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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?
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.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
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.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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.
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Those two games introduced me to computers (in my elementary school classroom). I had no idea before that.
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.
E pluribus unum
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.
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.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
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.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
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
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
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.