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For six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul

Sunday, August 20, 2006

The Greatest Software Ever Written: BSD Unix 4.3

Charles Babcock of InformationWeek comes up with a nice overview of the greatest software ever written (some can't really be called "products" per se). A number of old favorites and surprising choices make the grade, as you might expect:

10. The Apollo spacecraft guidance system - "This software got Apollo 11 to the moon, detached the lunar module, landed it on the moon's surface, and brought three astronauts home. It had to function on the tiny amount of memory available in the onboard Raytheon computer--it carried 8 Kbytes, not enough for a printer driver these days."

9. Microsoft Excel - "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." You know, like any disease, really. I suspect the makers of VisiCalc and Lotus 1-2-3 will argue with this choice, though obviously Excel has continued its dominance for quite a while.

8. The original Macintosh - "The Apple Macintosh was based on the Alto system built there. Alto included the first windowing interface, the first mouse, and first unified graphical user interface. But it never made it to market. It took an Apple redesign to give it impact ... The Mac incorporated the power of object-oriented computing into the user interface, and users have never looked back. The first Mac operating system was great software."

6. Mosaic - "Mosaic's combination of address lines, mouse-based pointing and clicking, multimedia file displays, and hyperlinking in its window meant clients had finally found a perfect partnership with the information servers proliferating on the Internet. Mosaic combined elements for ease of use--the tool bar at the top and a set of pull-down menus--in a format that would be repeated in Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer, and Firefox." Fair enough. Using the Excel example, however, Netscape Navigator should be on the list, not Mosaic.

1. BSD Unix 4.3 - "Unix System III was almost the greatest piece of software ... The single Greatest Piece of Software Ever, with the broadest impact on the world, was BSD 4.3. Other Unixes were bigger commercial successes. But as the cumulative accomplishment of the BSD systems, 4.3 represented an unmatched peak of innovation. BSD 4.3 represents the single biggest theoretical undergirder of the Internet. Moreover, the passion that surrounds Linux and open source code is a direct offshoot of the ideas that created BSD: a love for the power of computing and a belief that it should be a freely available extension of man's intellectual powers--a force that changes his place in the universe."

I guess it's hard to argue with that. But I suspect people will.

Related, and just as interesting:

How Windows Measures On The Scale Of Greatness

Microsoft Windows was left off InformationWeek's list of the greatest software ever written ... Windows comes close, tries hard, gets an A for effort, but just when we think it might be great, along comes that blue screen of death and we're rebooting all over again.

Hard to argue there.

5 That Almost Made The List Of Greatest Software Ever

Sketchpad, Smalltalk, GPS, video games, virtualization

Honestly, "Adventure" should have been included in the greatest list. Or perhaps "Space Invaders."

[ Posted at 12:14 PM | Permalink ]