Slashdot Mirror
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?
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.
For me it's either "vi" or "screen".
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." --Mark Twain
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.
activeX malware and exploitation worms made huge difference in our lives
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?
Bugs are just features that have been fixed.
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
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
SSH
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
In the last 20 years, the web browser has done the most to change the way we use computers.
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
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.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
-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.....
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.
Check out my blog!
Oh, and MUD I. Without which, there would be no MUDs, MUSHes, MMORGs, or much of any other gaming online.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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. .NET.
And it seems that Delphi was the leader before MS bought all the team to create
Yeah, and "testing, one, two, three" is the most important thing ever spoken into a microphone.
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.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
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.
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.
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.
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.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Where would FOSS be without GCC?
What about HyperCard???
Without HyperCard, there would be no Web as we know it today. We'd all be surfing Gopher!
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
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.
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
Nitewing '98
Everything works...in theory.
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News