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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.
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
Whither, Mavis Beacon?
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
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/
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.
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/
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.....
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 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!
they listed ubuntu, but oddly it's also on their "disappointing technologies page" see?
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
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.
How about no.
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.)
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.
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.
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?
I remember spending countless hours using Debug, the poor man's assembly language.
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...
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.'"
Gotta be vi and grep for me. Real nuts and bolts stuff, ya know?
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 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.
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?