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?

Comments

MS Paint

[ciderVisor]

MS Paint

Re:MS Paint

[gringofrijolero]

No way man.. Solitaire!

Re:MS Paint

[spydabyte]

Yeah, we can definitely see that you grasped this product quite well in your very concise description.

Re:MS Paint

[carlzum]

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.

Re:MS Paint

[hey!]

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.

Re:MS Paint

[faffod]

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.

The boot-up splash screen

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:The boot-up splash screen

[postbigbang]

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

On One Page

[russlar]

http://www.itnews.com.au/Tools/Print.aspx?CIID=146459

For me it's compilers

[OrangeTide]

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.

Lotus 1-2-3?

[gilgoomesh]

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.

internet explorer

[postmortem]

activeX malware and exploitation worms made huge difference in our lives

Re:internet explorer

[sakdoctor]

Bonzi buddy.

How did people live before they had a malware purple ape on their desktop?

Re:internet explorer

[superslacker87]

Oh the days of ignorance and when system administrators didn't bother locking out the computer from installs. I installed that at work back in 2000 and was on Amazon surfing for a book called The Multiorgasmic Man: Sexual Secrets Every Man Should Know. Bonzi Buddy popped up and naturally my speakers were blaring and decided to tell the entire cubicle section I was in what I was looking up.

Instant Messanging?

[Ryan Stortz]

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?

More recent ones

[Darkness404]

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

Pagemaker over both Photoshop and Quark Xpress

[tverbeek]

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.

"hello world"

[scotch]

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?

Turbo Pascal

[JoeD]

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.

Not an application, but...

[SmlFreshwaterBuffalo]

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.

Re:Trolls permanently buttplugged

[ale_ryu]

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.

Re:Tie for first...

[fermion]

Seriously.

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.

PGP

[burris]

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!!

Re:Trolls permanently buttplugged

[Phroggy]

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.