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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?"
'nuff said
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.
BTW, the source for MacPaint is available online at the Computer History Museum:
http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/macpaint-and-quickdraw-source-code/
Written by one guy..in assembly
I'd say HyperCard would be a better choice
#DeleteChrome
Autocad & PowerDraw (now PowerCADD) 2D CAD followed a decade later by SolidWorks 3D for turning concepts into executable designs that were within the realm of price and usability for individual designers.
dBase
Word Star
Turbo Pascal
Here are a few that were great in the beginning but have become bloated and kind of overbearing since:
Word 4.0 for Mac (fast, stable, good UI, nearly perfect)
Photoshop 1.0 and then 3.0 (when they added layers)
Early versions of Excel (for Mac, then later Win95)
FreeHand (when it was Aldus)
PageMaker (when it was Aldus...see a pattern here?)
Aldus Persuasion (notice I didn't say PowerPoint?)
iMovie (compare to any version of movie editing software bundled with Windows ever...no contest)
Honorable Mention: Garage Band (too niche to be mainstream)
An FPS without any S (or colour, or sound, or high resolution graphics):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_Monster_Maze
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKvd0zPfBE4
Armed with the awesome power of a Sinclair ZX81 and its 16k external RAM pack, you could run around a maze, chased by a dinosaur. In 3D!
Made the Mac famous
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Algol-60. RT-11. TECO. Hypercard (count this one twice!).
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.
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.
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.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
"Why aren't you one, too?"
OK, maybe that's a little harsh. But it's not completely apparent what value such a detailed review of early software programs would add to a computer science curriculum. It's probably sufficient to note the emergence of the GUI as the major defining element here, and let our poor undergrads get back to studying their bi-directional linked lists.
My opinion: it's not an accident that computer science is a more forward-looking than backward-looking discipline. Students will get more mileage out of downloading the latest version of OpenCV or playing with math in Python than sitting through a boring lecture about primitive computer software apps.
Watfor/Watfiv. QED and its predecessors. TRofff/Nroff and their predecessors. And lots more.
Without the desktop publishing revolution, it's hard to see Apple surviving long enough for Jobs to retake the helm.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl
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.
--- "When you gotta do something wrong. You gotta do it right. (Fighter)"
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.
This introduced a lot of people to 3-D rendering, and the free-enough license led to widespread adoption.
Aldus Freehand, Deneba UltraPaint and Aldus PageMaker. Oh the memories!
No. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCPaint
Leisure Suit Larry
At least the source code for MacPaint is available from the Computer History Museum.
http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/macpaint-and-quickdraw-source-code/
VisiCalc
I wonder if we can nominate turing as a wetware piece of a complex software program. Unless I miss my guess, he inspired VisiCalc.
- Nec Impar Pluribus, or so I'm told.
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.
-- Did you try Tao3D? http://tao3d.sourceforge.net
you mean this unavailable source code?
http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/macpaint-and-quickdraw-source-code/
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.
Learn C to learn how things really work for the last few decades in the kernel and library spaces, learn the original specs of HTML to understand what Hypertext was really for, and learn C-Kermit to learn what configuraiton and control over a limited interface really means.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washed Warren Wiggins who was washing Waldo Woo. - FTFY
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
I'll beg to disagree with the idea that history is irrelevant to CS. Protocols, and practices, did not eveolve in a vacuum. Knowledge of how early principles were derived, and why we've migrated to newer approaches, is critical to understanding ongoing changes in a field. Moore's law, for example, led us from extremely limited command line interfaces to today's sophisticated GUI's. But understanding the original command line interfaces is vital to seeing _why_ modern tools aren't all in XML with back end databases.
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.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
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.
Circumcision is child abuse.
LOL, you fixed it for Dr. Seuss! I'm not sure if that is bold and confident or heretic...
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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.
Historically, that also happened in mathematics. Oh, wait, software IS mathematics. And mathematics just doesn't get obsolete. Just sometimes, notation changes (== programs get reimplemented), but the core is still the same.
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Wizardry on the Apple ][
Directory Opus on the Amiga
TUTOR (also known as PLATO Author Language) is a programming language developed for use on the PLATO system at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign around 1965. TUTOR was initially designed by Paul Tenczar for use in computer assisted instruction (CAI) and computer managed instruction (CMI) (in computer programs called "lessons") and has many features for that purpose. For example, TUTOR has powerful answer-parsing and answer-judging commands, graphics, and features to simplify handling student records and statistics by instructors. TUTOR's flexibility, in combination with PLATO's computational power (running on what was considered a supercomputer in 1972), also made it suitable for the creation of many non-educational lessons - that is, games - including flight simulators, war games, dungeon style multiplayer role-playing games, card games, word games, and Medical lesson games such as Bugs and Drugs (BND).
1994 Message from CS Prof Daniel Sleator to Tim Berners-Lee: It would be possible for one person to write a new game (such as double bughouse chess) without having to write a half dozen graphics interfaces. Many really cool things change from being impossible to being quite feasible. (The PLATO system developed in the 70s at the University of Illinois had some of these properties: simple graphics available to all users, fast interaction among a large pool of users. The result was the development of a number of very popular and engrossing interactive games.)
pong was pure hardware
I'm not sure Turbo Pascal's legacy is as influential as it should have been. Sure, plenty of modern IDEs owe a nod to TP, but what about the compiler? The thing was shockingly fast. I wish TP had been more influential in that regard.
Some interesting info about how Turbo Pascal's speed was achieved here.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Jumpman: set the standard for 'playability' & 'fun'. I remember making fun of it when I saw the underwhelming graphics, but it had me hooked the first time I played it. Truly, one of the best games ever. Decades later, it's STILL playable
Archon: what can I say? It started where chess left off, hit the ground running, and just *oozed* "epic win" for concept & gameplay.
Barbarian: the game that INVENTED the concept of a "fatality" move
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4Ii_YfJNvw&feature=youtube_gdata_player
Quake. Then Quake 3.
That and Norton Utilities made DOS useable.
But XTP's superlative use of the screen area and hotkeys was stunningly competent.
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.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
I learned so many things with PCTools 2.41e, from formatting (I was a noob really) to hex editing (Removed face-off copy protection, and even created complete hack list for EyeOfTheBeholder lol)...
I have so much memories with this program... and when I tryed the next version, it was so poor and with so less features....
I can't call that English
RUNOFF on CTSS (1964) turned the computer into a document preparation tool. From there we got Multics runoff. The UNIX developers justified their early efforts by promising to bring runoff to AT&T without the expense of Multics. And now RUNOFF has many descendents, both in the form of markup languages and document processing applications. These are arguably a more widespread and important use of computers than actual computation.
Before the internet, computers were a tool and not just a screen to get you to what someone else already had made. You got a computer because you wanted to make things. It could be a document, an image, a song, software that could be used to make more and other things. Computers were mainly purchased by those who wanted to use them as a tool for creative and practical purposes. All you could consume on computers in the pre-internet age were games, and consoles were usually cheaper and better for that, or the few expensive and slow online services that you could reach over dialup.
So this made a huge difference for early software. The windowed GUI interface that is everywhere today was designed for desktop publishing, by Xerox, a company whose business is making documents. The phone and tablet interfaces that are growing now and the first centered around consumption of data instead of creation of data. This is a huge switch which makes it even more important to remember software history.
So a few titles I think are of note:
The Print Shop - One of the most popular programs in the 80s. Most people's first experience with anything like desktop publishing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Print_Shop
BASIC - This language introduced many people to programming, and was a default built in feature of most early computers.
Deluxe Paint - Bitmapped graphics program by Electronic Arts - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deluxe_Paint
HyperCard - Multimedia software http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard
SuperPaint - Combined bitmap and vector graphics in one program - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperPaint_(Macintosh)
SoundEdit - The first popular GUI sound editor - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundEdit
TheDraw - Text editor for making ASCII/ANSI art - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheDraw
ResEdit - GUI builder for early mac - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ResEdit
That's just what I can think of so far.
Paradox for DOS was a breakthrough program for its time, permitting fairly serious multi user networked business applications to be built in DOS with a relational database. The PAL (Paradox Application Language) was very powerful. I built a rock solid and fast multiuser system for a mental health clinic with it. And Commodore 64's Logo was actually HP's graphics language in disguise, a great program for what it was and for its time.
In physics, we learn about older theories and the reasoning that lead to them, then the new experiment that disproved them and what came next. Physics isn't just a body of current theories, it's a process with a history. Understanding the process is probably more important than understanding the current theories.
CS could stand a bit of that.
I would love to make "the history of software" a mandatory course for anyone who will ever be involved in software patents. While we're at it, a history of science and engineering should be mandatory.
Napster - this is the software that kicked off the idea of music file sharing. Okay, the record companies hated this program but this is the first program that I can think of that really CONNECTED people as a group on the internet for exchanging data.
MS GW Basic - this was the basic that shipped with the IBM PC and was pretty much what much of its early software was written in because it was so simple to use and yet could be used to do quite a bit.
Windows 3.0 - This was the first version of Windows that people really used and really brought the GUI desktop with the mouse into the mainstream. Okay, the first Macintosh from Apple did that too and came before Windows 3.0 by a ways but it was not nearly as widely used, especially in the workplace.
I started computing with a VIC-20, and grew up with a C-64. I never really used the 'must have' apps that made businesses want computer in the first place, though. I knew about them, and knew my uncle spent a fortune on an Apple II to run them for his store, but knew little about them.
So recently I picked up a Commodore 128D and got some CP/M software: WordStar, dBASE II, and VisiCalc. After some configuration brouhaha (this wasn't easy, without the manuals!) I gave them a go.
What most surprised me was how usable they all are, still. Oh, the interfaces require actual studying, but WordStar's is sensible, and dBASE's total lack of anything resembling user friendliness at least exposes its raw flexibility.
Of course, then my 30-year old Commodore monitor let the blue smoke out of the capacitors, so it's out of commission till I get them replaced.
I think having current compsci people take at least a brief course using these old, old programs might help them understand not all that much has really changed - and maybe inspire them to change things.
Who knows? Probably couldn't hurt, at least.
Roman numerals are obsolete. Unless you live in clockwork world.
More to the point, the mathematical systems based on roman numerals are obsolete, replaced by a system that uses zero as a placeholder and as the common origin of all the number lines. You would have a hard time describing how to do simple things like reconciling your checkbook using only the concepts behind roman numerals.
Will
Also, for me, QBasic, Turbo Pascal, the Norton Guide (with an assembler guide that had each asm instruction and each DOS interruption listed). Norton Disk Doctor, to fix broken floppy disks.
The AfterDark screensavers for Windows 3.1 (this was the one with the flying toasters), which could activate when sending the mouse cursor to a corner of the screen (hahah, what does that remind me of?).
Though I regret to admit it, Visual Basic 3.0 was the first IDE I've seen that let you create GUI's by dragging and dropping buttons and form elements. I don't know if it was the first ever IDE to do this, but it was the first I've seen.
most computer Science programs are about theory and not the business parts, It / networking, how to code (real skills), user experience / UI , ECT.
MacPaint and MacWrite were, I believe, the two programs that enabled the original Macintosh 128K to be accepted. It was easy to use and, while not as powerful as some DOS apps, we're fully interoperable wirh one another. I am among the first to receive the Macs at Drexel in 1984. Our curriculum was based around these two apps. And, you know what? It worked. Eventually we received other - the departments developed their own software as well.
I developed on the Lisa. But, the, languages and tools such as Microsoft Basic, Turbo Pascal for the Mac, Lightspeed Pascal ( the Lightspeed C) and MacForth became available. These tools were low in cost and enabled many apps to be written. And, due to the slowness of the CPU and limited resources of those early machines, learned the value of choosing or developing an algorithm that offered performance even on those old machines.
Today, many developers don't appreciate the art of developing those early systems - the libraries they use today are often rehashes of the optimized code written in the days of yore. Yes, today's students should appreciate those early contributions as they see what worked and what failed and why.
well CS IS NOT IT / NETWORKING / DESKTOP / SEVERS.
And this why that needs to be in a tech schools.
First real browser
then Netscape
NDOS
PCTools
QEMM
DesqView
Deskmate
Wildcat and PCBoard
Sierra Games
As usual by self-centered people, rather than assuming your own knowledge should be known by everybody, why doesn't Dave Winer ask the teachers in charge of CS degrees why they are not teaching the software he presumes to be so valuable? Maybe then he would really learn why his comparison to shakespear sucks so much.
In fact, the whole logic is wrong, he first states knowledge of these programs should be mandatory, yet asks other people for knowledge about mandatory programs "he doesn't know". So they aren't mandatory if he doesn't know them? Otherwise why is he proclaiming himself the end all knowledge of what CS students should know?
The word for today is: confusion.
Solitaire
All of these programs ran in MS DOS, itself on of the great programs. Sorry, Microsoft haters, but at that point in my life, DOS was they only operating system I knew.
Q&A was a word processor and database (sort of). It had the totally cool feature of being able to add a list of figures in a document! It did macros.
Borland C After giving up on Microsoft C, someone gave me a copy of Borland C which had the advantage that it actually worked.
Telix was a full featured shareware comm program that was written by 17 year old! It was the best one out there at the time.
Norton Disk Doctor and Spinrite to keep the hard drive going.
Dirmagic was a program that handled files and directories instead of using the clunk dos commands.
Lemmings - Just plain fun.
Star Control 2 Great space game that told a story
DesqView and QEMM Allowed you to multitask in DOS.
Not only is TeX practically the first open source program, it is still in use (rewritten, tho), along with all the tools it spawned.
The only word-processor I ever really liked. And the reason why I switched to Windows from DOS and my own customized Turbo Pascal editor.
I immediately felt at ease with Ami Pro. Everything felt intuitive for someone who had started using computers mainly to get rid of typewriters. Other word processors at the time seemed like just different typewriters. But Ami Pro almost forced you to use styles instead of manual formatting. And it made the use of styles very obvious and easy, mapping them to the function keys. At last, something smarter and more useful than a typewriter.
I'm using LibreOffice now, but I'm unhappy and still long for the elegant simplicity of Ami Pro.
_why_ modern tools aren't all in XML with back end databases
...because vestiges of sanity inexplicably remain?
This reverse Polish language was not a "mainstream" language, but for astronomers, it was perfect for telescope automation. FORTH was also used in other robotic things. I was really surprised that FORTH wasn't included on anyone's list. In fact, how many of you have ever heard of FORTH, let alone did any programming in it?
Adventure, a.k.a. Colossal Cave, by Crowther and Woods (extended by others).
http://rickadams.org/adventure/e_downloads.html
This was many old-school programmers' first exposure to computers as entertainment. For example, both my wife and I recall playing it on TI SilentWriters (paper output plus an acoustic modem) when we were kids. Even more than Space Wars, which was written at least a year later and only ran on much less common hardware, this was the start of computer gaming.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
Lightwave and the rest of the Video Toaster studio software was influential in that for the first time, you could have a quality video studio stuffed in a single computer. A lot of UHF and independent stations used 'em.
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.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Byte is kind of the journal of note of the microcomputer era from 1975 to the early '90s (when it became just a bunch of boring reviews). I'm sure anyone who wanted a list of influential software from the past could spend a couple of weeks digging through them. You can find most of the early years as scanned .PDF files if you know where to look.
And don't forget to cover some of the important failures too, like The One[tm], Visi-On, and Lotus Jazz. And the important semi-failures like Smalltalk and OS/2.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
That's not a problem, but saying that younger people are dumb for not sharing the author's nostalgia is.
... I'll nominate the punch cards as the most solid stack ever
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Variation Simulation Analysis Software.
It's a technique for simulating variations in product assemblies. Usually mechanical, but could be of other natures, as well. You model the assembly and it's manufacturing variations, and then "build" some quantity of parts. One can determine how many assemblies will likely meet specifications, the major contributors to out-of-spec assemblies, etc. etc.
The technique was developed during WWII at Willow Run Labs, where it was implemented by the classic "banks of women operating calculators", and is one of the reasons we were able to crank-out all those airplanes that actually worked.
By the 70's it was implemented in an academic setting on mainframes.
A company I worked for obtained rights to VSAS and we ported it to the IBM PC. I did the initial port to Watcom Fortran (there's another one for you!), and then designed a domain-specific language (VSL) and implemented a compiler in C and interpreter in Fortran, so that mechanical engineers didn't have to write their models in Fortran any more. The Fortran models were bulky - with line after line of function calls with zillions of parameters, passing separate X,Y,Z values in the calls. I'd imagine the engineers wore-out the parenthesis keys on their keyboard pretty fast. VSL, on the other hand, had data types for points, lines, vectors, planes, etc. Using an interpreter didn't slow things down, because most of the time was spent in geometric library routines, which were in carefully-optimized Fortran.
I insisted on their hiring a mathematician, and between the two of us, we tweaked it to run faster on the PC than it did on the mainframe. (Engineering professors don't write code that is either fast or mathematically-correct, it turned out...)
And that's when it's use took off. The company founder started as a manufacturer's rep for some Finite Element Modelliing software, so had lots of contacts in the auto industry. (And the company was located near Detroit.) They both sold the software and did also did in-house projects for the auto companies until they ramped-up their own engineers. This allowed the auto makers, for example, to start treating windshields as structural elements (because the hole for the windshield could be manufacturered to precise tolerances), and allowed them to eliminate costly alignment operations, such as when fitting hoods.
It's used by every auto and aircraft manufacturer, every hard disk manufacturer, etc. etc. etc. Basically just about any complex mechanical product you touch was touched by VSAS during design.
I'd imagine you couldn't build an iPhone at an affordable cost or with the quality level of an iPhone without VSAS (or it's equivalent). You wouldn't be able to buy a terabyte hard drive for less than $100.
There's more info on it here:
http://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/en_us/products/tecnomatix/quality_mgmt/variation_analyst/
(The company was acquired by Siemens many years ago.)
Maybe not quite what this post was looking for, which I think was more consumer PC software. But it runs on a PC and has from the beginning of PCs, and has had a large but mostly-invisible influence on just about every tech product we use every day.
A 30-year run is nothing to sniff at, either.
I was visiting a computer store owned by a friend. A man walked in who looked homeless. He wore clothes that everyone else I knew would have thrown away. This was in California before Reagan, before there were a lot of homeless people.
I quietly asked my friend if he would ask the homeless person to leave; maybe there would be a concern about theft. My friend laughed, "That's Michael Shrayer, he wrote Electric Pencil, he's a multi-millionaire".
Paper tape -- or perhaps piano rolls -- as the first reel software storage method.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
While the first 4K Microsoft BASIC was significant in many ways, the ROM-based Microsoft BASIC included with literally tens of millions of computers shaped the industry in ways no other application ever did.
It's impact was in being the first tool used by an entire generation of programmers, it shaped their thinking in ways that frustrated some.
Ken
The first BBS, and the protocol that enabled the transfer of binary files over modem. Xmodem was originally invented for use on CBBS and spread from there.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
IBM's FORTRAN compiler, ditto COBOL.
Eliza, the fake psychiatrist.
Texas Instrument's Speak and Spell
Castle Wolfenstein on the Apple ][
On board control software for Apollo 11, ditto for the Voyager space probes.
MIT's Multics O.S.
The Xerox Star office workstation
OS360
Unix and C compiler
Dartmouth Basic
General Electric's time sharing O.S.
FORTAN: 1957
Lisp: 1958
Lisp was such a good idea that people are still reimplementing it 55 years later.
FORTAN was such a piece of crap that ... almost everyone started using it, it became for most people the only possible way to learn to program, it persisted for decades after alternatives were designed, it was sufficiently flexible to evolve into a very nice and usable modern version, it's still often more efficient than C, and it basically defined the whole procedural style of programming.
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Trumpet Winsock for Windows 3.1.
A small, nearly forgotten utility, but the one that opened the door of the internet for many.
In the same category, I might also mention Slirp, which I and many others used to suck full web access through our university shell accounts. Ah, the memories.
"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.
What a bunch of geeks. Not GUIs, not number crunchers, not "desktops" or "workstations" or "tools".
From the users POV: Leather Goddesses of Phobos is what got the juices flowing. And Mountain Dew.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
I was visiting a computer store owned by a friend. A man walked in who looked homeless. He wore clothes that everyone else I knew would have thrown away. This was in California before Reagan, before there were a lot of homeless people.
Reagan was the Governor from early 1967 to early 1975, and I doubt that Electric Pencil even came out before 1975. My guess the scene you described happened in Jerry "Moonbeam" Brown's first year of office.
Jerry Pournelle's first though when seeing Electric Pencil for the first time was that he would never have to retype another page again. The breakthrough with Electric Pencil was that it would run on "low cost" hardware, the magnetic tape typewriter provided similar functionality in the 1960's for about 10k$, or about the same as the base price for a Cessna 172.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
BoeingCalc was the first spreadsheet that had worksheets that were interconnected. The user interface was terrible (terrible) but if you're an excel wizard, you'll have a rough idea of what you're looking at. The very first version supported files up to 32mb in size. In 1982! Imagine that. I actually "inherited" a copy of BoeingCalc on old 5 1/2" floppies, but they're so old I wasn't able to retrieve the files (only the directory listing) off them, and as far as I know I'm the only amateur computer historian with a (possibly) functional copy/physical disk of the stuff.
If anyone is able to help/assist, my website and boeingcalc info is in my sig below.
moox. for a new generation.
Also Einstein's theory of the anomalous specific heat of metals. Oh how we laughed at that one!
Why can Computer Science only include the mathematical aspects of the discipline? You are essentially trying to draw a line between theoretical and applied science and insisting Computer Science only includes the theoretical half. The study of historical applications is part of Human/Computer interaction, which most certainly is a branch of CS.
It's true that the practice of software development is more properly called Software (not Computer) Engineering, but in practice few US schools break that out into a separate course of study. (Which is really quite a shame; most practicing software developers would be a lot better off knowing more about Software Architecture and less about, say, compiler design. And I dare say that the CS department would be much better teaching it than the blundering that goes on in the Business School under the rubric of "Information Management" courses.)
P.S. If you seriously thought a CompE was the person to talk to about software development, you apparently don't know many, if any, CompE's. In my school, we were roughly 1/2 CompSci, and 1/2 EE's, with more electives than either. We certainly didn't have any more requirements in Software Development than the CompSci majors did.
Back when nobody I knew even HAD a hard drive. PC-Write was a mainstay of the floppy-only era, favored for its light footprint and snappy responsiveness. If I remember right, the executable was around 32kb, which meant it would load off of a 5.25" floppy in just a few seconds.
I remember when "consumer" HDDs hit the market, and a friend of mine saw one in action for the first time. He described its speed in terms of PC-Write: "You know how when you load PC-Write, the disk whirs for a couple of seconds, and then it opens? Well, with a hard disk, you hit 'ENTER' and the hard disk goes 'zzzt!' and then 'pow!' it's loaded. Amazing!"
Considering the current state of "bloatware", one might say we've gone backwards since then. (sigh!) Time to get an SSD...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
It was developed by Bruce Artwick at his company, SubLOGIC in 1976+. Finally sold copyright to m$ in1996.