Ten Applications That Changed Computing 437
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?
For me it's compilers (Score:5, Interesting)
The earliest C and Pascal compilers on a home computer really changed the landscape of who had access to serious software development tools. I believe this is what made the difference and created a vibrant Shareware scene.
Internet Explorer (Score:2, Interesting)
My ISP uses Intuit for payment and last month I could pay with Firefox on Linux but this month I have to use IE (and IE6 in IES4Linux doesn't work.)
Die, Microsoft. Die.
Re:SSH (Score:5, Interesting)
The ultimate irony of OpenSSH was that it came along at almost the exact moment when it was no longer all that important. Everyone used telnet or rsh before OpenSSH became a killer app. People used OpenSSH primarily out of a fear over password sniffing on broadcast ethernet. Before that, switched networking had taken over. No-one was using T connectors and terminators by then.. and switching hubs were cheaper than broadcast hubs for UTP and active ARP attacks hadn't been demonstrated. Still, its amazing that such a good implementation of ssh came along when it did.
Re:MS Paint (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember going to the Harvard Coop the week that the Macintosh was introduced, and seeing people jammed around them, trying out something that was unlike anything most of us had ever seen before.
It was MacPaint.
What made it different is we'd never seen that combination of abstraction and direct manipulation before. Some of us knew what a light pen was, and had some vague idea you could do things like manipulate a model of something, but the thing about this app was that it presented analogies you could manipulate. They weren't literal models (like Microsoft's amazingly misbegotten "Bob"). They were things boiled down to the essence off what might be usable for the task: palettes that weren't palette shaped; "windows" that contained scrolling surfaces that were somewhat like a sheet of paper. And there were other things that were, well, new, but somehow logically fit with these idealized analogies: drop down menus, and scrollbars for example. They were easy to grasp (both literally and figuratively) because they were a kind of meta-analogy; they were simple mechanisms you could figure out because they somehow worked on the same principles of the things that were analogies. They were like analogies that didn't refer to anything we knew, but we kind of grasped they style of the thing.
Dark Castle and Oregon Trail (Score:5, Interesting)
Those two games introduced me to computers (in my elementary school classroom). I had no idea before that.
Re:Pagemaker over both Photoshop and Quark Xpress (Score:5, Interesting)
Agreed. PageMaker on the low and and later FrameMaker on the high end virtually drove the entire industry for awhile. In fact, Photoshop may not have had a place to live if PageMaker hadn't created a zillion newsletters to put photos in. After all, the professionals could afford LetraSet ColorStudio, which was Photoshop's functional predecessor. But at a few thousand a pop, small shops couldn't afford ColorStudio to adjust the photos going into the PageMaker newsletters, thus the "low-end" Photoshop was born.
Re:Trolls permanently buttplugged (Score:4, Interesting)
Change can be good or bad, here's my top 10 list: .NET
AOL
Cygwin
Exchange
MS Office
MySQL
phpBB
Quake/Unreal/Half Life
The Sims/World of Warcraft
Win95/X
Turbo Pascal (Score:5, Interesting)
In a day when serious compilers cost $300 or more, most people used the free Basic that came with DOS.
Then Turbo Pascal came out at $49.95, and proved that there was more than a niche market for compilers.
TJ-2, Spacewar, RS-1, FORTRAN, MacWrite (Score:5, Interesting)
1) TJ-2. Written by Peter Samson for the PDP-1, it is at least a plausible candidate for "first word processor." It used a text input file, with command reminiscent of later word processing program "dot commands," although the commands were identified by an overbar character rather than a period. It produced two-column output with justified lines, and had provision for hyphenation. Because the PDP-1 facility had output equipment based on IBM electric typewriters, the output was "letter-quality." It showed a generation of hackers that computer software could be used to edited and print finished-looking text.
If not TJ-2, then TYPSET/RUNOFF, which must have been used by tens of thousands of people at universities to perform what today would be called "word processing."
2) Spacewar! Another PDP-1 program, a plausible candidate for "first video game," and certainly introduced thousands of people to the idea that computers could be used purely for fun. A somewhat subversive idea, since commercial facilities rented PDP-1 time at something like $60 per hour.
3) Bolt, Beranek and Newman's RS-1, or perhaps its antecedent, Prophet. It was not a spreadsheet, but it was, nevertheless, an easy-to-use and powerful system for medical and scientific research calculations, with "tables" as its fundamental data type, and flexible vaguely SQL-like commands for extracting data from them and performing statistical tests and calculations on them. I don't know whether Bricklin and Frankston ever saw it, but I suspect that it was "in the culture" and influenced Visicalc in a very general way.
4) FORTRAN. Unlikely as it sounds, it was a breakthrough in computer ease-of-use. Long before computers started to make headway amount the general population, they first had to make headway in the scientific community among people who were not computer experts. It was FORTRAN that brought computing within the grasp of the average scientist. It also, oddly enough, became a breakthrough in portability and the loosening of IBM's monopoly power, at least in the academic community.
5) MacWrite. Or, if you prefer, the earlier Gypsy word processing program for the Xerox Alto. Gypsy was probably the first WYSIWYG word processor that could display multiple fonts and images. MacWrite was the program that first showed hundreds of thousands of people to that style of editing. In my case, I was utterly blown away by the ability to create superscripts that were actually in smaller type than the main text.
Before MacWrite, WYSIWYG meant only that the word processing commands could be hidden, and that lines on the screen broke at the same places as the printed copy. Before MacWrite, I never saw a system that show justified text as justified on the screen, or that showed multiple columns on the screen, or showed headers, footers, and footnotes in their proper places on screen.
IRC? (Score:4, Interesting)
Granted, the earlier networks didn't have NickServs so you had to /whois to semi-make sure the person you were talking to was actually the person you think you're talking to, but in terms of instant messaging, IRC is certainly by far a predecessor to all of the IM apps.
and I'm guessing there were near-instant messaging utilities for BBS's back in the day; I know I chatted with a SysOp once through... Terminat, I think?
Ahhh, Bi-Modem protocol... no carrier indeed.
Re:Tie for first... (Score:5, Interesting)
I leanred ed on a teletype. vi changed everything.
Shape table on the Apple were the next big change in my life.
Although I am sure 123 and all the clones are interesting, and Excel does deserve a place of it's own, visicalc changed the way I think.
Same thing for Mathematics.
I am not going to say anything about WYSIWG editing, because I truly think that combining content and presentation is a bad thing. It was a good idea, but it shouldn't be done on a regular basis. For any non trivial project, content and presentation has to be kept separate. I blame the fact that it isn't for all the bad code in the world.
Autodesk inventor was an excellent way to migrate from the drawing board to the computer. However Solidworks and later Inventor actually provided the means by onw which should draw on the computer. There is no reason to pretend that the computer is a drawing board.
It is kind of the same with C++. Lets us look at coding by modeling the world, but does not hide the code of the model behind arbitrary gibberish.
Anti virus software is very important because it allows us to used the cheap PC. Without it we have to buy the drones expensive computers.
Re:The boot-up splash screen (Score:5, Interesting)
1. WordStar/WordPerfect/Word
2. Visicalc/SuperCalc/123/Multiplan-Excel
3. AutoCad
4. dBase/Oracle7/MySQL
5. Duke Nukem/Wolfenstein 3D/Quake
6. Zelda.....WoW....etc with a branch to Second Life
7. Mozilla/Apache/Tomcat/II6 ad naseum
8. C/Java/php (note the absence of VB)
9. Napster/xTorrent/Amazon/iTunes/eBay/and other Business Distribution online apps
10. McAfee/Norton/AVG/etc.
Ten is too short a number for categories, but these IMHO all started billion dollar industry segments
AMOS, Blitz (Score:2, Interesting)
BASICs such as AMOS and Blitz on the Amiga allowed people to easily create games and other applications, and were similarly cheap, far cheaper than commercial C compilers back then.
The Amiga also came with a free BASIC, Microsoft BASIC, but that was good for almost nothing, and no one ever used that unless you were insane, and didn't realise there were better alternatives...
(Blitz BASIC survives to this day [wikipedia.org], although I personally started out on AMOS instead.)
Amateurish misspelling "seperate" (Score:3, Interesting)
What a professional article. They couldn't review the content or run a simple spellcheck.
"Before Office, business software was a collection of different applications from seperate vendors"
Those loosers who aren't dependant on quality editor review will dye a painfull death ... I tell ya.
Also, I hate minesweeper.
Debug (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Anonymous Coward (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:internet explorer (Score:2, Interesting)
activeX malware and exploitation worms made huge difference in our lives
Have they really?
I sometimes wonder.
Of the billion or so PC users on the planet, about 900 million or so run Windows. They are productive at work. They have fun at home.
It struck me that over the past no "household appliance" has troubled me less over the last fifteen years than the Windows PC.
Re:internet explorer (Score:3, Interesting)
I was on Amazon surfing for a book called The Multiorgasmic Man: Sexual Secrets Every Man Should Know
Was it any good?
If it was, would he be spending his weekends posting to Slashdot?
Re:The boot-up splash screen (Score:2, Interesting)
And even more time to drink that coffee as you rebooted while holding down shift when one of them fuxxored the system.
Re:AutoCAD (Score:1, Interesting)
+1 to that.
Imagine the good 'ol days when a client would ask something simple like, "could you move that wall 3 feet to over there"? Yeah, we'll get that back to you next week. They look over your shoulder now. Is this good or bad? Very good from the technical standpoint obiously.
Re:internet explorer (Score:2, Interesting)
I once spent well over an hour trying to fix this this eldery woman's PC. It was one of the first times I tried - and we were an ISP, so this wasn't our deal at all but she was old and I knew few others would try. Having no luck with the add/remove programs, I went to the website...The website said to uninstall/reinstall. But of course that didn't work. So I went to the "contact us" section, which referred customers to an email address. So I did a whois on their domain and found an address and a phone number. I called the phone number, went to the tech support section, which promptly informed customers to their "support" section of the website - yeah, the single paragraph of uninstall/reinstall. So I called back and went through every other option on their phone system until I found an area with a lot of sub-options...I finally got through to a voice after about 20 minutes of trying, five of those dedicated to digging through that one subsection....All the while with the very patient and nice but confused and unhappy elderly woman on the other line.
When I finally got this person, I told him the name of the very large cable company I worked for, and the infinite number of PC's I had encountered that were severely damaged or outright tanked from their malware. I informed him that I had the lady's phone number, and she had mine - if there was any trouble getting the software removed, I promised to assist her in contacting all of the relevant entities such as the BBB, BSA and more...Needless to say the problem was fixed.
vi and grep grep grep (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Lotus 1-2-3? (Score:2, Interesting)
Ironically, it's what propelled Apple to the 2nd spot for a year or two. It used to be 3rd in sales, behind TRS-80 and PET (world-wide). But VisiCalc gave it a jump ahead. The "Rise and Fall of Commodore" describes how biz people would come into early computer shops and ask for "a VisiCalc machine", which was only on Apples at first. Apple would probably be a dead company today if not for VisiCalc, because it largely funded Mac R&D.
In fact, the reason it was done on Apple first was that the TRS and PET were tied up on other projects at the development shop, leaving only an Apple machine.
Re:MS Paint (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:MS Paint (Score:3, Interesting)
It wasn't really until reliable WYSIWYG editors came about that windoz really began to get popular.
the basic toolbox (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Tie for first... (Score:3, Interesting)
VisiCalc (Score:3, Interesting)
I think lotus 123 was on this list but VisiCalc gave small businesses a reason to buy what was considered a hobbyist device. This was before the IBM PC. You could get it for the Apple II, TRS 80, Atari 800, etc. Also, WordStar should be included as well because without the word processor and spreadsheet, computers made no sense to a business. They bought and still buy the majority of equipment. I forgot to mention DBase from Ashton Tate.
Of course Office improved all of this stuff but it was basically there in the late 70's. So I would Vote the spreadsheet, database, and word processor in that order as 1,2, and 3. Quark Xpress at #2 come on?