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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?
MS Paint
Squirrel!
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.
World of Warcraft... Who needs to leave the house anyways ?
http://www.itnews.com.au/Tools/Print.aspx?CIID=146459
Anybody want my mod points?
For me it's either "vi" or "screen".
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." --Mark Twain
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 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
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.
My work here is dung.
Whither, Mavis Beacon?
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.
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
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
What do they tell you if you tell them you can't use IE?
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.
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?
XML causes global warming.
Those two games introduced me to computers (in my elementary school classroom). I had no idea before that.
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.
1011 1010 1101 1100 0000 1111 1111 1110 1110
Change can be good or bad, here's my top 10 list: .NET
AOL
Cygwin
Exchange
MS Office
MySQL
phpBB
Quake/Unreal/Half Life
The Sims/World of Warcraft
Win95/X
Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.
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.
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/
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.
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!
-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.....
I still prefer good old fashioned talk to modern instant messaging.
The old days.
Edsger Wybe Dijkstra
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.
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.
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.
I can't speak to a "killer app", but I think we can all agree that there is a killer filesystem!
Anybody want my mod points?
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!
was the original application that changed computing and led to the explosion of use by average corporations in the 60s and 70s (and beyond).
Quaterdeck Mosaic. It is, afterall, what brought the web to the masses.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." --Mark Twain
-1, Spamcruftisement
$ make available
they listed ubuntu, but oddly it's also on their "disappointing technologies page" see?
MS Windows would be the ultimate killer app. MS killed so many apps, it isn't even funny.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
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
Doom
Turbo Pascal
Ethereal
Red Hat Linux 4
For one reason or another, those apps changed my entire computing landscape.
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!!
whooooosh
...try adding Eamon to the list.
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:
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)...
Co-operation beats competition
The Darkest Side of Clippy.
Squirrel!
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' !
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
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...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
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).
How about no.
Well, according to them, only MacOS and Windows had GUIs. They probably think that on Linux, you're stuck with that "complicated command line".
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).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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.
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.)
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.
Qxe4
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.
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.
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.
"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?
The old basic games that dos shipped with?
Windows 95?
Visual pinball?
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.
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.
Online porn* took care of the "don't have to leave home" aspect.
*That includes the "Jenny cam" as well.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Where would FOSS be without GCC?
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...)
GCC should be on that list...
I remember spending countless hours using Debug, the poor man's assembly language.
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.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
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."
Umm, Oracle was number 10 in the article...
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.
I think it revolutionized the way people worked with computers.
This list is bullshit (as I knew it would be).
you had me at #!
Why spend the effort in writing articles like these, it looks as if I am reading a personal blog ...
Surprised Pong wasn't mentioned at all. If not for Pong, where would the computing (graphical) gaming industry be?
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)
In particular, tail -f
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.
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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
If you're going to link it, link it right.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
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.
8==8 Bones 8==8
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).
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.
Gotta be vi and grep for me. Real nuts and bolts stuff, ya know?
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.
We have no GUIs in Iran.
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....)
Until the skies turn blue...
Until the air of freedom strikes us...
For me it has to be the Phone Tapping application from AT&T which enables the G-Men to keep us safe from terrorists.
-:)
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
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.
The subject who is truly loyal to the Chief Magistrate will neither advise nor submit to arbitrary measures (Junius)
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.
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?
GCC
Emacs/Vim
X
Screen
SSH
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.
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.
Je me souviens.
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.
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
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
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
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?
Thanks. My obscure point is that even if UNIX had GUIs, the hard-core UNIX users didn't want to admit it.
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.
Definitely. Back in mainframe days, apps like NASTRAN and CADAM made modern aircraft design possible.
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.
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)
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.
-- $G
It weren't nothing until Apple, Borland or Microsoft said so, back when IBM was still banking on Wylbur.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
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...
Get off my launchpad!
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?
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.