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Nice Long Read: The Great Works of Software

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mouser:
Nice long blog essay looking at some influential software programs.

So I set myself the task of picking five great works of software. The criteria were simple: How long had it been around? Did people directly interact with it every day? Did people use it to do something meaningful? I came up with the office suite Microsoft Office, the image editor Photoshop, the videogame Pac-Man, the operating system Unix, and the text editor Emacs.

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https://medium.com/p/705b87339971





from waxy.org

Shades:
A decent read.  :Thmbsup:

But I do think he forgot about the old, venerable CVS.

Agreed, not that many people are familiar with it, but CVS comes with a history of 24-25 years and did affect the way people treat and contribute to code...to this very day.

PUTTY might also be subject for inclusion as provides a very robust way of communicating with remote Linux machines for more than 15 years and more Operating Systems than you would think.

tomos:
A very enjoyable read :up:

At the start he mentions code:
Is it possible to ... enumerate great works of software that are deeply influential—that changed the nature of the code that followed?
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but, then he changes the criteria to a different sort of influential (more about stamina and less about creativity?):
The criteria were simple: How long had it been around? Did people directly interact with it every day? Did people use it to do something meaningful?
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which criteria could be used/stretched to say that e.g. the British Empire was 'great'. In fairness he is critical of MS Office, and of the *.psd file format...

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