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The Greatest Software Ever
Posted by
samzenpus
on Tue Aug 15, 2006 10:03 PM
from the only-the-best dept.
from the only-the-best dept.
soldack writes "Information Week has an piece on the 12 greatest pieces of software ever. It also notes some that didn't make the cut and why. Their weblog covers 5 others that didn't make the cut."
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What about Deathmaze 5000? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:What about Deathmaze 5000? (Score:5, Funny)
I don't.
Parent
Re:What about Deathmaze 5000? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
the list (Score:5, Informative)
Software? HUH? (Score:5, Insightful)
These, although IMPLEMENTED through software, are not in and of themselves software - they're merely concepts (or in the case of Java, a language).
I like the list, but it's comparing apples and oranges. Surely, if the Java language makes the cut, other languages should make the cut too - C? BASIC? Don't try to tell me that Excel, or even Google search rank, is more important than C has been. And what about markup languages? No HTML?
And, if they're going to include OSes, WINDOWS doesn't make the cut? I'm sure I'll get shot around here for making this comment, but Windows has done wonders for bringing the computer to the masses. What about the software for the computer that INVENTED the modern GUI, the Xerox Alto, which also invented the WYSIWYG Text Editor? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto)
I'm sorry, this list doesn't quite make the cut, and it definitely isn't the "Witness the definitive, irrefutable, immutable ranking of the most brilliant software programs ever hacked."
Parent
Re: Windows (Score:5, Interesting)
Windows had enormous business impact and created a software ecosystem, but it didn't really drive any TRENDS in computing.
DOS might get a mention because it was critical in brining the PC to everyman. But then, the same could be said for the Macintosh OS if DOS never caught on.
Here are the breakdowns of software and major influence/contributions:
12) Morris Worm - Internet Security
11) Page Rank - "Search" (Internet utility in general)
10) Apollo Guidance System - Fault Tolerant / Embedded Computing (also historical significance)
09) Excel - Profound effect on business, put power in the hands of many professionals.
08) Mac OS - GUIs
07) Sabre - The proof of concept of large-scale BI, CRM and other "Enterprise Systems"
06) Mosaic - The Web
05) Java - Popularization of VMs and distributed/network computing
04) System 360 - Operating Systems
03) IGR - Pure wizardry and human impact (although I might posit that TeX or the Orbitz boking system could go here too)
02) System R - _the_ database.
01) BSD Unix - The Internet
Parent
Re: Windows (Score:5, Insightful)
Then that place should really be taken by VisiCacl for the Apple II.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisiCalc [wikipedia.org]
Sure in the end Excel won the war for Windows.
VisiCalc Started the trend.
Parent
Re: Windows (Score:5, Informative)
For software to be considered a success, it has to be up to handling the job it was created to do.
That axiom certainly applies to VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet software. It's great because it demonstrated the power of personal computing. The software put the ability to analyze and manipulate huge amounts of data into the hands of every business. But VisiCalc itself, despite representing a breakthrough concept, wasn't great software. It was flawed and clunky, and couldn't do many things users wanted it to do. The great implementation of the spreadsheet was not VisiCalc or even Lotus 1-2-3 but Microsoft Excel, which extended the spreadsheet's power and gave businesspeople a variety of calculating tools. Microsoft's claims that it makes great software are open to dispute, but the Excel spreadsheet is here to stay. Nearly everyone is touched by it.
See, there was more thought put into this than you may realize.
Parent
Re: Windows (Score:5, Insightful)
BG
Parent
Re: Windows (Score:4, Insightful)
"A computer on every desk" is not only about business, Mart, nor is being "great" only about business. It's also about personal computing. Every desk, Mart. Computing for everyone.
Maybe you don't like the idea that billions of people computing is more important than 10 millions of people computing -- even when the billions are doing so much less computation and more of simple communication and information retrieval when they "compute."
You could take a lot of hard lines and Geek perspectives which will make the software you mention seem more seminal or more important, or more "great" than Windows. If you ask me, in denying the importance of Windows, mass markets, and the still dawning participation age, you'd be missing the definition of "great" in this "greatest software ever" question.
Great is a computer on every desk, not because I prefer consumerism to intellectualism but because for one reason, thanks to the former we can afford a lot more of the latter. Thanks to a computer on every desk the Web could take off -- without the right OS and UI and a business capable of selling them, we could easily have stalled with BBSes, gopher, email.
I suppose the potential was too incredible for no one else to succeed, had Windows not succeeded in bringing computing to the masses. You can argue for the rest of your life that Microsoft and Windows have not been essential, or that they should not have been essential to the success of your livelihood and mine, but: they were, and they are. Windows: perhaps the greatest software ever.
Parent
Re: Windows (Score:5, Insightful)
Jeez, you really have drunk the Kool-Aid, haven't you?
What does Windows actually do? A bare Windows install is not capable of doing any useful computing at all, it is an Operating System. It is applications that do actual useful computing.
Granted, most applications are written to run on the Windows OS, but that does not make Windows the driver of computing for the masses, it is still the applications.
For business adoption, this was software like Lotus 1-2-3, dBase and WordPerfect. For home use? Games. Face it, most home users on this forum when discussing leaving Windows cite games as the factor keeping them on the platform.
The history of the microcomputer shows that is applications that drove adoption. The early 8-bit machines were sold to hobbyists who used them in little projects, and the generation of the ZX Spectrum and the Commodore 64 sold to families as replacements for the games console, with a little productivity on the side. Meanwhile, 8080 and Z-80 based machines sold to small businesses for WordStar and dBase II on CP/M, and when the IBM PC came and evolved, businesses upgraded to it and the new software available for the platform. It didn't hurt that the IBM name finally gave the microcomputer enough status to be treated seriously by more than SME's. Mac adoption started really heating up with its use in DTP, and Unix workstations sold on the strength of the high-end engineering and science applications that ran on them.
As the PC architecture became more versatile and powerful, and Windows started being more than just a DOS Shell, these separate markets slowly collapsed into one market, that of the Windows-driven Intel architecture, with lone holdouts in the Unix and Mac sectors. But a good objective look at history shows that it was not Windows that created this market. Microsoft merely rode the wave of success of the PC platform, and due to its massive install base was able to provide the most common API for application developers.
Windows being responsible for the whole microcomputer revolution is too silly to be taken seriously by anyone but Microsoft itself.
MartParent
Re:the list (Score:5, Interesting)
Tell me about. I remember 20 years ago when young lady was just getting into email she ask me if a virus could be spread by email. I just laughed and said no, it would never happen. It would require that email readers have the ability to execute code passed to them, and nobody would be stupid enough to write a mail program that would do that. Execute code passed to it from anyone.
Parent
Re:the list (Score:5, Funny)
So what have we learned, kids?
Every time you hear a bell, an angel gets his wings.
Every time you say you don't believe in fairies, one fairy dies.
If you light a cigarette on a candle flame, a sailor dies.
And - most importantly - whenever someone says nobody would be stupid enough to do something, a programmer in Microsoft gets an idea.
Now, who knows what one has to say or do for a Microsoft programmer to die?
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Re:the list (Score:5, Funny)
"Free, non-propriety standards compliance."
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Re:the list (Score:4, Funny)
Non-proprietary, you mean?
But close enough... the Force is strong with this one.
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Let me be the first to link to (Score:4, Interesting)
Unix is probably the greatest bit of software ever, but "Unix" doesn't exist per se, it's almost like you could say, that it's had a long branching history [levenez.com], oh well, I can't fault him for his choice, I probably would have said the same as well...but seriously...
Excel is on the list? Not say, VisiCalc? [wikipedia.org].
ooh, printable version (Score:5, Insightful)
I hope it catches on.
VMware? A me too software... (Score:4, Interesting)
AIX? Got em
HPUX? Got 'em
Solaris? Got em...
Re:VMware? A me too software... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Interesting article, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
All respect goes out the window here. It wasn't price that pissed off Stallman, it was restrictions on his freedom. He doesn't care how much he has to pay for software, so long as he can do whatever he wants with it when he gets his hands on it.
And what pisses me off is having to read through the whole rest of the article first, then all respect goes out the window on the 3rd paragraph from the bottom.
Re:Interesting article, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Interesting article, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know how accurate or inaccurate some of the other things the article says are, because they are in areas that I don't know as well. But certainly what he said about the history of GNU and Linux was almost completely wrong in its details.
Parent
Hello World (Score:5, Funny)
Best Hello World ever (Score:5, Funny)
public void sendMessage();
}
public abstract class AbstractStrategyFactory {
public abstract MessageStrategy createStrategy(MessageBody mb);
}
public class MessageBody {
Object payload;
public Object getPayload() { return payload; }
public void configure(Object obj) { payload = obj; }
public void send(MessageStrategy ms) {
ms.sendMessage();
}
}
public class DefaultFactory extends AbstractStrategyFactory {
private DefaultFactory() {}
static DefaultFactory instance;
public static AbstractStrategyFactory getInstance() {
if (null==instance) instance = new DefaultFactory();
return instance;
}
public MessageStrategy createStrategy(final MessageBody mb) {
return new MessageStrategy() {
MessageBody body = mb;
public void sendMessage() {
Object obj = body.getPayload();
System.out.println(obj.toString());
}
};
}
}
public class HelloWorld {
public static void main(String[] args) {
MessageBody mb = new MessageBody();
mb.configure("Hello World!");
AbstractStrategyFactory asf = DefaultFactory.getInstance();
MessageStrategy strategy = asf.createStrategy(mb);
mb.send(strategy);
}
}
In order to get through the lameness filter, I was forced to include this sentence that I would otherwise omit.
Parent
Re:Best Hello World ever (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, but I could have never written that straight through. I just began with the "naive implementation" and started cramming patterns into it. Plus I needlessly referred to concrete classes via interfaces wherever possible like you're supposed to. (Otherwise I might be tempted to stray outside the bounds of the interface and use implementation specific features.) Singleton and Factory were both no brainers. Strategy, though, was what really turned the program flow into a mess.
I initially posted it in a BS slashdot comment but this code actually became famous. It's all over the web. It appeared in one of the Patterns books [amazon.com] as a warning of what not to do. I got a free copy from the author after I found this code in his online draft. There are also C# versions around if you need a Hello World in your Microsoft shop.
I hope to improve my Hello World in the next versions with even more patterns. Ones I'm looking at include Mediator, Proxy or Bridge, and Decorator (maybe to replace "." with "!" at the end of strings or something obnoxious like that, so I can name an interface "Excitable"). There may possibly be room for Visitor and a few others. Command and/or Interpreter would be nice but Interpreter might require a significant amount of code- using a library is unacceptable in a project like this one. Although that code then might need some more PATTERNS to help it out because otherwise it's hard to think of stuff that these patterns should be used for except for earlier infrastructure to implement previous patterns! (This would make the Hello World similar to projects I have seen in real life.) Maybe a stack- I'll push a Noun onto it ("World") and an Interjection ("Hello") that knows how to modify a Noun operand. Then I'll feed the stack to the Interpreter which will generate a MessageBody. That would really make a nice mess of things. If things get too complicated I'll have to jam a Facade in there somewhere.
Parent
Another vote for the shuttle...and here's why: (Score:4, Interesting)
This article from Fast Company [fastcompany.com] is coming up on ten years old and I've carried a bookmark for it since that time.
Read through it and see how much software you're aware of which is as capable as it is, the bug count, the lack of nights of old pizza, etc.
There are a lot of Earth-bound companies which write software on a large scale (source line count) which should take a page from what this article details.
DOH!!! He forgot the wordprocessor (Score:5, Informative)
This produced a completely error free program, and started a generation of programs that followed that would drive mechanical typewriters to extinction practically everywhere, and changed how we get printed text onto paper. Hence this is truly great software.
So TeX is a glaring ommission for this list, and probably should have been close to the top, if not number one.
Re:DOH!!! He forgot the wordprocessor (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree that it is simply amazing how few bugs there are in Tex. I do not think this is due to the fact that Knuth was paying people who found bugs. Rather, I believe the quality of TeX is due to Knuth's genius, and also not in small part to his idea of "literate programming".
There are better ways to put it, but in essence, literate programming means that you are supposed to write text that explains the algorithm or process; the code is like actions intersepsed in the text, but in a sense, the main product is the text, not the code.
I try myself to follow this style, having code that either reads obvious, or having large comment sections that explain what is going on, and all the background assumptions, so that the code is then obvious. It certainly had an influence on the amounts of bugs in my code, not to mention in my coworker's ability to understand what is going on.
In this respect, I believe a lot of OSS is sorely lacking. And the pity is that they lose developers in this fashion. As a personal story, some time ago I wanted to develop a plugin for Gimp to implement a particular effect, something I used to be able to achieve with a chemical darkroom. After three hours of staring at the code, and not being able to figure out for certain how to get to the pixels of an image, I gave up. I remember staring at hundreds of lines of C code, written in poor style, with very few comments (and what comments there were explained the obvious, instead of the background and the assumptions of the piece of code).
Parent
My nomination... (Score:5, Funny)
Excel is Over. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm amazed that he put Apollo's command module and Excel in the same article. Excel ten years ago had some simplicity and virtue. Today, it is choked with M$'s horrific auto-wrong features. Worse, it requires an OS he dismisses just one paragraph up.
There are plenty of examples of Excel costing everyone lots of time and money, and not just because someone used it the wrong way. I've read stories about gentic code sequences at the Center for Disease control being turned into date codes. I've seen what happens between versions. Putting your work into a secret format, of course, puts you into a position where the owners of the secret can lead you around. Then there are the cases of misuse. No, not using it for obtuse things, like a blog formatter (yes, I just read about someone doing that), flexibility is what makes spreadsheets great. Misuse is creating the monster that's so big and complex it will eat you alive. When you combine misuse with auto-wrong you get a real disaster.
I use Gnumeric now. It's light and won't tax your computer. The input is functional, so it won't tax you. It has all the functions Excel does but they all give you the right answer. Most important, it won't auto-wrong you. The formats you enter are the formats it uses and you can go back and forth between them without losing information. Gnumeric is everything Excel used to be and more. It's grown useful features like perl scripting, but not bloat like silly drawing tools.
After such a blatant contradiction, Excel as a simple tool, I'm going to read the rest of the article with a grain of salt. If I see Power Point or Word, I'll quit reading.
Easy: GCC (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow! (Score:5, Informative)
- He claims that the first version of Unix came with paging. To even credit the PDP-7 with paging capability is rather amazing. Unix used whole-process swapping until only much later in its development. If I'm not entirely mistaken, wasn't paging implemented in BSD3?
- He appears to claim that Unix invented time sharing! I don't think I have to elaborate on that, really...
- He also claims that "[Unix] would let two people use a computer at the same time." Not only is it false (it supported as many as there were terminals wired in), I also find it a bit funny that two-people time sharing would have been considered impressive at the time.
- He seems to imply that "Uniplexed Information and Computing System" was an actual, official name of the system. To begin with, "Unics" wasn't really meant to be expanded -- it was just a pun on the "Multics" acronym (that is, a pun on the acronym, not on its expansion).
- To mention that Unix was rewritten in C without mentioning that C was invented for that very purpose is of course not "incorrect", but I would argue that it is a rather important omission.
- He writes that the first C version of Unix was "Unix System III", while in fact it was, of course, Third Edition (V3). System III was a much later release (~1980?) by the USG.
There are probably many more errors, but I stopped reading when I noticed that my eyes were bleeding.Why not wikipedia? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is wikipedia not on the list? I consider this the best invention of technology ever--a method that combines the power of the internet with the minds of people.
A better list (Score:5, Interesting)
-
IBM's VM operating system. (1972) OS/360 was a nightmare, and not even the best OS of its era. Burroughs and UNIVAC were way ahead in operating systems in the late 1960s. VM, though, had paging, good security, hypervisor capability, and good performance. In the 1970s. And it's still in use.
-
Backus' FORTRAN compiler (1957) The first good compiler. Optimizing, even. Better code generation than anything running on UNIX prior to the mid-1980s.
-
QNX (1980) The first really good microkernel OS. Still in use, deep inside railroad signalling systems, machine tools, and nuclear reactor controls, where it has to work.
-
NLS (1967) The first system with a mouse, windows, and a GUI. It took a mainframe to make it go in 1967, but all the key ideas were there.
-
AutoCAD (1982) This is the program that replaced the drafting board. Huge increase in productivity. Ever ink in a drawing by hand? Redraw a drawing to make changes? Engineering companies used to have acres of people doing that stuff. No more.
-
Bravo (1974) The first what-you-see-is-what-you-get text editor. Multiple fonts. Ran on the Xerox Alto. The ancestor of all modern word processors.
Those are older examples, each a major advance over previous technology. As the technology becomes more mature, the advances become smaller, but more widely deployed.ha, I get to post something twice (Score:4, Insightful)
[TimBL...] Interesting, he's going to go down in history with similar status as Gutenberg. One of the very very few people alive who will still be referenced in 500, 1000 years where even kings, prime ministers and presidents will be forgotten.
And a shame too. marca (or his bosses) were the ones who said "all this abstract chatter on www-talk about compound documents is interesting, but can we hack some shit into the next release to show pictures?" Behold, the IMG tag. Years later, we've just about recovered from the infrastructural mess this made.
The IMG tag allowed corporations to burn money on graphic designers to avoid competing on actual content. Wikipedia as an application was viable once we had TEXTAREA, and before if you count the TimBL's NextStep browser; myspace and toyota.com were not.
What really built out the net we still use is one core idea: the Web is "a badly animated TV with a buy button". And the Web would have gone the way of Gopher+ without that. So let me toast the IMG tag. I'll see you in hell.
true! (Score:5, Funny)
/bin/true!
The ultimate example of the Unix philosophy of doing one thing, one thing only, and doing it right!
No arguments, no parameter lists, no side effects, just true!
Such a beautiful example of Unix doesn't just happen; it takes work! Let's look at /bin/true on a Solaris 2.10 box:
Don't let anyone tell you the Unix way is the easy way; it took Six Whole Versions for Sun to get true correct! No wonder Windows is so full of bugs - they're trying to do hundreds of things. If they'd only adopt the Unix philosophy, they might have gotten it right in only ten tries! (Ten, because all the smart people work on Unix.)
Worship the true!
Notepad (Score:5, Funny)
System/360 (Score:4, Informative)
Almost everything else was an unholy mess for years. The first System/360 operating systems (OS/PCP, TOS, original DOS) could not run multiple applications at a time. Although this functionality (implemented by OS/MFT, OS/MVT and later versions of DOS) was in the plans from the start, it took a lot time to actually arrive in a useable form. The process of converting customers from the older 1401's and 7090's to the new architecture was horribly mismanaged. In theory, emulators (supported by microcode) were available to simplify the task. In practice, the conversion was a nightmare, not helped by the fact that, in those days, it was very common to be unable to locate program source code. In IBM's defense, they did put System Engineers on site with customers for as long as it took to solve the problems.
An even greater technical achievement (Future Sys: which was eventually released in part as the System/38 and its successors, as well as some hardware devices) was axed by Thomas Watson personally, after a bigger investment than that made in System/360 development, because of the painful experiences involved in converting clients to the System/360.
Nah (Score:4, Funny)
Cheers,
Dave
Parent
Re:Excel was simply a clone (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Excel was simply a clone (Score:5, Insightful)
or "great" about it, really. I would think 123 or Visicalc
would get it. I can understand the rational behind not
giving it to Visicalc in terms of not being complete, but
123 was. All Excel added was running with a native Windows
UI.
Parent
Lotus 1-2-3 Macros -- everyman a programmer (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the most amazing things I've seen is how Lotus 1-2-3 macros turned accountants and clerks into programmers (spehgetti perhaps, but it ran). Lotus did this by leveraging users *existing* knowledge of spreadsheets and menu keystrokes. Just toss in a Goto cell and an IF function into a keystroke recorder and you have a Turing Complete language. Complex billing programs were written by ordinary clerks. There has been nothing like it in scale before or since that I know of. Excel's programming language was only for the bravest of clerks and killed the trend.
Parent
Re:Better choices - go back the originators (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Better choices - go back the originators (Score:5, Informative)
That's kind of the point, Sparky.
Parent
Re:Java made the list (Score:5, Interesting)
Java is not now, and never was, a toy programming language. It's used by, among other things, cell phones, large web servers, and of course the annoying web applets you used to see everywhere before Flash stole their cookies. As far as I can see, it has few remaining technological drawbacks, the only big one left for me is how insanely ugly the language itself is. But that's not because it's a "toy" language, it's because it's an industrial-strength language, designed to force the programmer to program correctly, even if it takes 3 times the code and 10 times the time.
Java is not little. It's freakin' huge, when you count all the standard libraries. And the verbosity makes your programs even bigger.
Java may have been essentially interpreted in the past, but it isn't now. Don't believe me? Look up gcj. Even if you don't count a JIT as "compiled", I think gcj pretty much ends that argument.
Java is standard, it just depends how you count. It's not an open standard (yet), it's a proprietary one. Still, that's better than no standard, which is about where most implementations of BASIC are.
Java is not good for learning the basics. BASIC is much better for learning the basics. But have you ever had to sit through "Hello, World" in Java? That was my first Computer Science class in college, ever:Oh, and it has to be in a file called "Hello.java", or it won't work. Case sensitive, too. And, of course, they had to explain every last detail.
I would have quit right there, except I already knew some 5 or 10 languages when I came to class, including Java, so instead, I got to explain it to everyone else.
So what did you get right? Well, BASIC was popular, and Turing probably was, I don't know. And Java did indeed make the list, and like every language, it sees some use by novices and students, as well as trained professionals. But counting all of that, you don't really have much point.
Don't get me wrong, I hate the language as much as the next guy, and bytecode isn't as relevant as it once was (or may be soon). I'd much rather see C make the list -- after all, C is Unix and Unix is C. But then, the list seems pretty arbitrary -- no mention is made of Mosaic being bug-free, but VisiCalc doesn't count because it was buggy, and Excel makes the list because it's less buggy.
Parent
Re:Wank wank wank (Score:5, Informative)
Thank you for playing. Our hostess has a fine parting gift for you as you leave. If you return, please remember to always phrase your answer in the form of a question.
The correct question for: "Tbe first operating sytem written in a high level language" was: "What was MULTICS?"
On a whim, the judges decided that PL/I and BLISS both sucked, and The C Programming Language openly states that C isn't really a high level language, so they would also accept "What was the Lilith?"
Of course, the first truly high level language was Trebecktran, used to write the OS for me, the Trebecktron 9000!
Parent
Re:Wank wank wank (Score:5, Informative)
That's simply incorrect. PL/I was chosen as the implementation language for MULTICS well before the first line of code was written. It was never written in assembly language. If you'd like to know some facts, consider reading a bit about the history of MULTICS [multicians.org].
Oddly enough, this is mostly true. Even though MULTICS was written in a high level language from the beginning, it wasn't very portable. It required a fairly heavy duty memory-management unit that most of the machines at the time simply didn't provide. It was a bit like a current x86 in protected mode, but in reverse. The x86 takes a virtual address and translates with with the paging unit to a linear address, then the segmentation unit (theoretically) does another translation on that to give a physical address. MULTICS required an MMU that took a segment-style address and translated it to a linear address, then a paging unit that translated that to a paged address.
Very few memory management units (then or now) provide that capability, and without it, MULTICS is pretty much dead in the water.
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Re:Somewhere... (Score:5, Funny)
Said the geek in the darkened basement.
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Re:Somewhere... (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Somewhere... (Score:5, Funny)
It's common knowledge that he's screwed millions of people.
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