Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 2nd May 2014 20:03 UTC
Talk, Rumors, X Versus Y


Each person has his or her own criteria for these sorts of things, but in my view, this list is woefully inadequate. If it were up to me, I would pick these, in no particular order:

  • A-0 System: the first ever compiler, written by Grace Hopper in 1951 and 1952, for the UNIVAC I.
  • UNIX: This one's a given.
  • WorldWideWeb/CERN HTTPd: the first web browser and the first web server, both written by Tim Berners-Lee. Also a given.
  • Xerox Star: this one is actually a tie between the Star, its research predecessor the Alto, and Douglas Engelbart's NLS. These three combined still define the way we do computing today - whether you look at a desktop, a smartphone, or a tablet. I decided to go with the Star because it was the only one of the three that was commercially available, and because it's so incredibly similar to what we still use today.
  • Windows: you cannot have a list of the greatest software of all time without Windows. You may not like it, you may even hate it, but the impact Windows has had on the computing world - and far, far beyond that - is immense. Not including it is a huge disservice to the operating system that put a computer on every desk, in every home.

This leaves a whole bunch of others out, such as Lotus 1-2-3, DOS, the Mac OS, Linux, and god knows what else - but such is the nature of lists like this.

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MIcrosoft didn't have a monopoly when Win 3.1 came out, it sold millions of copies. People stood in line for Win 95, it created the monopoly.

Marketing maybe, monopoly, no. Either way, It helped bring computing to the masses.

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tylerdurden Member since:

You could be mistaking "popularity" with "monopoly."

Microsoft already had a monopolistic position, at least OS wise, by the late 80s. MS had some ruthless, and indeed monopolistic, licensing terms with PC OEMs all through that decade. To the point that by the late 80s, PCs not running DOS were rarer than hen's teeth.

A big deal of the success of Win 3.1 and 95 was due to the status of DOS as the (forced) defacto standard OS for the PC space.

Reply Parent Score: 5

delta0.delta0 Member since:


False error messages

Beta testers of Windows found that if they were using DR-DOS, this was detected and false error messages were generated.

Microsoft's encrypted code to disguise what it had done was unravelled by Geof Chappell in England, who commented at the time that "the only error' is that the user is running Windows with someone else's version of DOS."

This is why Windows should never be included in any list for greatest software - This anti-competitive behaviour of Microsoft's is what lead them to dominate - Windows has always been a POS, make no mistake only reason why 7 was half way decent is because of the explosion of OSX in the west (developed countries) and Linux in the east / developing countries after the failures of rubbish like vista.

Its a common misconception that without Microsoft we wouldn't have a computer in every home - this is complete baloney Microsoft would love you to believe this.

They had nothing to do with it Compaq reverse engineered the IBM Bios (I think? - someone did) Which meant generic oems started popping up all over the place - Microsoft was just the right bully at the right time to take advantage of it, otherwise it would have been the guy behind the Original DOS, before MS bought QDOS, or D.R. Dos or BeOS or OS/2 or FreeBSD/Unix and we would probably be in a place where computers would be seen as very reliable and the desktop market place would be full of healthy competition spurring on innovation.

Microsoft has done nothing but spend billions Marketing shite to the masses and holding back technology their contribution to Networking and the Internet was NetBUI FFS, an unroutable dog shit protocol. Yeah I can see how they made the list - Thom I'm sorry but your wrong here.

Edited 2014-05-04 09:09 UTC

Reply Parent Score: 3

zima Member since:

Win7 is just Vista SE... if you have Vista with latest Service Pack and patches, there is practically no reason to switch to Win7.
(explosion of Linux? You're imagining things, no web stats show it)

BeOS was too late (after they mocked about for half a decade with expensive proprietary BeBox and Macintoshes); OS/2 was about returning to IBM the control over the PC market ...if you don't like MS Windows, you would really hate IBM OS/2.

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