A History Of Killer Apps

I stumbled across The 25 killer apps of all time in a recent eWeek magazine. Thought it was a nice trip down memory lane for any old timers like me out there... Here is a quick summary:

1976 - Electric Pencil: EasyWriter for IBM PCs

1978 - WordStar

1979 - VisiCalc: Pioneered spreadsheeting as we know it today

1981 - dBASE II

1982 - AutoCAD

1982 - WordPerfect: Back when Microsoft was actually inventive, though still copying off Apple...

1983 - Turbo Pascal: Pascal was my first programming experience... but not until 1989 for me!

1983 - Lotus 1-2-3: This is the product line that defined Lotus as a software leader in the 80's. They are still around today with Lotus Notes, etc...

1984 - MacWrite/MacPaint: Defining apps of the early Macs. See a trend in product naming? iPod. iTunes. iPhones...;-)

1985 - Excel for Macintosh: I believe this was developed by Bill Gates himself... before the launch of own windows-based operating system. My guess is Bill learned an awful lot about how the Mac OS was working to help him copy, I mean design, the first Windows OS.

1985 - Aldus PageMaker: Another Mac legend. (I'm a PC guy by the way... in case you were wondering!)

1986 - Cross-network eMail: Founder of the one of our most addictive habits... email!

1987 - Excel for Windows: Microsoft start to separate itself and grow a PC sofware dynasty.

1988 - Mathematica 1.0

1989 - Word for Windows: Hard to believe it has been almost 20 years!

1990 - Photoshop: Much like Google has become a verb, this software is now synonymous with the meaning "to manipulate or fabricate an image".

1990 - Windows 3.0: Helped keep PCs afloat and competitive with the Macs until Gates could catch up and mature his product.

1991 - Visual Basic: We've all used it at some point. Hell I think I still have a copy of VB 2.0 lying around somewhere. Wonder if it will run on my XP? ;-)

1994 - Navigator 1.0: This was my first taste of the internet. I was a computer engineering student and we had Netscape loaded on all our Sun Sparc workstations (Unix). Great times...

1995 - Internet Explorer 1.0: Following their trend of copying success, Microsoft launches their own browser.

1996 - Palm's HotSync

2001 - OS X: Apple's breakthrough OS that combined the robust Unix architecture with a cutting edge GUI frontend.

2001 - iTunes: Has it really been around for 6 years already? Ughh... time flies.

2004 - Firefox 1.0: An open-source darling that made it mainstream.. we all use it. Enough said.

That's it! Hope you enjoyed this trip down memory lane as much as I did. Thanks again to eWeek...