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?

On One Page

[russlar]

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

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.

Re:Seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, if you RTFA, you'd see that the number 1 application is precisely a web browser. Unless you are being sarcastic~

ubuntu

[kloffinger]

they listed ubuntu, but oddly it's also on their "disappointing technologies page" see? [itnews.com.au]

Re:More recent ones

[mdwh2]

Firefox, it showed that it was possible to reopen the browser to innovation and standardization after the rise of IE.

It wasn't the first of the post IE/Netscape browsers - at the least, there was Opera.

Not that I think this counts as being a killer app. People didn't buy computers to run Firefox (or Opera). The web would have still carried on without them. Yes, I love Opera, and Firefox is okay too, but this isn't anywhere near on the same scale as the initial development of the web and web browsers.

Ubuntu (yes, its not an application), it gave Linux to the masses and made it

So shouldn't every other OS get listed there too? Why is a version of Linux a killer application, and no other OS?

Re:ubuntu

[value_added]

Hardly surprising given their existing Top Ten list. The rationalisation for MS Office, for example, is that it put thousands of secretaries out of work. No acknowledgment was made that they were already out of work long before Windows appeared, and wordprocessing software didn't need a toolbar with a ribbon to be effective.

Re:SSH

[Zero__Kelvin]

"The ultimate irony of OpenSSH was that it came along at almost the exact moment when it was no longer all that important."

It will surprise many a computer security professional that SSH isn't all that important.

Re:SSH

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, who needs secure remote access these days anyway?

Re:MS Paint

[ichthus]

No no no. I wasn't making a comparison, or stating a preference. Maybe you never used win3.1/95/98.

This was a common error message when trying to open a simple txt file. Windows would complain that notepad wasn't capable of opening such a large file, so it would offer to open it in Wordpad instead.