The author made an interesting choice, to (essentially) lump the IBM mainframe "greatest software" into one line item ("360 OS"). (OK, System/R is another.) It's yet another area where the comparisons break down pretty quickly. How do you compare CICS or IMS with other software, for example? That's difficult -- they (and a lot of IBM-MAIN readers) keep civilization running I guess you'd say. And I think he means more than "360 OS" when he talks about the mainframe. (He kind of mixes up hardware and software, although that's easy to do. Interesting how that works, though. So much of the great software on his list depended on great hardware or at least was a carefully constructed total package -- Macintosh, Apollo, etc.)
I disagree with Microsoft Excel, at least in terms of his dismissal of VisiCalc and Lotus 1-2-3. Surely one aspect of great software is that the world would be poorer for not having that software in existence. Is that true of Excel? If 1-2-3 (or Quattro) was the world's most popular spreadsheet today, would that somehow be a problem? No, I don't think so. Visi Calc for Visi On preceded Excel for the Macintosh by about two years, so Excel wasn't even the first GUI spreadsheet (which might be a possible claim to greatness), and 1-2-3 became graphical in its life within a reasonable time (and mouse-driven and single-application-graphical way before that). Functionally Excel was pretty awful in its first several releases, lagging behind 1-2-3 in the feature wars (such as number of built-in mathematical and statistical functions), but the GUI look-and-feel and bundling with Word were the primary advantages. No, I'd award this slot to VisiCalc which was truly revolutionary and, thus, great. Mac OS already has the slot for the GUI part of Excel. I wouldn't have narrowed the "Apollo guidance system" to the software aboard the lander. The Saturn V software (inboard and on the ground) was remarkable, too. Sabre is interesting since that begat what we now know as TPF (and z/TPF). The IBM mainframe has three line items (exclusively), I guess. I disagree with the Morris worm in a sense because it was an example of a great bug. Morris didn't intend for the worm to spread as quickly and as destructively as it did. Do note that it only affected Solaris systems, back then called SunOS, and DEC VAX systems running BSD. In other words, only UNIX. :-) There are some missing ones that probably belong in (or at least near) the top 12. Grace Hopper's A-0 or FORTRAN probably ought to figure somewhere. Before compilers and programming languages getting a computer to do much was horribly difficult, error-prone, and time consuming. It still is, but programming languages helped a lot. There's nothing on the list that directly addresses wordsmithing, such as word processing or publishing. Electric Pencil? Wordstar? WordPerfect? Aldus Pagemaker? Quark? Photoshop? TeX? There are some great ones in there, I think. We generate more paper than ever, so that's got to count for something. How about Pong or MIT's Spacewar? Isn't entertainment and amusement important, at least in many philosophies? Apollo and Sabre aren't the only aerospace-related contenders. The U.S. air traffic control system, which still owes its roots to the early 1960s, is another "great software" nominee, I think. The Air Force's SAGE system for strategic air defense probably deserves a nomination, too. The world didn't get blown up, so that's pretty great. I only partially agree with BSD UNIX. The BSD TCP/IP implementation has long been the "gold standard," so I think I would have narrowed the award to that -- a fine piece of software engineering. UNIX has otherwised cursed humanity with such non-greatness as case sensitivity (rather than solely case retentiveness) and a command line syntax with, shall we say, a steep learning curve. The approach to file handling (hierarchical slash paths) and I/O (everything-as-file /dev/whatever) is at least nice. The kernel is a mixed bag. (Recompile for device drivers? Please! Yes, I know this is sort of changing, and perhaps completely changed on microkernel UNIX variants like Mac OS X.) In terms of influence and spread, yes, excellent choice. Not sure about #1 because UNIX as a whole is so mixed technically and in human terms, but it definitely should be on the list. Speaking of networking, how about the Apache HTTP Server (the analog to NCSA Mosaic)? True, it's a pretty simple idea (file delivery, basically), but simple ideas can be great ones. I wonder if one of the timesharing systems should get mention, like Dartmouth's, Michigan's (MTS), McGill's (MUSIC), or something else. The author sort of positions UNIX in that role, but I don't think it really was, at least in the first many years. Those systems did an awful lot to bring computing to the masses in the 1960s and 1970s, to educate a whole generation of computing professionals (and even non-computing professionals). We've really got to have z/VM on the list. Terrible oversight there. Virtualization is hugely important (and great), and there's nothing like z/VM and its predecessors. That one was (and is) just like Apollo: way, way ahead of its time in innovation. I would argue that compression software and algorithms -- and its natural applications, like MPEG, JPEG, MP3, even the humble fax, etc. -- are hugely important. We wouldn't have iPods without the greatness that is compression software. Similarly encryption software. (iPods again, among so much else.) I don't know exactly where you'd set a marker on those two to choose a single work that represents the greatness, but I bet it's possible. Digital Research's CP/M probably deserves a greatness nomination as the first general purpose, mass market microcomputer operating system. MS-DOS is simply a bad copy of CP/M. CP/M had a profound and lasting impact well beyond its own years. If Microsoft belongs on the list I think it should get on the list for, oddly enough, BASIC. Microsoft BASIC really was great software because it brought a relatively simple high level programming language within a finite hardware footprint to masses of people in a relatively standard way, and the quality was at least good enough. Without BASIC I don't think small computers would have been as approachable as they were in their formative years. I think Microsoft BASIC was much, much greater than Excel. Interesting article! - - - - - Timothy Sipples IBM Consulting Enterprise Software Architect Specializing in Software Architectures Related to System z Based in Tokyo, Serving IBM Japan and IBM Asia-Pacific E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html