If you can mention 6 word processors, you have to mention at least one game. Some people argue that gamers are responsible for fueling the amazing technical leaps PCs have gone through, especially in graphics and sound.

Personally, I have three votes:

1. (Microsoft) Flight Simulato: Pretty much the first PC 'game' that had the right combination of graphics, thought, complexity that showed the PC was different, and better than any game console.

2. Tetris: The holy grail of games: simple and addictive. Worked on many different platforms, and was the initial reason people went out to buy the hardware (especially the gameboy).

3. Doom: Arguably the single program that is responsible for more people upgrading their PCs graphics, cpu and networking capabilities than any other. One of the first programs that was the bane of corporate network managers (via the multi-player mode). One of the first programs that had a huge fan base creating new levels and characters, and sharing them, open source.

All in all - I vote for DOOM. It may not have been the first to in any particular gaming feature, but it was the first where it all came together, and rocked the world.

I think Harvard Graphics by Software Publishing, the first wide-spread presentation program, should have been included. It was not the Visicalc of the industry (i.e., it was not the absolute first), but it was the Lotuse 123 -- the first "must-have" for business users.

Rollie

What a refreshing look back. As one who started developing many years ago, I'd add one more: full screen "TSO" (circa 1975?) which allowed us to rapidly edit our code. Okay, maybe I'm getting old. But it was a killer application at the time.

Flight Simulator -- yep, almost a killer app, certainly in the sense that it was almost the only good reason to buy the otherwise horrible Color Graphics Adapter for the early IBM PC. It was also the acid test of graphics compatibility.

Harvard Graphics -- boy, I'd forgotten that one, and it was even part of the tetrumvirate (quadrumvirate?) of basic productivity apps that we deployed to new PCs when I had that job: 1-2-3, MultiMate, dBase II or III, and Harvard Graphics. Whether it was a killer in the sense of propelling adoption of a platform, I'm less sure, but thanks for bringing it into the conversation.

TSO -- yeah, that was quite an improvement over punched cards. I'm not sure anyone bought a mainframe because they were excited about the opportunity to work on a 3278 terminal, but TSO probably prolonged the mainframe's hold on many applications that otherwise would have moved even more quickly to the PC. Perhaps, therefore, I should have mentioned the Irma card -- remember those? -- that made the PC a 3278 plug-compatible terminal emulator, as I recall.

Perhaps I shouldn't have limited myself to 25, but choices are what make these lists interesting -- I hope.

How could you not have WordPerfect on your list? Instead you included
MS Word?! Word sucked when if first came on the market. 90% of
desktops were using WordPerfect witht the blue screen. The world ran on
WordPerfect.. It's the reason you had desktops in the business world.
It killed the IBM typewriter.

MS Word??? You gotta be kidding me.

Another candidate for the "Top 25" is Harvard Project Manager. In the mid-1980s we used HPM and AutoCAD to design aircraft passenger boarding bridges and manage their manufacture and installation at major airports throughout the world. (e.g., Oakland Terminal II, New Lihue Airport, Kauai, Miami International.)

HPM's output was to a dot matrix printer, so we Scotch-Taped 8-1/2 x 4-foot banners together. Later we used a drum plotter, which did double-duty with AutoCad.

--rj

Three more to consider:

Novell NetWare 2
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When Ray Noorda passed away recently, the industry (correctly) remembered him as perhaps "the" father of network computing. NetWare gave us a reason to get our computers talking to one another, without which the basic infrastructures that allowed for the Internet to accelerate so quickly would not have existed. It was easy to install, easy to administer, easy to use, yet tremendously powerful, head-n-shoulders above anything before, and on its way to becoming nearly ubiquitous for a time--the essence of a killer app.

Windows NT 3.5
==============
When Windows NT 3.5 came out, Novell Netware 3.x was THE ubiquitous network operating system. Banyan VINES and other previous contenders had clearly lost the battle in the marketplace. Novell's position seemed assured for many, many years to come. Except Novell never moved beyond file-and-print sharing to also provide an equally great platform for running server-based applications. VAPs and NLMs were a pain to develop and awkward to administer. Windows NT 3.5's server application options were so much better, and thanks to Dave Cutler Windows 3.5 did it all with a tremendous amount of operating system sophistication that came disguised in a cheap and easy-to-use platform. UNIX and the AS/400 would never be viewed the same way thereafter. In less than five years, Novell went from market dominance to irrelevance thanks to this killer app. Unfortunately, Windows 4.0 began the march towards making Windows NT as much a desktop product as a server product to provide a single, ubiquitous platform for both environments (although they have very different needs and operating characteristics). One wonders what the world would look like today if the Windows NT and Windows 95 product lines had never merged...

NCSA Mosaic
===========
Like Netscape Navigator, this killer app also enjoyed but a short time at the top. But, the forces it unleashed in a matter of only a year or so truly launched the Internet revolution. Like everyone when they first loaded the software (and IP libraries) on a Windows 3.x PC and pulled up my first page with text _and_ graphics, I was absolutely blown away. This was the future of using the Internet--and it was clear within the first 10 seconds of using it. When Marc Andreessen and the folks from NCSA left and soon thereafter released Navigator, Mosaic quickly faded from the scene. But the impact Mosaic had should not be underestimated.

Patrick O, and some others, ask why I didn't list WordPerfect. I've been trying to make the distinction between a merely excellent application and a killer application. The former becomes the choice, in time, of a platform's users, but the latter appears at a key moment with key differentiators -- even if it's not that impressive overall -- that attract or even compel new users to adopt a new platform in the first place. "I want that and something that runs it."

I've never seen someone buy a PC in the first place for the purpose of running WordPerfect. By the time WP came along, it's my recollection, the IBM PC was well established. But MultiMate, for example, drove Wangs out of offices -- while Word for Windows drove graphical displays *into* offices, as something formerly considered "desktop publishing" quickly became the word-processing norm.

Perhaps this makes my thinking clearer.

A great walk down memory lane no matter exactly which apps are listed as being the Killer Apps.

Makes us remember just how old we're getting.

Should good old DOS be there? Norton Commander and some of the Norton Utilities also deserve a nomination, I believe.

Anyway, nice job and thank you for the memories :>)

Well, I am someone who bought his first computer to specifically run two applications: WordPerfect, and ProComm. That gave me the ability to write, and access to the Internet through BBS's initially. That, to me, is the definition of a Killer Application.

I never, for instance, would have bought a PC just to sync to a Palm.

And I was a computer programmer for years at the time. And that first PC was a Toshiba 386SX-12Mhz notebook, which I still have, and still runs WP 5.1, although I have moved up to newer hardware since.

Why did I wait so long to buy my own computer? Other problems I wanted to solve I could do at work on the mini's of the day, or at the university. Moore's Law said the longer I waited, the better off I'd be. Definitely WP and PC were my Killer Apps.

And as to why WP was significant, it was multi-platform and had drivers for *every* printer in existence. That was huge before the unified driver model of Windows 3.0 came along. It was also fast, first usable WYSIWYG preview, integrated downloadable FontWare fonts, built-in spell checker, and other leading-edge features for the time.

'Nuff said.

Other honourable mentions should go to:

Back in the DOS days -
- Volkswriter - easy and worked off two floppies
- TSR's - the first calendaring, address book, phone book tools
- Goldmine and other contact sales managers
- Harvard Graphics - definately a staple
- Novell Netware - reliable networking
- Norton Commander and similar menu pre-cursors of Windows - made accessing applications easy
- BBS tools for early file sharing / servers
- SDLC card and 3270 emulator
Then moving to Windows era
- Lotus Notes - business collaboration tool
- Adobe PDF
- Quicken
- Turbo Tax

OK - so I did work on one dozen of the original 32,000 IBM PCs ever made - does it show?!

ebay made my wife buy a PC (that and itunes). Surely that's a killer app?

I have to say I agree with all your choices except for one. 24 of your choices are exactly what I would have picked myself, so well done on that part, and well researched!

However, I need to point out the fact that Windows 3.x is NOT an Operating System at all. It was a simple GUI Shell program that ran on the Disk Operating System ( DOS ). If you didn't have DOS installed, Win 3.x would not run at all. A lot of people made this mistake in the past, so don't worry too much about it, just wanted to clarify that point - Windows 3.x is just a shell application that talks to DOS.

Instead of picking that choice, I would have chosen Windows 95 instead, it really was a revolution for the PC world. OS/2 warp was technically superior upon launch, but lost out for the same reasons Apple did, too many windows developers already in the marketplace , too much money to be made on Windows.... So, buggy as it was, Windows 95 was an amazing product for its time, a complete 32 bit OS that included stacks for TCP/IP, Network Basic I/O System, IPX/SPX and the Point-to-Point Protocol. It introduced a newer file system with 255 character long filenames, protected mode multitasking, etc. No more configuring Expanded or Extended Memory Manager (EMM/XMM) in DOS to access RAM above 640Kb to play games, editing autoexec.bat and config.sys files etc... what a pain that used to be!! No more configuring WINSOCKS programs to be able to access the internet!! It was a joy to behold, especially for us pc techs.. ( not counting the bugs and driver issues anyways )Kids these days have NO idea how GOOD they truly have it with Windows XP etc...

Also, if you ever do an article titled "Worst apps/OS ever..." I vote Windows Millenium ( Me ) the absolute worst, buggiest, prone to lockups/freezing ( worse than Win95 or 98 versions even ) , annoying, ugly OS ever released to the public. ( I used to be a hw tech back in the day, and kissed the ground when Win2k came out, and finally XP... ).

So thanks again for a great article, brings back many memories to me, and like I said, I only have the one nitpick I mentioned about it.

Afterthough: I also remember the WP 5.1 days, I would say both it and the later versions of Word were indeed Killer Apps. Also, I think that C or C++ should be on the list as well, the father of Java ( J++ ) which is basically C++ for the internet. It is one of the most powerful programming languages ever invented, and many, many apps and games use it.

As well as what others have mentioned above, it is nearly impossible to nail down only 25 killer apps, as everyone has different ideas as to what they should be. Perhaps they need to be categorized such as "Top 25 Operating Systems/GUI/NW apps" and "Top 25 Office Suite apps" and "Top 25 Desktop Publishing Tools" and "Top 25 Programming languages" and so on. The choices are endless, but the focus of your article is "Why do I need that??" so based on that criteria I do agree with your choices, although the choices do seem to be weighted in favour of general computer user preferences, and not so much industry professionals ( regarding network apps and C++ and so forth not being included ). Minor nitpicks, and I like your list, these applications did indeed drive a lot of computer purchases without a doubt. Cheers!

How about Btrieve? It was the first PC data engine with high data integrity. Dbase, Paradox, Jet and others are/were not comparable in this respect. There was a time when every quality accounting product in the PC world was Btrieve based. Btrieve was also the underlying engine for Novell. A Btrieve app on a Novell server got complete transaction tracking. Netware 3 with Btrieve apps ruled.

eBay is a website, not an application!

It was Sublogic who created Flight Simulator, not Microsoft. But yes, it was really awesome for the time.

A few apps to consider: AOL Instant Messenger/ ICQ - launching a new communications standard and shortening the feedback loop from minutes to seconds; Napster, for creating the compelling business case for P2P networking and setting the stage for iPOD and pushing broadband connectivity into the consumer marketplace; MS Outlook - the PIM gold standard, which helps keep anti-virus companies like McAffee in business.

Going by hours of computing time spent running a program, surely Solitaire belongs on the list. It STILL ranks right up there with Minesweeper for most lost hours of productivity in the average office!
Although I suppose we should actually list all forms of pornography as the real driving force behind improvements in technology, from printers to screen graphics to storage to internet bandwidth. What a waste!

I'd throw in a vote for Norton Commander. At a time we were installing a lot of software onto limited-space hard drives just to try new things out, Norton Commander's convenient menu and visual layout helped keep those now tiny hard-drives organized.

As a fellow sojourner with you down this technology road, I'd say you've captured the scenery the way I remember it as well. Particularly well put was the following:

"Visual Basic: Originally conceived as a dual-platform tool, Microsoft VB abandoned planned OS/2 capability just before the 1.0 release, opening a leadership gap for Windows development that IBM would never close."

That says it all. IBM just didn't get it and plenty of us at the time were screaming that we needed a "VB for OS/2."

The genius of the Turbo-Pascal model originated by Borland still lives. Many companies still don't "get it."

I was a bit surprised that DBase was the only DB product mentioned. I would have thought that MS SQL or DB2 (PC version) would have had some mention. My list of killer apps/technologies reads thus (more generic)

1. Spreadsheet (late 70's)
2. Word processor (early mid 80's)
3. DB (mid, late 80's)
4. Internet (90's)

5. Rules Engines. (just now emerging as more than an AI plaything).

I consider a "killer" app/technology as something that once it comes on the scene, we wonder how we ever did it before. It has to pass the "I can no longer imagine having to do it the old way" test. It's like the advent of the copier. Remember carbon paper?

No one would trade their spreadsheet for the old ledgers.
No one wants to go back to the typewriter
No one wants to go back to dealing with the particulars of data storage at a lower level than SQL.
No one want to go back to the "good old days" of dial up BBS software.

I can tell you that I'd never want to go back to having to code my business logic in my programming language of choice. Modern rules engine technology does for the programmer what the advent of the DB did. It does for the business analyst what the spreadsheet did for the accountant. I think that rules engine technology will be the next "killer app." Ironically, in my discussions with at least one of the major players, they couldn't grasp the rationale for taking a "Turbo-Pascal" marketing approach, even though it is well within their grasp (their IDE is Eclipse based and easy to use.) They desperately need to "get the cookies on the lower shelf" where two guys in a garage with an idea can use their product. That's what VB did. At the moment, they don't have a "low end" offering. But sooner or later, one of the majors will tumble to this idea or else be forced to adopt it by the likes of JBOSS's Rules (formerly DROOLS) which is starting to look like a contender.

Once you start writing and maintaining apps incorporating a rules engine architecture for the bulk of the "logic", you'll never want to go back to doing it the "old" way.

-dB

There is no way that any one can even consider Word a superior wordprocessor to WordPerfect. Although the original WordPerfect reached it best version with 5.1 for DOS, even today it runs circles around Word. With every new version of Windows and Word that arrives, I am far less productive than I was with even Windows For Workgroups and WordPerfect 6.1. If you have ever tried to edit or even fill out a Word based document created by someone else, especially if they used 'advanced features', you will know what I mean. Word should have never been released and should be scrapped entirely. The only way Word has gotten as far has it has is because it is bundled with Excel. OpenOffice is an excellent replacement, but unfortunately they have duplicated the majority of Word's disabilities. I learnt to 'wordpress' on a typwriter and moved to a TSO terminal where real wordprocessors started - Microsoft has made a royal mess of text documents. My rant - enough is enough.