What Early Software Was Influential Enough To Deserve Acclaim?

theodp writes "That his 28-year-old whip-smart, well-educated CS grad friend could be unaware of MacWrite and MacPaint took Dave Winer by surprise. 'They don't, for some reason,' notes Winer, 'study these [types of seminal] products in computer science. They fall between the cracks of "serious" study of algorithms and data structures, and user interface and user experience (which still is not much-studied, but at least is starting). This is more the history of software. Much like the history of film, or the history of rock and roll.' So, Dave asks, what early software was influential and worthy of a Software Hall of Fame?"

Comments

VisiCalc

[YrWrstNtmr]

'nuff said

Re:VisiCalc

[YrWrstNtmr]

And if you want to continue:
GeoWorks

Re:VisiCalc

[astralagos]

Indeed. If there's a piece of software that launched the personal computing revolution, it was VisiCalc - the first software business actually _needed_. I'd also throw in: * WordStar - which was the PC world's answer to emacs. If you did text processing on DOS systems, it was done with WordStar or another program which emulated it. * WordPerfect - the word processor, I imagine that without the Windows Hegemony, Microsoft would -never- have been able to kill wordperfect * Bank Street Writer - the first -educational- word processor, I imagine X'ers like myself lived off of this in school

Re:VisiCalc

[Will.Woodhull]

1. Visicalc, of course. It is what changed the Apple ][ from a toy to a valuable business asset.

2. Lotus 1.2.3, the better VisiCalc, and now for DOS machines!

3. The first flight simulator for the Apple ][.

4. WordStar on CP/M (later on DOS), proving that effective word processing could be done without a dedicated word processing network. 5. Perl--- the first truly useful, easy to learn (hard to master) programming language supporting regular expressions. (Well, awk preceded it, but awk was impossible to work with.)

There were also several raster and vector graphics apps from the 1980s that demonstrated the breadth of possibilities.

I have avoided the software that was originally created on mini frame and main frame computers, then duplicated on the microcomputers. These were great, but they did not have the "Oh wow, nobody saw that coming" impact of Visicalc, WordStar, or Perl.

Yes, any decent Computer Science program should definitely have some required courses in how and why these apps changed the world.

Re:VisiCalc

[Samantha Wright]

Which, it should be emphasized, we do study. While I'm a major advocate for the study of computer history, CS is not about software development, it is a branch of mathematics. The author of the article would be better off pestering computer engineers.

Re:VisiCalc

[Samantha Wright]

Xerox Bravo (1974), Xerox Gypsy (1975), and Xerox Markup (not sure of exact year, in the vicinity). As a general rule, whatever you can think of, PARC had it ten years earlier. By the late eighties they were working on a PDA/tablet/smart surface, touch-driven ecosystem.

Point being—people disproportionate weight on programs that they experienced. It's the same story whenever an amateur writes a computer history article; a few pages of nostalgic bullshit without any real research. Yes, it's significant that the Mac programs (which, oh by the way, already existed on the Lisa, too!) were popular, but severely erroneous to give them all the scrutiny. As historians we should endeavour to look past our own biases and provide an accurate image of history, not play favourites with specific products.

What the fuck?

[Anonymous Coward]

Whining because they don't teach Mac history 101 in CS programs?

I sure bet the grad student heard of MS Windows, Word and Excel. I bet he's even heard of CorelDraw, Super Mario Brothers and Pong too.

Re:What the fuck?

[Bing Tsher E]

Apple 2? I had Multiplan on Xenix.

The old Xenix Microsoft produced before the PC. I still have an Altos box that runs it.

Susan Kare

[Amorymeltzer]

He mentions Susan Kare but I'd like to give another shout out to her work. We are still using derivatives of her designs, and the brief simplicity of them really led the way for a lot of the icons we use now.

Re:Times change

[mikael]

Because once we forget how this software worked, someone else comes along and does a research project, thinks that they have invented something new, patents it and/or names it after themselves. Then they'll start sending lawyers after other people. I've seen this happening with something as simple as 3x3 convolution matrices and widget libraries. What was common knowledge in personal computer magazines back in the 1980's now seems to be stuff that leads
to patent battles now.

Second for PageMaker

[Nova Express]

Without the desktop publishing revolution, it's hard to see Apple surviving long enough for Jobs to retake the helm.

Re:Times change

[Leafheart]

For the same reason we have a Baseball Hall of Fame, a Football hall of fame, or even simpler, for the same reason we study world history. Know thy history, learn from your mistakes, understand what the best things were made off.

Re:Times change

[gbooch]

OMG, please tell me you are not old enough to vote too.

We study influential software for the same reason we study the past in any domain: to learn of the forces that shape what is, the human stories that lead to these artifacts, the design decisions and the lessons learned therein. What you see on your desktop today is the current end of a long chain of "obsolete software" that includes MacPaint, and Whirlwind, and any number of earlier systems that bring us to current dominant designs. Economically significant and useful software intensive systems all have such a legacy, and your hubris in so quickly dismissing the value of understanding anything older than your professional lifetime is staggeringly depressing to me. May you never be on any development team that has to grapple with the refactoring of legacy code.

Don't forget

[Anonymous Coward]

Leisure Suit Larry

Re:Influential?

[jpiratefish]

Turbo Pascal changed *everything* It turned Mr. Borland into a millionaire overnight, and completely changed how software is marketed, and changed the way software is developed forever.

Lisp 1.5

[rmstar]

Lisp 1.5 was the first widely distributed Lisp sytem (and it includied an interpreter AND a compiler). Many people have completely forgotten about it, but among its contributions were to pioneer dynamic programming languages (as are ruby, python, etc, etc) AND garbage collecting. And many other things. It was staggeringly innovative.

The Clipboard

[gilgongo]

Not so much software as software tool, but if you're looking for the most influential and important thing in software, the clipboard probably wins hands down. Without it, most of the web would not exist, for one thing.
It also has the distinction of being invisible - out doesn't even feed back. Nothing comes close to it for ubiquitous power and influence.

Re:Times change

[Stormwatch]

Understanding what made such software good back then might help you produce better software now. Who knows, maybe studying various ancient, obscure GUIs could have averted disasters like Windows 8, Gnome 3, and Unity.

Re:Times change

[vlm]

You have not gotten the straight answer yet, but the real world economic answer is nothing changes very much, so a well educated individual knows how the newest PR news release about a "new" idea will turn out, given how the exact same idea turned out three times in 1970, five times in the 80s, and twice in the 90s. Even if the outcome is different for tech or non-tech reasons, the challenges, successes, roadblocks, etc, will be the same this time around as the last ten times.

Ah so you're saying that this new language will be a silver bullet which will eliminate programming as a profession because business people will write their own programs, you say? Hmm I wonder if thats ever been claimed before. Naah. If it were you'd have language names like "Business Oriented Language" and stuff.

I've got a totally new idea! We can project manage programming by programmer-hour because the product of programmer times hour is always a constant a given problem. You'd think someone in 1960's mainframe development would have had the same idea, but people back then were pretty stupid so I'm sure my new idea is ... new.

Hey guys, I got a new one. We could assign a noob to work with an old timer and see if the noob learns anything by osmosis. This has never been tried in all of human history so I'm gonna patent it and trademark it and I'm gonna be rich and buy a private island.

To be honest its not as technical as you'd like to think... its kinda like studying ancient fashion to predict what future fashion will look like, seeing as womens fashion is kinda cyclical. So, you're saying after skirts go down, they tend to go up, and vice versa? Holy cow batman! Especially when dealing with trendy style high fashion like UI design or PR.

You know you've got a killer app when....

[PapayaSF]

Once in an interview, Dan Bricklin (IIRC) said that in the early days they personally demonstrated VisiCalc at trade show booths. Sometimes accountants would actually cry, as they realized how many hours they'd spent adding up rows and columns of numbers, and how quickly they'd be able to do it with this new piece of software.

You know you've got a killer app when a demo causes members of your target market to realize how much your software is going to change their lives, and they burst into tears.

CS

[Capt.Albatross]

"CS is not about software development, it is a branch of mathematics."

That depends entirely on what college or university you are attending.

Computer science has a meaning for more than just students, and that meaning lies primarily within the domain of mathematics. What gets taught in the name of computer science depends on the institution doing the teaching.