eWeek’s Peter Coffee has compiled his idea of the “25 Killer Apps of All Time, seen below in chronological order.
Peter Coffee’s 25 Killer Apps of All Time:
1976: Electric Pencil
1978: WordStar
1979: VisiCalc
1981: dBase II
1982: AutoCAD
1983: Lotus 1-2-3
1983: Turbo Pascal
1984: MacWrite/MacPaint
1984: MultiMate
1985: Excel for Macintosh
1985: Aldus PageMaker
1986: Cross-network E-mail
1987: Excel for Windows
1987: dBase Mac
1988: Mathematica 1.0
1989: Word for Windows
1990: Windows 3.0
1990: Adobe Photoshop
1991: Microsoft Visual Basic
1994: Netscape Navigator 1.0
1995: Internet Explorer 1.0
1996: Palm HotSync
2001: Mac OS X
2001: Apple iTunes
2004: Mozilla Firefox 1.0
Read about and see screenhots of each application in the full article here.
Visual Basic… gimme some vira now
Where’s the contact manager, like Act!?
HMMMMM…
OSX, Windows 3.o but no mention of the Amiga OS. No mention of the Video Toaster either.
And no mention of Deluxe Paint which was the Photoshop of it’s day.
Hmmm where’s Hypercard?
Err first browser….WorldWideWeb?
Err What about WebObjects…
VisualBasic my as….
Forgot AppleWorks for the Apple II (not directly related to the Mac’s AppleWorks). It was the “killer app” for the platform that started it all…
[And Windows 95 should be there instead of Windows 3.0 (which was terrible and “non-killer”)].
“And Windows 95 should be there instead of Windows 3.0 (which was terrible and “non-killer”
think 3.0 is listed as a ‘Killer App’ because of what it replaced. After all Spam is a ‘killer food’ if your starving to death.
I would vote for FORTRAN and the killer ap of all time
how can an operating system be a killer app?
Windows 3.0???
Where are Mac OS “System 1.0” and Mac OS 9?
MS Office? (choke ack gag, but it is a killer)
DOOM?
iLife? (iTunes, iPhoto)
Err first browser….WorldWideWeb?
… and.. what impact did that have.. was it ever available to .. human beings to use?
If Windows 3.0 was a “killer app”, then they made a huge mistake by not including any Mac OS that came with the original Mac. My first Mac had OS 4 on it, and was purchased in October of 1984. I don’t know if OS 1, 2 or 3 made it to general release, so I don’t know if they should be included there. But to include the original Windows without including the original Mac OS is just wrong!
First web browser was NOT Netscape Navigator. It was MOSAIC, and I still have the original floppy and Oreilly ASsociates book to prove it. THAT was the killer app before Andresen created Netscape.
PFS: File
Hypercard
Why different iterations of the same application?
Why programming languages? Are they really “killer apps”?
Are OS’s “killer apps”?
Most people would pick a totally different 25. An infinite no. of monkeys would eventually come up with the same 25 as he has.
Wow, Electric Pencil. I learned to write Basic programs while using Electric Pencil on my hand-wire-wrapped
S100, 8080, 64K, CPM box I made for myself back in 1977. Memories….8^)
MDN word: “getting” as in getting old 8^(
Interesting attempt, but I think it needs some help.
Notice MS’s last killer was in 1995.
And that was with stolen software…
What no Mosiac or Netscape. Come on!
Okay I take the Netscape back, but what about iMovie?
Baloney.
On the right side of the page:
Microsoft’s Vista has widely inspired the “Why do I need that?” question, which past “killer applications” have answered in different ways for different platforms during three decades of personal computing.
Too many sreadsheets and browsers on the list. How about Toast, ffmpeg, Illustrator…. Vista falls into the category of “soft-serve.”
{{{ Emit raspberry sound here }}}
The greatest application of all time: Google Earth.
Solitaire is the greatest. It keeps hope alive for so many Windows using idiots.
Your TPS reports are still due by Monday.
1982 and 2001 were good years.
Rasterbator,
It was because of my exposure to Mosaic that I develop web sites today. Remember what happened when you would load a page that had graphics? If you were on a Mac, JPEGView would launch. My first time ever using that program floored me, especially after having to use telnet and gopher to go through information at other universities.
What?!? No NextStep?!? Mac OS X IS NextStep revamped.
Where are the Outliners? MORE was the coolest app on the block.
HEY, what about the famous Video Toaster on the Amiga that gave rise to video editing on the desktop.
What, no Multiplan or Jazz?!?
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Don’t forget the greatest program of all time, “Copy-2-Mac”
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What about MacDraw? I made my first million using that app.
Well, it sure was popular in my household.
Photoshop 3.0 was a killer app, no doubt about it. Layers changed everything
iMovie
iPhoto
iDvd
killer apps all
very conservative with a geeky bent…
calculator/math programs didn’t change or revolutionize the world
because they only replaced calculators… for the vast majority calculators worked just fine their needs…
how about bit torrent or even napster which changed the the very nature
of content distribution and made digital content the de facto standard…
bringing the whole music industry to its knees as the world opted to become pirates rather than deal with the crack dealer labels for their “fix”.
how about pro tools which obsoleted a whole sector of high end recording equipment and put a recording studio into every musicians hands so they didn’t have to sell their souls for recording time… the same for programs that made everyone a graphic designer/photographer…
sure the early programs were stepping stones and foundations which led to the powerful programs of today but they weren’t “killer” apps because their steep learning curves caused as many problems as they solved designed by and for the nerds rather than common people… just think what a nightmare search engines were before google… yes they were useful but they were also a pain in the ass, so much so that they weren’t vital to the world.
QuarkXpress needs to be in the list too.
Killer Apps, are by nature, first — and responsible for breaking new ground and creating a new digital market or industry
Of course, the Mac’s original System OS of 1984 ushered in the era of a graphical computer interface put to successful use in a mass market product and predated Windows, which was a derivative of Apple’s work. So, Apple’s System OS (v4?) from the original Mac should have been on the list, not Windows 3.0. Knowlegdeable historians know that a Silicon Valley Xerox research center developed the concept of a graphic interface for computers, but Xerox never put the idea to use in a groundbreaking product. Steve Jobs’ crew at Apple connected the dots and created a real (and successful) product. Microsoft has been copying Apple’s Mac products since the very beginning, just as it does today.
QuarkXPress also was derived from Aldus PageMaker, which (along with the Mac and the Apple LaserWriter printer), created the desktop publishing revolution. While Quark deserves credit for making vast improvements over PageMaker, it was not a first, and thus not a Killer App.
I can’t believe this wasn’t on there….
http://cuecat.com/
I agree with crayon1, ProTools is definitely in the list somewhere.
I’m not sure you have that completely right Geo. A Killer app is, by definition, a killer of something. And I suppose what a Killer ap is killing is what it is competing against – whether it’s a digital competitor, a real world one, or both. It doesn’t always follow that the first ap of a type (ie the ground-breaking one) is the one that does the killing – it’s often the case that the second or third ap of a type are the successful ones which kill off (or severely restrict) what it was made to replace. A very good case in point is the Mac OS – which was the first of its type, and may well be the best of its type… but the ‘Killer ap’ here is without any doubt Windows.
And of course, what about:
Bars and Pipes – So big that M$ bought it just to shut it down!
DreamWeaver
Final Cut Pro – Definately a killer app, just ask Avid.
After Effects
ImageFX
QT – changed everything when it first arrived!
and……
Microsoft Bob
I think before you can do a list you need to define what “killer app” actually is.
Wiki has this definition:
A killer application is a computer program that is so useful or desirable that it proves the value of some underlying technology, such as a gaming console, operating system, or piece of computer hardware.
Using this definition here are a few of my suggestions:
Deluxe Paint for the Amiga Proved computers could be used for graphic arts and design. MacPaint came later and Photoshop after that.
Caligari for the Amiga Proved that 3D Modeling was cost effective and relatively straight forward to perform on the desktop.
Adobe Premier 1 Launched the desktop NLE paradigm (As much as I loved the Amiga, The Video Toaster was not an NLE solution). iMovie is not a killer app inasmuch as Premier had already proved that video could be done effectively on the desktop.
Also, by this definition, you can’t really have the same app for different platforms be killer apps. Word and Excel popularized word processing and spreadsheet development on the desktop but popularization is not the same as proving the value of the underlying technology. So Wordstar and Lotus 1-2-3 make sense but not any of the Office products.
Therefore, there should only be, on the list, one spreadsheet program, one word processor, one video editor, one graphics program, one 3D modeler, one jukebox, and so on.
Just my 2 cents worth.