The 20-year story of personal computing often seems to be dominated by hardware. But it's the software that makes the hardware worth owning: Many early buyers of Apple IIs walked into stores and asked for the VisiCalc machine.
CP/M 2.0
Developed by the late Gary Kildall in 1974, CP/M was the first OS to run on machines from different vendors. It became the preferred OS for most software development, and it looked like it would rule forever.
VisiCalc
Written in 1979 by first-year Harvard Business School student Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston of MIT,
VisiCalc was a godsend
to Wall Street users who had bought the first microcomputers two years earlier. Running initially on the Apple II and nearly single-hand
edly creating the demand for the machine, VisiCalc established spreadsheets as a staple application, setting the stage for Lotus 1-2-3 on the IBM PC in 1982.
WordStar
While writing programs on the Altair, Michael Shrayer hit upon the idea of writing the manuals on the same machine. Electric Pencil was born, the first microcomputer word processor. But the first program to exploit the market potential was Seymour Rubinstein's 1979 masterpiece, WordStar. Other programs took up WordStar-compatible keyboard commands--including the last major upgrade of Electric Pencil.
dBase II
Wayne Ratliff's creation, first intended to manage a company football pool, was the first serious database management system for CP/M. dBase II, in its DOS incarnation, was a massive success. Ashton-Tate, which acquired dBase from Ratliff, began to lose the lead when it released the bug-ridden dBase IV in 1988. A Windows version (under the ownership of Borland) didn't appear until
1994, much too late. The dBase language survives in the form of Xbase, supported by vendors such as Microsoft and Computer Associates.
AutoCAD
Autodesk's AutoCAD
started life as a CP/M (Control Program for Microcomputers) application, later moved to DOS, and eventually made the transition to Windows. It brought CAD from minis and mainframes down to the desktop, one of the first programs to make that now-common migration. AutoCAD quickly became--and remains--an industry standard.
Lotus 1-2-3
VisiCalc may have sold Wall Street on the idea of electronic spreadsheets, but
1-2-3 was the spreadsheet
that Main Street wanted, too. When the IBM PC and XT took over the world, Lotus's simple but elegant grid was without question the top spreadsheet to run on them, adding graphics and data-retrieval functions to the paradigm established by VisiCalc. By the early 1990s, Lotus could brag that 1-2-3 was the top-selling app
lication of all time.
The Norton Utilities
Before Peter Norton rolled up his sleeves, bit twiddlers were on their own when it came to recovering lost clusters and managing other disk catastrophes. It's almost the end of the millennium, and most of us still reach for Norton Utilities when something goes wrong with a disk.
DOS 2.0
The version of DOS that truly solidified the Microsoft/IBM platform dominance was 2.0, which came out with IBM's new XT in 1983. DOS 2.0 had commands to support the XT's new 10-MB hard drive as well as such now-familiar external commands and files as ANSI.SYS and CONFIG.SYS.
DOS 2.11 became the de facto basis of backward compatibility for any DOS program. In 1990, you might not have known if an application ran on DOS 5.0, but you could be sure it worked on old 2.11. DOS limitations even survive in Windows 95--in particular, the dreaded 640-KB memory limit.
Flight Simulator
To work its magi
c, Microsoft's simulation of an airplane's cockpit employed low-level graphics routines. It became a mainstay of software suites used to test compatibility with the IBM PC standard. It was also one of the best-selling games of all time.
Novell NetWare
The year of the LAN happened sometime in the 1980s, and it was Novell's NetWare that made it so. NetWare is no lightweight desktop OS. NetWare was an OS that systems administrators could rely on. Versions of this OS are still in use in businesses everywhere.
Unix System V
The best effort so far at unifying the diverse flavors of Unix, System V took off after AT&T's divestiture in 1984, when Ma Bell was freed to market the OS more aggressively. Version 4.0, released in 1989, brought together Xenix, SunOS, 4.3 BSD, and System V to form a single standard. Hardware vendors continued to go their own ways, however, requiring subsequent efforts by numerous groups (e.g., X/Oepen, OSF, and COSE) to continue the
fight for a shrink-wrappable Unix. Those efforts have mostly failed, but Unix's communications standards and network protocols are finding a wider user base as the Internet explodes in popularity.
Mac OS and System 7
The Macintosh wouldn't be the Macintosh without
the Mac OS
. And it was on the Macintosh that the concept of the desktop GUI really dug in. Later named System 7 in a major 1990 upgrade, the Mac continues to best Windows in ease of use, plug-and-play compatibility, and color matching. Apple's Power Macs and the first Mac clones just might keep System 7 relevant into the next century.
Quicken
This checkbook-balancing program may be better-suited to the needs of its users than any other program on this list save VisiCalc. Scott Cook's company grew from humble beginnings in the mid-1980s to become Microsoft's multibillion dollar dance partner (until the Department of Justice cut in). Once you start balancing your checkbo
ok in Quicken, you don't ever go back.
SideKick 1.0
Besides being the first PIM (personal information manager), its pop-up notepad, calendar, and calculator made Borland International's SideKick the model for TSRs--an application type that was relatively rare in 1984. Pop-up mini-apps became commonplace in the DOS era, but Windows' task switching killed the TSR market in the 1990s.
Excel for the Macintosh
VisiCalc and Lotus 1-2-3 started the spreadsheet revolution, but they were character-based.
Microsoft Excel for the Macintosh
made the benefits of graphical spreadsheets obvious. Microsoft ported Excel to Windows, but Lotus was slow to convert 1-2-3 to Windows. There's a lesson here: Today, Excel for Windows is the best-selling spreadsheet.
PageMaker
This is the program that launched a million newsletters. PageMaker's paste-up metaphor also made sense to people who had worked in traditional design and
production departments. QuarkXPress might now have a larger share in higher-end publishing, but with Adobe's money and name behind Aldus, PageMaker promises to remain a competitive desktop publishing system for a long time to come.
LANtastic
For people who thought Novell NetWare was for corporate MIS gurus, Artisoft's affordable network-card-and-software package was an easy and popular way to link PCs and share resources. With the addition of NetWare server functions in Artisoft's new LANtastic Dedicated Server, LANtastic keeps a foothold in the future.
Adobe Type
Desktop publishing was still a bit of a toy when Adobe made Type 1 PostScript fonts available on the Macintosh. Thanks to these fonts and the enhanced line spacing and printing control that PostScript provides, the Mac became a tool on which to run a publishing business.
Windows 3.x
Though it was first introduced in 1985, Microsoft Windows spent the rest of th
e '80s as somewhat of a joke. It was slow, ugly, and underpowered. Then Microsoft rolled out Windows 3.0, a complete rewrite, at a tightly orchestrated, bicoastal multimedia hypefest in the spring of 1990. Gone was the 640-KB DOS memory limit (sort of); in came a flood of applications, a type of multitasking, and the desktop environment most users live in today. Version 3.1, released in 1992, added speed and stability, not to mention OLE, True Type fonts, and drag-and-drop commands.
Lotus Notes 3.0
Notes is the most innovative and powerful of the numerous contenders in the leading-edge groupware category. Not just E-mail, Notes is brilliant at capturing corporate group-think, thanks to its unique, replicated message system. Notes has become the standard applications development environment in every company that's ever uttered the word reengineering.
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It slices, it dices, it renders, it models. AutoCAD single-handedly wrested design from minicomputers.
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Quite possibly the program responsible for the `80's Wall Street frenzy: VisiCalc on the Apple II.
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Apple's Macintosh OS had the first real graphical user interface and awesome ease of use. Too bad Windows didn't copy more of it.
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Excel, built on mistakes of others (see Lotus).
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Lotus had it but lost it. A good Windows spreadsheet, but too late.
Most Important Software Products
