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What's the Greatest Software Ever Written?

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zridling:
What's the Greatest Software Ever Written? by Charles Babcock of InformationWeek is an article I completely missed last month. Very interesting, as he considers industrial and scientific software, not just desktop software, and he goes way back, too. Here's the conclusion; you decide:

     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. The Unix operating system
Whaaa? I can't believe Windows 1.0, RealPlayer, or WinFax didn't make the list!  ;)

Renegade:
Ummm...

I didn't really like his assessment of VisiCalc. It seems to me that ten years or so of development in Excel is bound to blow away the original. Hardly a fair assessment.

By that token, how does Mosaic get on the list? FF or IE should be good candidates there. Seems like a bit of a double standard. About Mosaic he says, "In other words, great software that opened the floodgates." Well, how does that not apply to VisiCalc?

And while UNIX (or Mac OS) may be great, it's still Windows that made computing accessible to the masses. That doesn't count?

Java? Huh? WTF? .NET is Java done right. How the heck does Java get in there?

Why not cite an example of an FFT algorithm? DSP programming drives all the really hardcore scientific applications.

He doesn't seem consistent to me. Excel wins on quality, but Java wins on innovation. Apples and oranges. Either we're talking about great quality or greatly innovative, but he's mixing them.

I dunno... Maybe I'm just getting a bit jaded with all the "Top 10" lists out there.

mouser:
What's particularly confusing in that list is, is that some of the entries make sense if we are talking about historical significance (Mosaic), but then many of the other entries don't make sense.

Maybe I'm just getting a bit jaded with all the "Top 10" lists out there.
--- End quote ---
exactly. you took the words out of my mouth.

ravenlaughs:
"Greatest" means what, in other words. All I could vote for would be "most useful to me" - probably IrfanView.  ;D

rjbull:
And while UNIX (or Mac OS) may be great, it's still Windows that made computing accessible to the masses.
-Renegade (September 03, 2006, 08:44 PM)
--- End quote ---

I'd have thought that DOS made computing available to the masses, at least in the sense of a tool commonly used at work, and by that fact, kick-started the move of computers into everyday life?

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