't get fixed because of Opera or Safari, they got fixed because of Firefox.

Even for web developers, better compliance with standards hasn't changed things that much. Professional web designers still have to make sure everything works in IE6.

This is true now, but it won't be in two years. Some sites have already dropped IE6 support; others are warning their users that they soon will. Within two years, IE6 will be a distant memory, and yes, that's because of Firefox. When Firefox hit 10% market share and looked like the numbers were going to continue to climb, Microsoft sat up and took notice. They started working on fixing Internet Explorer, and adopted the attitude that they're not in a dominant position anymore and they need to play nice in order to catch up. That's why we have IE8 today, and why it doesn't suck ass.

And yet I still see professionally-done pages that don't render correctly in Linux Firefox. dominos.com is unusable under Linux Firefox, for example. Whether that's a bug in the page or Firefox or Flash or Firefox's embedding of Flash, it shows that web standards haven't changed the basic rule of cross-browser rendering: if the developers are committed to testing and tweaking their code against a browser, then it will work with that browser. Otherwise, it's a crapshoot.

Yes, it's a Flash problem. That's why HTML5 is so important: by making the things that web developers want to do available as part of HTML (with CSS and JavaScript), they'll be able to build the kind of sites they want without using Flash. It will take a few years before this becomes a reality for sites like dominos.com, but unless Adobe and/or Microsoft throw a ton of money at them, it will happen (Microsoft would like them to switch to Silverlight, of course).

So, given the continuing need to make everything work under IE6, it seems like the only thing that web standards changed is that there are now four or five decent rendering engines instead of two or three. You still can't be a web designer without being a student of browser quirks. Even if you attributed the entire HTML/CSS/Javascript standardization phenomenon to Firefox, it still wouldn't qualify as one of the top ten apps that "changed computing."

IE6 will be dead within two years, and you won't have to develop for it at all anymore. Yes, there are four decent rendering engines (Gecko, WebKit, Trident, Presto), but there are also ACID tests from the Web Standards Project that help browser developers find and eliminate bugs that cause compatibility issues. The formation of WHATWG has pulled the W3C back into reality, and HTML5 is being crafted by people who really know what they're doing and want to make the web better for everyone (Hixie rocks). Not everything is totally compatible between browsers today, but that's the goal everyone is shooting for, and we have tools in place to make it a realistic goal.

We're not there yet, but a few years ago it was difficult to imagine every major browser being able to correctly render something as complicated as the ACID2 test, and today ev

Re:Killer? Really?

[russlar]

I can't speak to a "killer app", but I think we can all agree that there is a killer filesystem!

Norton Desktop for Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

This did more to make an ol' crusty Windows pre-95 desktop to soar, and I still use it.

Please, buy my product(tm).
-Video Professor

Re:Norton Desktop for Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

"Video Professor" ? I don't understand --

Oh, wait --

Is he that weird guy who has things for sale So Amazing You'll Want To Join the Columbia Records Club to Rid Yourself of Your Video Professor Addiction, the guy I've seen on those decorative cathode-ray furniture items I've seen at some other humans' domiciles?

I don't understand now, but at least I think I understand what your amazing post could do for me, if I did understand its content! I'll have to order my first, free DVD for making revolutionary posts like yours.

Re:Norton Desktop for Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

Choose the phrase most people use to describe you:

fucking retard

fucking asshole

immature shithead

whiny bitch

Re:Trolls permanently buttplugged

[ale_ryu]

You forgot the controversial and short lived napster (I know it's still around but it's not the same anymore). napster completely changed the file sharing world.

The most important, and most unrecognized

[Anonymous Coward]

RSA

Re:The most important, and most unrecognized

[2.7182]

Yeah, well more properly, ssh, secure sockets, etc. It made it possible to have e-commerce. PGP really didn't have the same impact I think. (Of course, it uses RSA I think...)

Re:The most important, and most unrecognized

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it just me, or do Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman get used by *everyone*? Can't those dudes get laid without getting fucked over?! They're MIT'ers ferchrissakes!!

(If you know about the Cocks involved, this post is even more clever. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA#History if you're a mere extension of the awkward, funny-smelling, ignorant masses or masochists-in-query. I can Hasse [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasse_principle ] cryptozburgers?)

COBOL

[Lawrence_Bird]

was the original application that changed computing and led to the explosion of use by average corporations in the 60s and 70s (and beyond).

Re:COBOL

[Zero__Kelvin]

I hope you are a better at playing basketball than you are at identifying applications. COBOL is a programming language, not an application.

I'm surprised no one mentioned...

[viyh]

Quaterdeck Mosaic. It is, afterall, what brought the web to the masses.

Re:I'm surprised no one mentioned...

[divide overflow]

Quaterdeck Mosaic. It is, afterall, what brought the web to the masses.

You do know that NCSA's Mosaic was the #1 choice on the top 10 list? And that all commercial versions of Mosaic were licensed by Spyglass, Inc., a company founded in 1990 to commercialize and support technologies from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign? And that the original codebase for Internet Explorer was also code licensed from Spyglass?

Re:I'm surprised no one mentioned...

[viyh]

Hah, well, that's what I get for not RTFA. :P But hey, the list should have been posted in the submission.

Re:I'm surprised no one mentioned...

[Anonymous Coward]

"But hey, the list should have been posted in the submission."

No, it shouldn't have. That's the TFLink is for.

Engineering applications?

[Anonymous Coward]

maybe im partial because of my field but i think there deserves to be a mention of engineering and drafting software or at least a calculator or CAS if they are going to mention minesweeper. Maybe computers changed engineering more than engineering apps changed computers but i think there needs to be one on the list.

Re:Engineering applications?

[eliphalet]

Definitely. Back in mainframe days, apps like NASTRAN and CADAM made modern aircraft design possible.

#1 going away - Netscape Navigator

[Anonymous Coward]

I did RTA and note that they debated among themselves Mosaic vs. Navigator for the top pick, as some of the key players (Andressen and Bina) were involved with both. But it was the introduction of Navigator turned the world upside down. That's when the world took notice of the Internet. Bill Gates wrote his first book "The Road Ahead" in 1995 and scarcely mentioned the Internet - ditto for the initial rollout of Windows 95. He wasn't the only one who missed it. Then Navigator hit the streets, Internet usage started skyrocketing and Gates had to backpeddle with his famous memo to the troops, kicking off the browser wars The dot com era began, giving us dynamic companies like Amazon, Yahoo, eBay, and Google (along with hundreds of others mercifully consigned to the dustbin of history). And incidentally, possibly rescuing Bill Clinton's presidency, which until then had been mired in tactical mistakes, the health care task force fiasco, and the gays in the military PR blunder.

Anonymous Coward

[Anonymous Coward]

What a bunch of newbies ...
1. Assembler - no more machine code
2. Fortran - no more Assembler
3. Cobol - still manages your bank account and your taxes
4. CICS - showed that online systems could handle lots of transactions
5. TPS - may still do your airline reservation
6. SAS - showed that statistics could be fun
7. Mark IV - look it up
8. SAP - showed ERP could be fun (sort of)
9. CATIA - designed that plane you flew in and probably some of your car
10. Oracle - databases for the masses

Re:Anonymous Coward

[supernova_hq]

Umm, Oracle was number 10 in the article...

Re:Killer? Really?

[Thinboy00]

-1, Spamcruftisement

ubuntu

[kloffinger]

they listed ubuntu, but oddly it's also on their "disappointing technologies page" see?

Re:ubuntu

[value_added]

Hardly surprising given their existing Top Ten list. The rationalisation for MS Office, for example, is that it put thousands of secretaries out of work. No acknowledgment was made that they were already out of work long before Windows appeared, and wordprocessing software didn't need a toolbar with a ribbon to be effective.

MS Windows

[flyingfsck]

MS Windows would be the ultimate killer app. MS killed so many apps, it isn't even funny.

Locksmith

[billybob_jcv]

It forever changed the way software would be packaged and sold, and reminded the software companies that the higher you price the package, the more likely it is to be broken. It also directly led to other incredibly popular commercial programs such as Copy II PC and CopyWrite. RIP Omega Microware. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,953342,00.html

My top software

[j_kenpo]

Doom
Turbo Pascal
Ethereal
Red Hat Linux 4

For one reason or another, those apps changed my entire computing landscape.

PGP

[burris]

I'm so glad that PGP has been honored on this list. Let us take a moment to reflect what life would be like had Zimmerman not put his freedom on the line to write PGP.

1. Without PGP, almost everyone would send their emails in the clear. Today, cleartext email is the exception, not the rule.

2. Without PGP, emails, blog posts, and the like would be unauthenticated. Today, with the ubiquity of digital signatures and the public's expectation that they be valid, its virtually impossible to impersonate someone else or misquote them.

3. Without PGP, huge volumes of personal data aggregated onto easily transportable laptops and DVDs would be vulnerable to petty thieves. With the strong encryption tools in wide use today everyone can rest assured that their personal can't fall into the hands of some crackhead who broke the window of a bureaucrat's car.

Clearly, PGP has changed computing. No no, PGP has changed the WORLD!!

Re:PGP

[bloodhawk]

As much as I love PGP I too laughed at the ineptitude of the authors for including it in a "industry changing" list, really the whole list reeks of them just posting about there pet love projects without any real thought put into it, only 1 or 2 on there could even be considered industry changing.

Re:PGP

[letsief]

I agree PGP never really accomplished much. However, I think you could make the argument that PGP was the first piece of software to advance the movement towards opening up crypto export controls. It brought very high-strength crypto to the masses, including any "bad guys" in other countries. I think it helped policy makers, and the public, see that crypto export controls were pretty silly when everyone had computers. So, I suppose in that way you could consider it an application that changed computing.

However, it's my personal opinion that PGP didn't do a whole lot to advance that movement. Crypto controls were a goner as soon as it was apparent e-commerce was going to take off. If I had to pick a crypto application, I'd pick SSL. SSL (now TLS) has been, and continues to be, responsible for securing most e-commerce applications.

Re:PGP

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you're suffering from an irony deficiency

Re:PGP

[Anonymous Coward]

Sarcasm detector completely broken then? *files repair ticket*

Re:PGP

[Anonymous Coward]

*** --- Joke

(_)
  |
-_- --- You
/ \

Re:PGP

[Anonymous Coward]

WHOOOOOOSH!!!!!

Re:PGP

[Anonymous Coward]

How the fuck is this insightful?

Re:PGP

[Anonymous Coward]

*whoosh*

Re:PGP

[Anonymous Coward]

Sarcasm detector... exploding...

Did you miss how every single "point" he made was a contradiction of reality? Obviously it's not true. The last statement makes the sarcasm evident to even the thickest individuals. Oops, sorry - guess not.

Re:PGP

[Anonymous Coward]

wooooshhhhhhh

Re:PGP

[Anonymous Coward]

Woosh!

Re:PGP

[Hognoxious]

Wow... what world do yo live in?

Start with an easy one. What country do you live in?

My guess is Germany.

Re:PGP

[RocketRabbit]

"1. Without PGP, almost everyone would send their emails in the clear. Today, cleartext email is the exception, not the rule."

Keep smoking that crack buddy!

Re:PGP

[soliptic]

Well said. I couldn't grasp that inclusion at all. "brought encryption to the masses" - not any masses I've ever seen. I work within the general technology/geek field (web dev) and even including every work-related email I've got from clients, colleagues, contractors, suppliers, peers etc, I think I can count the number of PGP signatures/keys I've encountered in my entire life on the fingers of one hand. As for the type of people more usually associated with "the masses" (computer-shy relatives, friends who did Arts degrees, etc), the count is thoroughly stuck on zero.

Note to those with fingers hovering on the downmod button: I'm not saying PGP shouldn't be widely used by "the masses", in principle I agree it'd be nice if it were; nor even that it's not fit to be used by "the masses" (too difficult or whatever). I am merely observing than in practice, in my experience it's simply not.

No VI, No baSH, No (yuck) windows or X

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait a minute... Minesweeper gets honorable mention, but no mention of VI, or any unix Shell or wordstar or (yuck) windows or x-windows.

How many users would have played minesweeper without a GUI.

What a crock.

What did Shaun Nichols Iain Thomson major in ? Literature, PostColonial Romanticism, Journalism? It had to be something bereft of basic cause-and-effect reasoning skills.

Re:No VI, No baSH, No (yuck) windows or X

[mdwh2]

Well, according to them, only MacOS and Windows had GUIs. They probably think that on Linux, you're stuck with that "complicated command line".

The only reason I use a computer

[IsaacD]

is because of porn.

-1, missed the irony

[XanC]

whooooosh

Re:-1, missed the irony

[mgblst]

It is not fucking irony, it is sarcarm. If you don't know why irony is, stop using the word!

When I first read your post, I literally laughed my head off!

Re:-1, missed the irony

[XanC]

If I don't know "why" irony is? I'm afraid I don't understand you.

Perhaps reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony#Verbal_irony_including_sarcasm will clear things up for you.

Re:-1, missed the irony

[ClosedSource]

"If you don't know why irony is, stop using the word!"

It's understandable. XanC is really Alanis Morissette.

Re:-1, missed the irony

[Anonymous Coward]

Or 'whoooooch' as we say in England

Re:-1, missed the irony

[Smurf]

Dude, chill out and grab a dictionary.

From the New Oxford American Dictionary:

irony: the expression of one's meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect : "Don't go overboard with the gratitude," he rejoined with heavy irony. See note at WIT. [...]

sarcasm: the use of irony to mock or convey contempt : his voice, hardened by sarcasm, could not hide his resentment. See note at WIT .

From the usage note at wit:

Irony is the implicit humor in the contradiction between what is meant and what is expressed, or in the discrepancy between appearance and reality. An example would be to shout, in the midst of a hurricane, "What a perfect day for a wedding!"
Although sarcasm may take the form of irony, it is less subtle and is often used harshly or bitterly to wound or ridicule someone. Unlike irony, however, sarcasm depends on tone of voice for its effect (: "a fine friend you turned out to be!" he said, with obvious sarcasm).

So in this case, XanC is right. You could say burris was using sarcasm, but it was more like irony, as he was being very subtle.

If you don't know why irony is, stop using the word!

Indeed.

If you like hackable RPGs...

[pcraven]

...try adding Eamon to the list.

My list would be...

[SST-206]

My first computing experiences were ZX80+BBC BASIC, Elite, et al.

These are the apps that have most revolutionised my computing over recent (interweb) years:

1. Ardour and JACK - pro audio software
2. apt - Debian rocks, other OS's are just jealous
3. ftp - the ability to publish web pages
4. KATE - awesome text editor
5. BASH - type commands, computer obeys!
6. mutt - email done right
7. GIMP - who needs Photoshop?
8. Firefox/Iceweasel - wish it was faster, but still cool
9. VLC - plays what I watch
10. get_iPlayer/get_flash_videos - because Flash is lame

Soon more music software will join that list. And one day I'll get into Blender, probably when/if I can stop wasting my time playing prboom (=Doom)...

(the original) Napster

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean Seth Green?

Ob: Clippy

[ciderVisor]

The Darkest Side of Clippy.

How Quake changed computers

[Anonymous Coward]

If you really want an app which changed computers try Quake. Quake and it's many children (since going open) has proven to chip manufacturers that there was a market for accelerated 3D graphics in the home. So many 3D apps have little bits of quake code in them that Quake is to realtime 3D what Mosaic is to browsers. So when you use nVidia to Genie, Aero or Wobble your windows (depending on your OS of choice) know that there probably would be no nVidia cards if there were no strogg.

Quark & Photoshop only affected professional publishing much like AutoCAD affected design and Logic changed music. Quark & Photoshop didn't change computers at all, just sold a few more.
There is merit in saying Photoshop kept Apple alive during the 'clone wars' but many in Music and Video Production used mac for it's perceived performance advantage during the time.

Re:How Quake changed computers

[mdwh2]

Quake was a significant game, but I think you're overstating the effect. Whilst Quake may have been most well known, there were other 3D games around, and the demand for faster 3D graphics would have still remained. I think the Playstation probably did far more to demonstrate how powerful having dedicated 3D hardware could be.

I'm not sure what you mean by your claim "So many 3D apps have little bits of quake code in them" - whilst there are probably a far number of games that licence the Quake engine, this would not be true in general of 3D applications.

Doom probably is a better choice for "killer" app - it seemed that people were buying then-expensive 486 PCs to play the game. This was at a time when PCs were previously seen mainly as business computers, and traditionally the home market had been ruled by other platforms. Quake did this too, but probably to a less extent.

Re:How Quake changed computers

[centuren]

Quake was a surprisingly "modern" multiplayer game. While one had to enable mouse look in the console, the fundamentals of playing Quake with both the keyboard and mouse across a network have lived on. It's the earliest 3D game that I played with that gaming style, and the first I played very competitively against friends.

I specifically remember when one of my friends assembled us, and opened with the monumental line: "What do you guys know about Ethernet cards?". We each bought one and pitched in on a hub, and the LAN party was born into our world, specifically to play Quake.

I'm totally serious ...

[Zero__Kelvin]

"Gosh, all this time I thought the term "killer app" meant that it was on course to unseat the long disputed champion of that application realm--you know, kill something."

You probably were not associated with any teenagers from California when the term was coined. Killer is slang for Mega-awesome, as in: "Dude, I was surfin' in Ensenada over the weekend and the waves were killer !", or when someone shows up at the party with some awesome bud: "Dude, I'm so wasted. That Ganj is so killer !" A lot of people don't know where the term came from, but you have to admit that once you do the feeling of being superior and "in the know" is totally bitchin' !

Far too high level/closed minded

[nurb432]

Things such as BIOS, or drive read routines were much more significant then 'office'.... Include VM ( you know, the big iron ) into that.. TSO... TCP/IP...

Re:Far too high level/closed minded

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you find unclear about the term "application"? Granted, the lusers I talk to every day on the phone don't know what it means, but I'd expect someone reading /. would know the difference between an application and elements/extensions of the operating system.

Re:Trolls permanently buttplugged

[Phroggy]

Napster definitely gets my vote too. Napster is what introduced the masses to the concept of obtaining music by downloading it from other people over the Internet. Previously, people copied music by exchanging physical media with their friends, but Napster made it possible to browse the music collection of a complete stranger. Obviously some of us had been downloading music from newsgroups or bulletin boards or IRC channels or whatever, but Napster made music piracy accessible and mainstream.

Napster changed people's expectations, opening their eyes to how the world could work if only the media companies would allow it. It paved the way for the iTunes Music Store, as well as P2P protocols like BitTorrent.

Postscript

[wandazulu]

Though technically a programming language, most people didn't interact with it as such; it was the hidden application in printers that made them produce such gorgeous text and graphics from Pagemaker, Quark, Illustrator (wasn't as important for bitmap-based programs like Photoshop).

The article talking about Quark, other folks have mentioned Pagemaker, but it really was Postscript that showed that mere mortals could produce camera-worthy output, and now we absolutely expect it, in both the most ephemeral print out and our displays. It's no surprise that the most advanced windowing system at the time, IMHO, was NextStep, which used Display Postscript as its rendering engine. Now we have the Mac (descendant from NextStep), and Windows, which uses its own rendering system.

LightWave 3D

[mdwh2]

They mentioned graphics programs Photoshop and Quark, but not a mention of Lightwave, used for 3D rendering. And this was a killer app in the traditional sense of the term for the Amiga - graphics companies made render farms out of Amigas, all because of Lightwave.

Re:LightWave 3D

[jedidiah]

Right on.

Take MS Office off of that stupid list and replace it with Lightwave.

Fontographer

[Cartoonist]

Every piece of software I use computerizes something I already did. Only Fontographer does something I never did or conceived of doing in the DBC (Days Before Computers).

Re:Zune HD

[workman161]

How about no.

#2 SHOULD have been UIUC Server/Apache.

[WindBourne]

If Mozilla was #1, then you have to argue that the other side of that coin was the server which was EASY to dish up files and ultimately dynamic data via CGI (esp. perl-CGI).

AutoCAD

[Animats]

AutoCAD, the program that wiped drafting boards off the face of the earth. There was CAD before AutoCAD, but it required very expensive hardware, and was usually sold with a special purpose workstation.

During the 1980s, AutoCAD drove the graphics card market and the plotter market, and created the tablet market.

Drafting is an incredibly laborious process. Making changes to a drawing was a huge pain. (The previous big breakthrough was the electric eraser.) AutoCAD provided a huge productivity improvement, far more than a word processor vs. a typewriter.

Re:AutoCAD

[Anonymous Coward]

+1 to that.

Imagine the good 'ol days when a client would ask something simple like, "could you move that wall 3 feet to over there"? Yeah, we'll get that back to you next week. They look over your shoulder now. Is this good or bad? Very good from the technical standpoint obiously.

Re:AutoCAD

[Anonymous Coward]

Between AutoCAD & Overnight shipping (now internet delivery) the whole business has gotten faster.

Not sure if that's good or bad overall (5 year projects now take 3 years?), but I've been seeing a lot more sloppy.

AMOS, Blitz

[mdwh2]

BASICs such as AMOS and Blitz on the Amiga allowed people to easily create games and other applications, and were similarly cheap, far cheaper than commercial C compilers back then.

The Amiga also came with a free BASIC, Microsoft BASIC, but that was good for almost nothing, and no one ever used that unless you were insane, and didn't realise there were better alternatives...

(Blitz BASIC survives to this day, although I personally started out on AMOS instead.)

Re:AMOS, Blitz

[chill]

Mmmmmm.....AREXX. Metacontrol of damn near everything on an Amiga.

I had software that used frame capture on an IV-24 board, fed the image to ASDG's Art Department for processing, then passed it to a database (I forget which one) for storage along with the rest of the inmate's info. It was a jail management system and basically was off-the-shelf software with a bit of glue code done in AREXX. Magic.

Re:Killer? Really?

[phantomfive]

You were wrong. X killer is different than Killer App. Killer app means the app that you have to have, the reason for buying the platform.

The "C" Compiler

[msobkow]

Being introduced to "C" was a major breakthrough, as I'd cut my teeth on TRS-80 BASIC and Z-80 machine language (not assembler -- POKE'ing values into memory.) "C" was a portable assembler, so close to the PDP-11/70 metal that I could almost taste it.

Lol.. Ages...

[Juliemac]

You can almost tell the ages of the posters by the software they post about.... Me? GWBasic. Sooo much easier to code in than 6502/68000 assembler. I could address a port or address easily, rapid application development was the key word. Back then they WANTED people to develop cards and software.

Photoshop killed Film?

[TomRK1089]

"In creating a new market for digital imaging Adobe also managed to kill off another market; photo printing and film developing. I'm sure in the corporate halls of companies like Fuji and Kodak, Photoshop is about as popular as a Christmas-time shaved ice vendor in Moscow."

Somehow I doubt that. Photoshop doesn't put glossy paper in your printer or make it easy to print a whole memory card's worth of photos at once. Those were separate developments that led to the widespread adoption of the digital format.

If anything I'd say businesses adopting those all in one kiosks helped kill film. Now instead of needing to set up your own print lab with expensive paper, ink, and printer, you could take your CD or stick to WalMart or CVS.

how about Switcher / Multfinder?

[Joe The Dragon]

how about Switcher / Multfinder?

The old basic games that dos shipped with?

Windows 95?

Visual pinball?

Amateurish misspelling "seperate"

[Mean Variance]

What a professional article. They couldn't review the content or run a simple spellcheck.

"Before Office, business software was a collection of different applications from seperate vendors"

Those loosers who aren't dependant on quality editor review will dye a painfull death ... I tell ya.

Also, I hate minesweeper.

Re:Amateurish misspelling "seperate"

[Just Some Guy]

My English teacher taught me that "seperate" was an adjective and "separate" was a verb. Or maybe it was the other way around, since it turns out she was just making crap up.

Re:Amateurish misspelling "seperate"

[Anonymous Coward]

dye you looser spelling natsi!

Re:Amateurish misspelling "seperate"

[Anonymous Coward]

That's nothing, I was told that there's no such word as a comma in English language...

Re:Amateurish misspelling "seperate"

[WeirdJohn]

The word you are trying to spell is "losers". "looser" is an adjective that means "less tight". I have no idea what "loosers" means, as it looks like the plural of "looser", and I don't know how to parse the plural of an adjective.

Re:Amateurish misspelling "seperate"

[Anonymous Coward]

whoosh.

Re:Amateurish misspelling "seperate"

[Mean Variance]

To reiterate what the AC said in reply to you, "woosh!"

The last sentence I wrote in the original comment was a spelling and grammatical train wreck; it was intentional.

Re:Amateurish misspelling "seperate"

[WeirdJohn]

My apologies. The inability to differentiate between those two words gets right up my nose. The scary thing is the number of people who would have seen nothing wrong with that sentence. I am now punishing myself by self-flagellation with a dictionary.

Java's software sandbox

[CustomDesigned]

While it had been done before, and will probably be done better (or worse), the Java software based sandbox security made a whole class of applications feasible, and enabled a new level of fault isolation for non-malicious software. *nix process based security and its predecessors were ground breaking. Java applies that within a shared address space at the ClassLoader level.

Re:Java's software sandbox

[burris]

...except that nobody uses the Java sandbox. As a language for executing untrusted code Java is a huge failure. Flash and Javascript won in the browser. OTOH Java has been very successful in server side and corporate desktop apps where the sandbox features aren't used.

Redefining Addiction: Porn.

[Ostracus]

Online porn* took care of the "don't have to leave home" aspect.

*That includes the "Jenny cam" as well.

No GCC?

[colinrichardday]

Where would FOSS be without GCC?

Re:No GCC?

[jonaskoelker]

Still working on printer drivers ;-)

Humm.

[BrookHarty]

GCC should be on that list...

Debug

[Snarf You]

I remember spending countless hours using Debug, the poor man's assembly language.

Narus wont someone think of the back end

[AHuxley]

Would be my in my top ten, Fort Meade on a rack.
Allowing the NSA or any banana republic to find, track, spy on and disappear its citizens or help with renditions.
The same with cell phone tracking or private credit card databases.
The software to data mine and bring it all together.
All the post seem to talk of the front end web 2.0 in development or Mac gui.

Re:Narus wont someone think of the back end

[convolvatron]

hardly. a random pile of scripts for poorly and inefficiently extracting packet fields?

what long term impact in the field of software?

Mod Parent UP

[Anonymous Coward]

That was my thought exactly. Wikipedia even lists VisiCalc as the first "killer app". Way before there was photoshop keeping the Mac platform alive (which they mention), there was VisiCalc doing the exact same thing.

I'm also surpised left PS/PDF off the list. While it isn't necessarily an "app" per se, it is probably the most important development in computer publishing/printing. More so than Photoshop and Quark, which makes their stupid list.

Re:Mod Parent UP

[ClosedSource]

Like many ideas of that time, page description languages were used at Xerox before the more famous implementations were created. Press and Interpress predate Postscript and PDF (which makes perfect sense since the founders of Adobe were former Xerox employees).

No HyperCard?

[mfnickster]

What about HyperCard???

Without HyperCard, there would be no Web as we know it today. We'd all be surfing Gopher!

Re:No HyperCard?

[Phroggy]

HyperCard also inspired AppleScript and Visual Basic.

I still have a boxed copy sitting on my shelf.

Navigator

[zogger]

Netscape Navigator hands down for me, combined with the wonderful WWW, on a Netcom account. The killer app, the web browser. I had a computer for a few years previous, but then I upgraded after using my friends machine and seeing how cool it was and got my own good enough for online machine. Man that was sweet, that first time getting online with my own machine! I have never had as good a tech experience, before or since.

 

Netware!

[Salo2112]

I think it revolutionized the way people worked with computers.

Minesweeper but not MacPaint???

[toby]

This list is bullshit (as I knew it would be).

Doom

[Anonymous Coward]

is a must-have

Why the effort

[garphik]

Why spend the effort in writing articles like these, it looks as if I am reading a personal blog ...

PONG!

[aspoon]

Surprised Pong wasn't mentioned at all. If not for Pong, where would the computing (graphical) gaming industry be?

for me it's

[vikarti]

for me it's 1.Linux(not apache but linux itself, many distributions) 2.VMware Workstation 3.Webmoney Transfer 4.Visual C++ 5.EVE Online -:) 6.Fidonet software(Golded+/T-Mail|Argus/HPT for me) 7.Symbian OS 8.Doom (first one) 9.IRC 10.LLVM(may seem strange but yes, it is)

Norton utilities

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone else remember how useful Norton stuff was before it turned to crap?

Howdy, 2039 AD reporting in - you missed a biggie

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Duke Nukem Forever

tail

[dusura]

In particular, tail -f

Re:Trolls permanently buttplugged

[JPortal]

phpBB and MySQL are on my list too. As a younger coder, I can honestly say phpBB and MySQL shaped my view of programming and, honestly, changed my life.

I'm glad I didn't learn formatting and documentation from PHP-Nuke.

There was no whoooooosh

[Kjella]

That one went so far over his head it was in space and made no sound. I'd call it a feat to miss that one.

Re:Killer? Really?

[drinkypoo]

If you're going to link it, link it right.

And Debuggers

[EXTomar]

Don't forget more robust debugger support. When compilers and debuggers on a platform get robust and feature filled the quality of applications can increase.

No HyperCard?!

[Bones3D_mac]

Given how relevant Flash and the web are in this day and age, how can you overlook HyperCard? It was the first program of it's kind to grant nearly anyone the ability to create their own full-fledged GUI-based applications within minutes. You'd simply swap stacks with other hypercard users to get at more apps.

(If I recall correctly, Hypercard's closest living relative is now a product called "Runtime Revolution"...)

Oh, and I'd also like to give an honorable mention to "ResEdit". I must've spent close to a decade exploiting it's features.

Re:No HyperCard?!

[MrEricSir]

One could also argue that the web is merely a networked version of HyperCard.

vi and grep grep grep

[guygo]

Gotta be vi and grep for me. Real nuts and bolts stuff, ya know?

SMS shapes Life.

[Terranex]

Only SMS has had a massive impact on my life. Seven years ago, Meteor, my operator, introduced free Meteor-Meteor Calls and Texts. This instigated a period of huge amounts of texting between myself and friends. Taking a small group of two dozen of my friends and acquaintances, I would estimate that hundreds of thousands of texts have been sent among us over this period. Relationships have been made and broken over SMS, and not one of us would disagree that SMS has been the most influential technology out of this list.

Ahmadinejad on Linux

[ClosedSource]

We have no GUIs in Iran.

Re:Ahmadinejad on Linux

[Veggiesama]

We have no GUIs in Iran.

That's an extremely clever, if entirely misplaced, joke. Kudos.

Re:Ahmadinejad on Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

In my country, we have only on GUI. You will bring me widgets, widgets for my GUI.

Emacs

[Anonymous Coward]

Many of the most superb applications (TeX, GCC, ...) of our times were created using it.

Ten Applications That Influenced Computing

[bagsta]

I don't think that the title is correct according to the applications mentioned in the article. I believe that the word change is a too much to use it. Personally speaking I would use influence... It would be nice to have a poll for this though(the problem would be what applications to have in the poll....)

You Forgot DOOM

[Anonymous Coward]

  1. Killer Game
  2. Only reason to keep DOS in a PC
  3. Free Level
  4. More Killer than MineSweep

The phone-tapping application from AT&T

[freedom_india]

For me it has to be the Phone Tapping application from AT&T which enables the G-Men to keep us safe from terrorists.
-:)

No AutoCAD

[JakartaDean]

Quark Xpress gets number 2 but AutoCAD didn't make the top 10? I bet they'd like to take that article back when someone points that out to them.

Unrecognized Apps

[Nitewing98]

Not sure I agree with their pick of Lotus 1-2-3, as Visicalc was the app that made Apple computers suddenly "useful" for something other than hobbying. And granted they mentioned Visicalc, but it was Visicalc that convinced IBM that there might be something to this "personal computer" craze.

Not sure if operating systems count, either, but both Unix and the Mac GUI should count as "killer" - Unix for its longevity and hardiness some 40 yrs later, and the Mac GUI for proving that people would use a GUI rather than a command line.

I'd agree with a previous post that MacPaint (and later Photoshop and Illustrator) should be in there.

Hypercard, while a huge hit on the Mac, never translated to the PC, so I'm afraid it doesn't make the cut.

I agree with their inclusion of Quark XPress, though again it was another app that led to its creation - Framemaker, originally written for Sun, was later paired with the Mac and Adobe's Postscript printers to create desktop publishing.

I also disagree with Minesweeper. I'd vote for one of the earlier computer games, like, say Zork or the Hitchhiker's Guide. There were lots of folks like me spending their nights mapping Zork or trying to figure out what the pocket fluff in Arthur's pocket was for.

On balance, it seemed their picks were very PC-centric.

Re:Unrecognized Apps

[yklktk]

Correction: Not FrameMaker - Aldus PageMaker was the desktop publishing pioneer on the Mac.

What about BIND?

[Naxeji]

I'm missing BIND on the list - the most popular DNS server on the Internet, which powers most of the DNS root servers. Without DNS it would be hard for us to use the Internet, wouldn't it?

Re:Trolls permanently buttplugged

[Anonymous Coward]

As a younger coder, I can honestly say phpBB and MySQL shaped my view of programming and, honestly, changed my life.

I'm sorry to hear that. Wish you best.

I'd add..

[jamesmcm]

GCC
Emacs/Vim
X
Screen
SSH

Porn

[Anonymous Coward]

Streaming internet porn.

Winamp

[macson_g]

Srsly, Winamp. For the firs time we wanted to have our computers one while we were not actually sitting by them. Of course now there is tousands of apps like this, and I'm using Amarok myself, but Winamp was the one.

No mention of Cubase..

[Anonymous Coward]

Steinberg Pro 12 changed into Pro 24, which became Steinberg Cubase.
There's a tool that changed the way we make and see music.
(I was at the world presentation in Dusseldorf at the time so maybe I'm not really impartial)

Mosaic

[Anonymous Coward]

No one mention Mosaic? Changed the online world for me.

Debugger

[32771]

Not that I like debugging but I just love ddd's data display functionality. There are a few missing features, i.e. I would like to access memory behind a pointer from the data display, but on the whole I love its ability to essentially document structures like lists and trees.

Norton Utilities

[Anonymous Coward]

What about Norton utilities.
The classic undelete program saved millions.

Re:Trolls permanently buttplugged

[Anonymous Coward]

Napster wasn't really *that* big in Sweden. Sure it was big, but so was IRC rooms, DC++ and other Napsterlike services (I remember using Grokster, was that a Napster clone and did it connect to the same central server?)

BitTorrent on the other hand changed a lot for me (that original client was quite painful though, keeping 3 or 4 downloads open would bring my system to it's knees).

the basic toolbox

[uiuyhn8i8]

I don't know if they changed computing in general but by God my life would be different, and worse, if it wasn't for gcc, perl, emacs and X (as in X11). I have been happily coding for a couple of decades with those and will probably be using them for a couple more.

uhm, email?

[Anonymous Coward]

duh? email let ARPANET actually take off...

Agreed, 110% OrangeTide... apk

[Anonymous Coward]

"The earliest C and Pascal compilers on a home computer really changed the landscape of who had access to serious software development tools. I believe this is what made the difference and created a vibrant Shareware scene." - by OrangeTide (124937) on Sunday May 31, @07:08PM (#28161981) Homepage

I'm with you, in 110% agreement, OrangeTide!

Turbo Pascal & Microsoft C gave me my start doing DOS programming back in 1991 or thereabouts, & later in academia (still on 8088's initially, until the Comp. Sci. dept. @ my school purchased a load of 486 33mz CPU based Intel rigs that is) then, that opened the "world of Windows" to myself & others there (which WAS totally cool, "art & science in 1 package" imo, is what graphical computing really is), & back then, you had the BBS (bulletin board systems) to post your wares onto.

My fav. compiler back then, & even still now?

Borland Delphi!

(I used it from version 1.0 for 16-bit computing, into 3.0-7.0 for Win32 development, for shareware/freeware creation)

It is the fastest compiler & produces the fastest code, especially in math & strings that there is, proven so in of all places, VISUAL BASIC PROGRAMMER'S JOURNAL Sept./Oct. 1997 issue, titled "Inside the VB5 Compiler"!

That is where Delphi 2.0 absolutely WHOOPED Visual Basic 5.0 &/or MSVC++ 6.0 even, in 7/10 tests administered, but especially in math & strings work (even DOUBLING MSVC++ in strings work), which as you know, EVERY program does work in)...

I had some fun in that area over time, to build my coding skills "above & beyond" MIS/IS/IT databasing type work (which is most of what I have found work in, the "steady eddy" end of the field, since no 2 businesses manage or keep their data the same as the next one does, so this type of work abounds, especially in custom DB work for say, Customer or inventory mgt. apps, reporting, & far more).

Do I still do shareware/freeware? No... but, my wares are still 'floating around' online for others to use/enjoy etc. et al such as this one -> http://www.techpowerup.com//downloads/389/foowhatevermakesgooglehappy.html or this one -> http://www1.techpowerup.com//downloads/390/APK_Matrix_ScreenSaver.html

There are others, but, I don't keep their links bookmarked anymore.

APK

P.S.=> I'd especially recommend that kind of work, doing shareware/freeware, to YOUNG programmers especially - it opens the door to what I feel IS the "final stage of evolution" for any person interested in computing, & that is programming (the most difficult of them all, because YOU invent the tools, not just use them + you really learn HOW THINGS WORK on a computer in doing so), especially to "round out" their skillset, fully (or, as completely as possible - but, "perfections' a road, not a destination" so, the "battle never ends", especially because things change SO much in this science over time)... apk

Quark? FAIL! It Was PageMaker!

[Anonymous Coward]

The article says that Quark XPress was the killer app. Anyone who lived through the first years of the desktop publishing revolution knows that it was Aldus' PageMaker that changed the world.

The Toolkit of The Revolution was a Mac, LaserWriter, Photoshop & PageMaker. For under $5K in the late '80's anyone could have a system that rivaled typesetting equipment costing hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Unless you were involved with printing, publishing or advertising during that period, it's difficult to grasp the magnitude of this technology. It was truly as significant as Gutenberg's printing press.

Quark came a few years later and held the mantle of "Killer App" in publishing until the early '00's when the torch was passed again to InDesign.

Slashcode

[Anonymous Coward]

If it wasn't for Slashcode, there would've been a lot more idling time at work.

An entire generation...

[TheGreatOrangePeel]

Once again, I'm late to the slashdot party, but I still wanted to point out that an entire generation of people (my peers) got opened up to the world of computing by one game: Oregon Trail

Those guys were smoking crack

[tekrat]

10. Doom
9. AOL
8. BASIC
7. SMTP (E-mail)
6. chat/instant messaging
5. TCP/IP (or internet access)
4. Apache / HTTP
3. Visicalc
2. Wordstar
1. Spacewar

PKZip

[Anonymous Coward]

It packed all 15 megs of Doom onto 5 disks and made most internet downloads hours and minutes faster on those 14400 modems...

Problaby the most often used and underappreciated piece of software of all time.

I heard the original author died without ever receiving any real compensation for his effort.

Even though we all still use it (the basic algorithm anyway) today in one form or another.

So long dude and thanks for all the zips.

VisiCalc

[EvilBudMan]

I think lotus 123 was on this list but VisiCalc gave small businesses a reason to buy what was considered a hobbyist device. This was before the IBM PC. You could get it for the Apple II, TRS 80, Atari 800, etc. Also, WordStar should be included as well because without the word processor and spreadsheet, computers made no sense to a business. They bought and still buy the majority of equipment. I forgot to mention DBase from Ashton Tate.

Of course Office improved all of this stuff but it was basically there in the late 70's. So I would Vote the spreadsheet, database, and word processor in that order as 1,2, and 3. Quark Xpress at #2 come on?

Re:VisiCalc

[artemis67]

Visicalc defintely deserves to be on the list. It was initially released on the Apple ][, and drove a LOT of hardware sales for Apple. This was back when customers were asking sales people, "What the hell do I need a computer for?"

QuarkXpress was dominant in its industry for a long time, but it was Aldus Pagemaker and the introduction of the first affordable laser printer with PostScript (Apple's first LaserWriter) that created the DTP market. Having only seen low resolution dot matrix and thermal printing at the time, I remember being blown away the first time I saw pages from a LaserWriter in 1985.

Re:VisiCalc

[OwnedByTwoCats]

Without VisiCalc driving Apple ][ sales, there would have been no IBM PC. So it was a product with world-changing impact.

Talking about "killer products" without talking about VisiCalc is like talking about automobile manufacturing milestones without mentioning Henry Ford's Model T and Assembly Line.

Lame.

The joke was also supposed to be relevant

[ClosedSource]

Thanks. My obscure point is that even if UNIX had GUIs, the hard-core UNIX users didn't want to admit it.

Emacs - The Genesis of Open Source

[pduey]

The point of the article was "industry changing" applications. Emacs, as the primary application of Richard Stallman's FSF, whose philosophies led to the concept of Open Source, is the clear winner! Where would the "industry" be without Open Source? Probably in a basement doing karaoke to Devo.

More candidates

[Punk CPA]

Aside from WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3, there were other applications that made business desktops well worth having:

• Harvard Graphics (eaten by Power Point)
• Visio (flowcharting)
• PK Zip, so you could fit things on a floppy
• Microsoft Project

The point is that these changed business computing, which is where most people first encountered computers back then. Without that degree of penetration, there would not have been such a thing as a home computer. Most people buying home computers told themselves that they were doing it to work from home.

pioneering apps

[dgallard]

First, Oracle and Apache, as good as they are, are not
apps, in my opinion. Apps are things end users use directly.

Visicalc was the pioneer. Not Lotus, for crying out loud.

My list would include:

WordStar
vi
emacs
Word
UNIX mail
rogue (just kidding)
ftp
Mosaic (ancestor of Firefox)

Missed a few spots

[salesgeek]

This list is weak as it really misses out on three key changes that have made a huge difference:

Netware - Connected the PC and forced MS to include peer to peer networking.
Trumpet WinSock - OK, this doesn't matter as much if you aren't a PC user, but this is the program that made the PC work on the Internet unitl MS Windows 95 made it redundent.
Client Server Databases - Btrieve, Gupta SQL Server and Sybase made the client server a way of life, and increased the value of networks.

Here are a few bad misses on the list:
Quark - Aldus PageMaker was released nearly two years before Quark and owned the DTP market unitl the mid 90s.
Oracle - Oracle has been an important player, but it is the concept of client-server database that is better represented by some of Oracle's earlier and more dominant (early on) competitors.

UCSD Pascal, Turbo Pascal, Microsoft C 4.0

[grikdog]

It weren't nothing until Apple, Borland or Microsoft said so, back when IBM was still banking on Wylbur.

Scripsit. (word processing for TRS-80s)

[Artifex]

Scripsit was an early word processing program, and it made the TRS-80 Model II Level II (and a Daisy Wheel Printer II) a cost-competitive alternative to paying for a typing service for the dissertations both my parents were publishing at the end of the 70s, as well as a boon for the scientific calculations each were previously making on the shared-time mainframe at the university. At least, that was their justification for buying one :)

So, as a little kid I'd be awakened by late-night printing on that huge 132-column tractor-feed daisy wheel printer, and stumble in to the study to find one or the other parent typing away. I naturally got interested in what they were doing, and the method of formatting with that software was so limited and simple that I learned it quickly. From there I played a few rudimentary games (no bitmaps on that hardware), started learning BASIC, etc. Even sitting around watching my parents and waiting my turn to do something, I picked up a taste for science fiction from the paperbacks my parents kept in easy reach of the armchair in the study. So Scripsit was my parents' killer app, and my gateway drug. And as a bonus, the gold and green mylar punch tape they'd previously been working with found new life, cut up into chains to hang on the Christmas tree for the next few years...

Top 10 list....

[jhcaocf197912]

That top 10 list, primarily list applications related to internet, games, office, or aesthetic design. They forgot AUTOCAD, Mathmatica, 3ds max, and other applications used extensively in industries (besides Photoshop). what about IDE apps like Visual Studio?

You're joking?

[CustomDesigned]

The sandbox features are a key feature of J2EE. That is how servlets/webapps/apidujour are isolated from each other. That is how your J2EE app can share a JVM with hundreds of strangers at a hosting facility for lower cost (and lower security) than a Xen/Vmware virtual machine. That is how many people create their own custom multi-app platform to share a JVM that reliably isolates the apps.

Javascript is reasonable in the browser, and has a standard. Flash is an abomination. I let it run only when absolutely necessary (youtube, cough, cough). When I do let it run, it crashes the browser after 20 minutes or so to let me know it's time for bed.

While I agree that they are not as popular, Java applets (for which the sandbox is also key) are much friendlier to the browser, and I trust the Java sandbox a whole lot more than Flash.