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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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