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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
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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.
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/
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.
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.
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!
-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.....
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!
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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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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!!
Sorry, we'll keep it down.
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.
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.
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"
If you're going to link it, link it right.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"