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."

Excel was simply a clone

[foxxer]

Umm, excel? Try Lotus 1-2-3. Foolish coycat mortals.

Better choices - go back the originators

[gtoomey]

Instead of the Macintoh, I would choose the Alto which gave us the WIMP interface http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto [wikipedia.org]

Instead of Excel I would choiose Visicalc http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visicalc [wikipedia.org]

Instead of Java I would choose C. Modern RISC machines are built to run C fast. What CPUs are designed to run Java.

ooh, printable version

[ampathee]

Offtopic, but I gotta say: linking directly to the printable version == nice work.
I hope it catches on.

Re:the list

[Riding Spinners]

12. The Morris worm

The Morris worm was a flash in the pan compared to the neverending parade of WinDOS remote exploits and email/word/excel viruses.The Morris worm inspired Unix vendors to change their habits. Microsoft seems immune from the pressures that make most companies fix their screwups.

Back when everyone had to worry about link and boot sector viruses, you would get laughed off the board for suggesting something like an email virus.

Interesting article, but...

[SanityInAnarchy]

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.

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:Better choices - go back the originators

[Hard_Rock_2]

"What CPUs are designed to run Java" Lots. Your probably most familiar with the ones on your phone.

Re:Interesting article, but...

[JackieBrown]

I was fortunate to skip to the end. That was enough to make the rest not worth reading. To change Stallman from an idealist to some who is just cheap made the article unforgivable.

Re:Interesting article, but...

[Abcd1234]

Wait... so you respected the writer up to that point, and one (frankly understandable) misrepresentation of RMS's motives, and you suddenly don't respect him anymore? Yeah... that's reasonable.

Re:VMware? A me too software...

[imemyself]

Yeah, but could those run other operating systems? Or run on relatively generic hardware for that matter? Virtualization may not be a new thing, but VMWare has really brought virtualization down from mainframes and big iron proprietary Unix to cheap x86/x86_64 boxes and Linux/Windows. (Though User Mode Linux might have been there before VMware, I don't know). And VMWare ESX could really change how datacenters are run with some of its stuff like VMotion. So, if you need to take a box down for maintenance - no problem, just move the VM's over to another box while they're still running. VMWare's enterprise products can do some really cool stuff, I'll be very interested to see what VMware does with it.

Excel is Over.

[twitter]

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.

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

[ishmalius]

I can think of no single piece of software that has enabled more people to create wonderful things with only their imaginations and a bit of skill. Take all of the pieces of software you love, and divide them into two piles: "built by GCC" or "built by anything else." Then you will see how impressive it is. Although users never see it, they use it every day. How many terabytes of data are served daily on the net by GCC-built software? And even the scripting languages you love were likely themselves built by GCC. GCC is the invisible root of our information society.

Printable Article

[Anonymous Coward]

I would just like to thank whoever submitted this for linking to the PRINT version of the article for once, instead of the FIFTY BAJILLION-MILLION pages version.

I'm even more amazed...

[EmbeddedJanitor]

You expect /. articles to be correct? Maybe the /. articles should be run as wikis then all the fact and grammar Nazis could correct things on the fly.

Why not wikipedia?

[mcrumiller]

Dozens of people have already replied with different technologies, and they all use one reference medium: wikipedia.

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.

Software? HUH?

[Ruff_ilb]

Java Language? Excel Spreadsheet? Google search rank?

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."

123.123.123.123?

[jafiwam]

Anybody that includes all that obscure stuff and doesn't include BIND on the list needs to retire his slide rule and chase the kids off his lawn.

Unix or some precursor at 1.

I'd put BIND at number 2.

3 PacMan ROM

4 Some distributed computing client (you pick)

5 Mosaic (or whatever the first browser was)

Stop 1 or 2 for a day, and half the world's economy stops with it. Some chess playing crap is neat, but doesn't do anything _important_. The rest are just ordinary breakthroughs....

Re:Excel is Over.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Worse, it requires an OS he dismisses just one paragraph up."

Wrong. You can run Excel on Mac OS X, which happens to be built on top of BSD, the #1 software on the list.

ha, I get to post something twice

[Jay Carlson]

Last night I posted this. Now I get to post it again, only now featuring new RTFA power:

[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.

Re:A better list

[Jay Carlson]

I'll agree with most of those. I'd change the last to:

• Every OS project on the Alto. Smalltalk-80 ate the world. It also hosted an influential Lisp environment. (DWIM? Structure editors? Guess who...) And Java never would have existed without Modula-3, which grew out of Cedar, which grew out of...oh, that's your point.

QNX is perhaps the weakest on your list. There are plenty of other embedded operating systems out there with great influence.

I'm a little reminded of a claim that containerized shipping has had just as much of an impact on global production as IT, though.

Lotus 1-2-3 Macros -- everyman a programmer

[Tablizer]

Umm, excel? Try Lotus 1-2-3. Foolish coycat mortals.

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.

Re:Excel was simply a clone

[Duhavid]

Excel is pretty good, but I dont see anything groundbreaking
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.

Re: Windows

[Anarchitect_in_oz]

If Excel is there for being the killer app that drives Personel Computer use in business, instead of the mainframe/terminal model before that.

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.

Re:ooh, printable version

[noidentity]

I have the opposite opinion: linking directly to the printable version just makes it more likely that the feature will be pulled due to "misuse". If the reader wants to avoid clutter, he or she can find the "printer friendly" link and for all the webmaster knows the document is being printed rather than read without interference.

Re:Interesting article, but...

[mellon]

There was interesting stuff in the article, but much of what he said was just inaccurate. He credits Unix with being the first operating system that did paging. I don't think so. Furthermore, what he said about Stallman's motivation isn't even accurate - Stallman came out of the MIT LISP Machine crowd, and (rightly!) thought Unix was primitive by comparison. He originally wanted GNU to have a filesystem like TOPS-20, with versions. And the original goal of the GNU project wasn't to make tools - it was to make a complete operating system.

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.

Re:Java made the list

[The New Stan Price]

Java ugly? Have you seen C++? Anyone who likes all that :: and -> and &var and *var stuff is just nuts!

Re: Windows

[brian.glanz]

Windows "didn't really drive any TRENDS in computing" ... perhaps, but Windows drove COMPUTING as a TREND, and at that, a trend which is clearly here to stay. Which do you suppose is more important? Computing did not just happen as some inevitable result of the power in a PC -- hardly, users would never have gotten far building kits. Remember Gates' and thus MS' old maxim, "a computer on every desk!" and you'll acknowledge that computing did not just happen -- Microsoft and Windows and Office made it happen. Like it, or not.

BG

Re:A better list

[annakin]

CAD in any form is a good call to make the list, not to mention any type of 3D rendering software used to make movies, or games.

CAD is partly responsible for the success of strip-malls, which are as bland and uniform on the computer screen as they are in real life. It's been a tremendous time-saver for the more industrial parts of the industry, not to mention making the Boeing 777 possible. However, some engineers, even younger ones, still do ink their drawings by hand, because there's no repeatability in the custom work they perform. I've inked structural drawings myself, for customers, and it's not even my field (supervised, of course, it's the law :)

Re: Windows

[mvdwege]

No, Windows didin't drive computing as a trend.

Lotus 1-2-3, dBase and WordPerfect drove computing as a trend, giving businesses the software to justify buying PCs. MS-DOS came with the computer that was necessary to run the software, and Windows merely capitalised on the huge existing install base of MS-DOS.

I'm getting sick and tired of this Microsoft revisionist bullshit.

Mart

Bad and misleading title

[Anonymous Coward]

Other than Excel they named all OSs and utility type software. End users applications were largely ignored. Of every software I have ever used Photoshop ranks at the top of my list. When you factor in stability, power, ease of use and impact it's hard to find it's equal. You really have to pick a field because there are landmark softwares for every end use.

In a sense it's pointless because the list is driven by the criteria and nothing else. When you say greatest software everyone will have their own list because what they consider makes a great software would be very individual.

Re: Windows

[brian.glanz]

Business? Fine, business.

"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.

Re: Windows

[mvdwege]

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.

Mart

SmallTalk and Lisp

[I'm Don Giovanni]

If you're talking about older examples, I'll take LISP over those, thanks. :-)

And what about SmallTalk (the language and environment)? Wasn't that the first widely deployed "object oriented" language/environment? That would make it pretty significant.

Re:Fuck Israel

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to be confused about your history. You see, this latest mess began when a non-uniformed fighting force (a violation of the Geneva Convention), Hezbollah, which is a proxy army for Syria and Iran, staged an unprovoked cross-border raid from Lebanon into Israel, a UN-recognized nation, killed 8 soldiers, and abducted 2 more who are still missing and are most likely dead. This latest in an endless series of Islamofascist aggressions was merely a test by Iran and Syria to see if they could pull off an unprovoked attack on Israel without bringing world condemnation upon themselves. They clearly were successful. In fact, the enormous anti-Semitic propaganda machine consisting of Muslims and the world press was overwhelmingly successful in shaping world opinion and placing 100% of the blame for being attacked upon Israel. So basically we are to believe that Israel was responsible for the unprovoked attack upon herself. Make no mistake - now that Iran and Syria knows that the West is a pussy-whipped version of it's former self and can be coaxed into self-flagellation and Jew-hating through an effective use of smoke and mirrors, the next attack upon Israel will be nuclear in nature. Maybe then the world will wake up to the true nature of you Islamic pigs.

Re:the list

[LinuxIsRetarded]

Now, who knows what one has to say or do for a Microsoft programmer to die?

Nice. And of course, here on morally-bankrupt Slashdot, this idiotic post is modded "Funny". There's nothing like a joke about death to bring joy to the basement-dwelling fanboys.

Re: Windows

[mr_mischief]

I think the Tandy Color Computer 3 did as much or more to put a computer in every home as Windows did to put a computer on every office desk. The Commodore 64 and Amiga systems did about as much, too. They all did more than DOS. The main difference in MS-DOS and MS-Windows is that DOS rode the coat-tails of IBM, and Windows rode the coat-tails of DOS. OS/2 was far better than Windows 3.1, but Windows 95 (and MS's practice of forcing white-box vendors to pay for Windows for every computer they sold if they wanted to sell Windows preinstalled on any of them) killed OS/2.

Windows has been far more projected onto the world by Microsoft's shrewd business moves than by any inherent quality of the software. At one time, the saying that noone ever got fired for buying IBM was almost universally true. When Gates convinced IBM to use MS-DOS as the exclusive preloaded OS on the original PC but to allow him to license it to anyone else, he laid the foundation for his multi-billion dollar wealth. The rest is just building on that.

IBM then laid a foundation of its own by allowing its hardware to become a defacto standard for compatible clones. This helped IBM's image and did them some good by getting more people developing for their market. It did MS much more good, because the clone hardware was being used with their software. While IBM was building a social empire through influence, MS was building a financial empire through actual sales.

People eventually bought Windows PCs for home use because that's what they were using at work, and it's what was in the stores. People could buy PCs compatible with the IBM gold standard for a silver-level price, and run the same software. This lead to more development for the platform, which in turn lead to more clones and more Windows sales. Vendors of other models of course had a choice to make, and most of them started selling IBM or IBM clone machines in place of or in addition to their own machines. Commodore and Apple both had software and even hardware solutions to let people use the files and even the software of this IBM/MS platform on their otherwise incompatible platforms. And so it grew even more. OS/2 was DOS software compatible, and that made DOS grow more. Then it was Windows software compatible, and it made Windows grow even more. Then Windows changed, and OS/2 wasn't compatible with software designed specifically for Windows 95. Some still consider this a bit of a dirty trick, because IBM was using the cross-licensing arrangement with MS to make OS/2 as compatible with Windows as they could. MS used the same arrangement to pretty much let the air out of OS/2.

People for years wrote and sold software to make up for shortcomings of DOS and Windows. Norton, McAfee, DesqView, Novell, Artisoft, and thousands of other companies and individual software developers made their livings making utility programs, file managers, security software, multitasking systems, window managers, network stacks, programming suites, file and disk compression, and a multitude of other add-ons to make up for what DOS and Windows lacked compared to other operating systems available at the same time. Microsoft keeps adding functionality to the OS now and saying it's necessary to compete, but it wasn't back in the day. Back in the day you paid a little for an OS license from MS, then paid far more than the cost of a more complete OS to set it up they way you needed or wanted it to work. Much of that other money went to third parties. Now MS is bringing most of those functions into one box, and is doing a decent but not spectacular job of making it all work.

The key to Windows as a widely used platform is still in the snowball effect of the original IBM PC and the early years of the clones, then the ISV support, then the compatibility efforts of other platform vendors, then more ISV support. These can still be attributed to stellar business acumen paired with mediocre software development. I'm not saying that there aren't brilliant developers at MS. I'm certain there are. Their

Re: Windows

[maxwell demon]

Denying the importance of the Windows platform is an idea too silly to believe by anyone but a Linux or Mac fanboy who has no real world technology experience.

The article was not about the most important software, but about the greatest software.

Re: Windows

[el americano]

If VisiCalc is disqualified for not being great software, then Lotus 1-2-3, which was great software, is the next logical choice. Excel was completely unecessary at that point. If a spreadsheet clone like Excel deserves all the credit, then we'll need to mint a few more awards for Microsoft. I think the reviewer is confused about whether he wants to reward great code or great success.

He goes on to select Mosaic and System R, despite better and more successful follow-ups. He should have used that approach throughout.