The Greatest Software Ever

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."

the list

[mincognito]

12. The Morris worm 11. Google search rank 10. Apollo guidance system 9. Excel spreadsheet 8. Macintosh OS 7. Sabre system 6. Mosaic browser 5. Java language 4. IBM System 360 OS 3. Gene-sequencing software at the Institute for Genomic Research 2. IBM's System R 1. Unix

Fah!

[Foobar of Borg]

From TFA: "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."

So, both the article and the submitter are obviously trolls!

Corrected

[mincognito]

12. The Morris worm
11. Google search rank
10. Apollo guidance system
9. Excel spreadsheet
8. Macintosh OS
7. Sabre system
6. Mosaic browser
5. Java language
4. IBM System 360 OS
3. Gene-sequencing software at the Institute for Genomic Research
2. IBM's System R
1. BSD 4.3

Re:Excel was simply a clone

[gtoomey]

No Lotus was a clone of Visicalc.

Unix as #1?

[Anonymous Coward]

I sense fanboyism in that article somewhere...

Re:Better choices - go back the originators

[punkass]

What CPUs are designed to run Java.

That's kind of the point, Sparky.

DOH!!! He forgot the wordprocessor

[eclectro]

I guess the question remains is which wordprocessor. While there's Wordstar, Wordperfect, and Word that might be worthy, clearly TeX should be in first place and mentioned on his list. TeX is the father of all wordprocessors that followed, and the author Donald Knuth had such firm belief that programmers should be responsible for what they create that he paid for each bug found in the code.

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.

Inaccuracies galore

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

From the article:

Meanwhile, high fees for Unix outraged Richard Stallman, a grad student who used it at the MIT artificial intelligence lab. Software, he decided, was an intellectual asset and should be free, like the published work of his fellow researchers. He set about building a set of tools called GNU that programmers could use to create their own software.

Sigh. High fees had nothing to do with it. Anyone who has spent an hour reading about the history of the GNU project [gnu.org] would know that.

Wow!

[Dolda2000]

I'm amazed! Never have I seen anyone be so thoroughly wrong about the history of Unix. I know this is Slashdot, so most people here should know these things, but just in case someone gets a wrong impression, I feel I should at least clear up a few things.

• 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.

Re:Wank wank wank

[Jerry Coffin]

They put down BSD 4.3 just so they wouldn't get flamed into eternity. But they didn't know the real reason why UNIX (not BSD 4.3 in particular) was so significant. It was the first OS written in a high level language, which was designed to write an operating system (prior to this point operating systems were written in assembly language for speed).

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!

Re:Wank wank wank

[Anonymous Coward]

so was Multics written in assembly

Yes, at least initially. The reason that UNIX exploded upon the world (unlike some other cool OS's like MULTICs and ITS), is that it was rewritten in C (it was initially written in assembly language). The fact that you only had to rewrite the assembly code instead of the entire OS made it extremely desirable (for the same reasons that Linux is desirable today). The idea of the first portable operating system escaping the editors of this article is unforgivable.

Here [osdata.com] is a reasonable history of UNIX. The history article at wikipedia currently sucks (so I guess I had better start rolling up my sleeves).

Re:Wank wank wank

[Jerry Coffin]

so was Multics written in assembly

Yes, at least initially.

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].

The idea of the first portable operating system escaping the editors of this article is unforgivable.

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.

System/360

[Mostly a lurker]

I would agree that System/360 belongs on the list. Charles Babcock's recollection of the achievement differs greatly from mine, however. The number one biggest achievement was the creation of a family of microcode-based computers that allowed the same software to run on everything from an entry level System 360 Model 20 through a supercomputer 360/195. It was the fundamental soundness of the System/360 architecture, that could be simulated on a wide range of different real machine architectures, that gave the underlying software legs and allowed upwards compatibility over a period of 40 years and counting.

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.

Re:Software? HUH?

[PinkyDead]

In defense of Java (ish).

As a language Java really isn't that amazing. C on the other hand certainly blew my mind coming from a Pascal background - it is fascinating conceptually.

However, the distinction isn't made in the article between the Java Language and the Java Virtual Machine. The Java language as I said, is not that amazing - it's really just a C++ hydrid (love your description). However, the JVM is far more significant - in its basic concept and in the many optimizing incarnations of it.

I would suggest that this is the idea that TFA is going for. Certainly, if you look at the problem that the JVM is designed to solve.

And yes of course there were many virtual machines for other purposes before the JVM, but it is one of the most successful.

Re: Windows

[FuegoFuerte]

Did you read the article? He specifically mentions VisiCalc, and also states WHY he decided Excel should be on the list and NOT VisiCalc. From the article:

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.

Re:Wank wank wank

[Guy Harris]

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.

Other way around. The segmentation unit takes a 16-bit segment number and 32-bit segment offset and translates it to a 32-bit linear address, then the paging unit translates it to a physical address.

Re:VMware? A me too software...

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM VM is from the 60s..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VM_(operating_system) [wikipedia.org]

Re:Better choices - go back the originators

[Junior J. Junior III]

I thought that it's not that the CPU is designed to run Java, but that Java is designed to run on many types of CPUs.

Re: Windows

[posidian]

Just a minor correction, but since I work there, for your #3 it's 'TIGR', not 'IGR'. Both the ranking and its description in the article is a little funny, though. :)

http://www.tigr.org/ [tigr.org]