Ask HN: What is the Mt. Rushmore of desktop applications?

3 points by exogeny 145 days ago | 1 comment

For the international audience, Mt. Rushmore is a landmark in the US that features the faces of four great Presidents carved into a giant stone edifice. It's a little ridiculous, but it is a good metaphor to use in service of the question: what are the four most influential killer apps in the history of desktop and personal computing?

My votes:

Visicalc Mosaic Photoshop Doom

Visicalc ushered in era of the computer as an essential work and productivity tool, by introducing the concept of a spreadsheet as a catch-all metaphor for all kinds of business work.

Mosaic and Photoshop probably don't warrant further explanation, even if both eventually got improved and largely deprecated by Firefox/Chrome and Figma respectively.

Doom ushered in the era of the PC as a serious gaming platform, and leaned into unique multi-player, networked, and customizable/expandable gameplay modes.

What do you think?

linguae 145 days ago |

Some honorable mentions:

1. Lotus 1-2-3 for MS-DOS

2. WordPerfect for MS-DOS, especially version 5.1

3. Aldus PageMaker, which predates Photoshop 1.0. It jumpstarted the desktop publishing revolution, and it also arguably saved the Apple Macintosh, which suffered from slow sales after its introduction, leading to Steve Jobs’ exit from the company.

4. Apple HyperCard, which further made the Mac stand out from its competitors.

5. Netscape Navigator. Yes, Mosaic predates Netscape Navigator, but it was Netscape Navigator that was many non-technical users’ first web browser in the mid-1990s.

6. The Apple iLife suite (e.g., iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand), which set the Mac apart in the 2000s by offering very easy to use applications for handling digital media.

7. The entire NeXT ecosystem of applications and developer tools from the late 1980s and early 1990s. There are so many, but highlights include Interface Builder and Lotus Improv. NeXT didn’t do very well in the marketplace, but it maintained a niche audience well into the late 1990s due to its software ecosystem and its developer tools.

8. Microsoft Visual Basic was revolutionary for making it easy to write quick-and-dirty GUI applications for Windows.