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

The original Lotus 123

[MpVpRb]

Written by one guy..in assembly

Under-appreciated

[descubes]

Microsoft BASIC and later Visual Basic: Unjustly despised, but introduced many to programming (and the very first ones were marvels of micro-programming too). Also interestingly portable at a time where portability was on nobody's radar.

Spectre GCR, a Mac emulator on Atari ST. A precursor of virtualization in my opinion, and a very smartly done one at that.

VMware for making virtualization available to the masses and enabling the cloud.

AmigaDOS for being the first OS with built-in hardware-accelerated graphics and sound.

The RPL system in the HP28 and HP48 series of calculator. Reverse Polish Lisp and symbolic processing on a 4-bit calculator with 4K of RAM? Seriously?

The Minitel system in France, including nationwide phone directory and dubious innovations such as Minitel Rose (porn in text mode at 1200bps, basically).

Postscript and the whole desktop publishing revolution.

NeXTStep (or whatever the CorRect CapItalizATION is), so far ahead of its time that it took years for it to reach its full potential in the form of iOS.

GeOS (already mentioned by someone else)

Mathematica. Just wow. But also forgotten precursors such as TK! Solver.

Lisp, Fortran, Algol, Pascal, Ada, Eiffel, Smalltalk and a whole bunch of under-utilized languages.

Much lower on the name recognition scale, Alpha Waves, arguably one of the earliest real 3D games, which also influenced the creation of Alone in the Dark.

Re:VisiCalc

[Deep Esophagus]

Before Wordstar, there was Electric Pencil. I also compared Apple Writer II vs. Wordstar for a technical presentation in some college class in 1982; I declared at the time that Apple Writer was far and away the most advanced and user-friendly WP on the market.

I find it amusing that some 30 years later, some of the old Wordstar keyboard shortcuts are still used in some programs today -- notably alt-X, ctrl-Y, and F1 still do essentially the same things they did in Wordstar.

I think someone else mentioned Colossal Cave, and yes indeedy -- CC begat Zork which begat the rest of Infocom's amazing library, which I still play from time to time today. My 20-something daughter just the other day complained about the difficulty of getting the babel fish in your ear! Tell me, Microsoft, what games of YOURS are still being played 20 to 30 years later?>

Re:Article summary: "I am a Mac fanboi"

[jhecht]

The Mac OS's successful commercialization of the GUI was a huge advance, and students really need to compare it to CP/M and the like to understand its importance. You don't need a detailed comparison, just test runs of the two side by side to show the difference in user experience. Late in 1983, I walked into a computer store fully intending to buy a CP/M machine, fiddled with the interface for about a half hour, and walked out without buying one. It simply was not worth it, even as a technology writer. I'm a fast typist, the three-finger command interface was too clumsy, and nobody wanted -- or even knew how to handle -- electronic submissions. The late Cary Lu introduced me to the Mac, in 1984, but what sold me was watching my six-year-old daughter play with one in the Boston Computer Museum. She picked up the interface in minutes for MacPaint. MacPaint and file management were similarly intuitive. I wanted a tool for writing, not to be a computer operator. I bought a Mac and got it up and running right out of the box.

C compiler

[fyngyrz]

Most valuable program(s) ever. From day one, and still today. Hands down. Best positioned language in terms of "to-the-metal", changes from tool to uber-tool in the hands of anyone who masters assembler and arrives at learning C with that under their belt, can create extremely fast executables if the CPU is really taken into account, or can be extremely simple to implement if a CPU is treated simplistically -- yet your code will still work fine, if a bit more slowly. Made portability something achievable instead of just desired. C is so well positioned that implementing the language's constructs on top of [some random] CPU is a relatively simple exercise, and then you have immediate access to oodles of goodness.

Also the source of a lot of whining and bad programming from poor programmers. But hey, a fine carpentry set doesn't make you a great carpenter, either.

Also a nod out to standard libraries -- also a boon to portability and more.

C++, oC, C#... also worthy of nods, but C is the king.