What's The Greatest Software Ever Written?

H

HyperTension

[H]ard|Gawd
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This is in direct response to the link on the front page, with the same title..

http://www.informationweek.com/shared/printableArticle.jhtml?articleID=191901844

My first choice is... drumroll please.....

Microsoft ME!! Thats right boys and gerbils, the greatest piece of software since.. hmm... since that, well.. hmmm... heck, I give up..

Any thoughts and opinions would be most welcome, and hopefully entertaining as well.
 
some might argue windows 3.11... cuz it did bring computers to the main stream and useable for more people...

some might say america online... cuz it um... brought america online and allowed people to connect to the internet easily and affordibly...

some might say IE cuz it brought the internet and an unlimited amount of information to the masses in a nice graphical package...

some might say AIM cuz it um... connected america online instantly and allows people from anywhere to communicate...

some programmers might say "hello world" since it set the standard for all future programs/languages and chapter in every programmers handbook...

pirates might say bittorent cuz well... it brings files to the masses in a fast way...

some might say google... cuz well... its google... and its taking over the world...

tought question... article does bring up some good pieces of software....
 
Can I vote for my own work?

Assuming I can't, I'd have to pick AutoCAD. It works great, it has features people need. They've been in business for 20 years. The UI is reasonable and well thought-out despite the package being incredibly powerful and flexible. They're consistent, too. I hadn't used AutoCAD since DOS days, and I downloaded a trial version and was productive in just a few minutes.

And Mathematica is on my list, too. From the CS geek perspective, it's an amazing collection of algorithms and solutions. It also has the features that its users really need, presented in a consistent and reasonable UI. There are some things missing (graphing, for example, is a little painful). But it's quite bulletproof, and remarkably easy to use considering its power and flexibility.

BRIEF, a programming editor most people don't remember, is on the top ten, too. It had features long before their time, and was very robust and flexible. Does anyone know what happened to David Nanian?
 
Firefox, cause without it, I'd slap the internet for the diseased, mal-nurished w*ore of information it is.
 
PigCorpse said:
Photoshop

The sheer amazingness of its abilities is astounding.
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It has lots of neat algorithms, and some interesting memory management tricks. But usability? That's another story entirely.
 
Bookmage said:
some programmers might say "hello world" since it set the standard for all future programs/languages and chapter in every programmers handbook...
Click to expand...

*LOL* Ahh, the good ol' "hello world" program. :)
 
vmware is currently my favorite piece of software to date, but i'd have to say mathematica. it's scary what it can accomplish.
 
tdg said:
TCP/IP :D
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That's a set of protocols, not software. An implementation of said protocols would be software. :p

I'm going to nominate tex. Powerful, open, and probably the most elegant, bug-free piece of software ever.
 
I could say Unix as its stable, secure, and fast but I will say Windows 3.11 because that is what attracted a lot of us to the PC (or at least it did for me).

I miss the days where we had simple little machines running on Windows 98 :( . We all have to have the bestest and fastestest machines running a modded skin of XP today.

/thread hijack
 
santaliqueur said:
i understand each of the words, but the sentence makes no sense to me.
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huh? I dare you to find a bug in tex.
 
ChingChang said:
Windows XP

can't use any of the programs listed without an OS :)
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UNIX
with the bell labs C compiler in a close 2nd wouldnt have windows with out C
 
Greatest software ever written? dd, find, samba, rsync are all nominations by virtue that if they didn't exist, my job would be about 100 times harder than it is.
 
santaliqueur said:
it was nothing against tex, but is can ANY piece of software be 100% bug free?
Click to expand...

Write this program:

10 PRINT "HELLO"
20 GOTO 10

Execute it.

Perfect software, simple. :)
 
bbz_Ghost said:
Write this program:

10 PRINT "HELLO"
20 GOTO 10

Execute it.

Perfect software, simple. :)
Click to expand...
Depends on the definition of a bug. That get's stuck in an infinite loop, which certainly is a bug in my eyes...
 
I think the infinate loop was a bit of sarcasm to find out who would bite on it, and... well... I guess that question is answered now :rolleyes:


There are only 10 kind of people in this world, those that understand binary and those who don't.

So as not to threadcrap, the best software ever written IMO was MS-DOS 5.0. It was a HUGE upgrade at the time and opened up the computer to what it is today.
 
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