Simple question, lots of good choices. Some rules:
You define “greatest”, “influential”, whatever. If # of users is your metric, go for it. If groundbreaking is your metric, go for it. If “I use this daily for 30 years” is your metric, go for it.
Operating Systems, languages, games, applications, database stuff, - all of it is considered. If it’s software of some sort, it counts. Think Pascal was the greatest thing to hit computers? List it. Civilization 2? It’s as good an answer as any. Windows ME? You’re wrong, but it’s allowed.
Got a meeting, will come back with my answer. Hint: I’ve been using it for 30 years (seemingly).
Well, in terms of most influential it’s got to be some version of Windows. Probably 98 or XP for how it dominated the world. I know there are Mac partisans out there, but the install and user base is just magnitudes different.
Or maybe MS-DOS once Microsoft took it national and based Windows off it?
Gamewise? I’d argue Wolfenstein 3D. Every single shooter came from that. From Call of Duty to Resident Evil and whatever. If you’re in a POV interface and killing monsters it comes from there.
In terms of real-world impact? Excel. There’s a lot of actual political policy and corporate planning that is done solely in Excel. There used to be other spreadsheets. Now there’s not.
I dunno. First thoughts go to games: Spacewar and Colossal Cave Adventure. The boring, but useful, stuff like vi or emacs and pkzip. Excel via VisiCalc works for me, too. So hard to choose.
If it’s Windows, I’d go with either 3.1 or 95. Probably 95 since so many more people were using PCs in 95 and it was a HUGE jump from 3.1.
In terms of influential, you might even go back to DOS. Win 3.1 almost felt like a DOS skin…like you’d do something in Windows and it would execute the commands in DOS.
As much as I loved DOS, Windows sure made working with computers a lot easier.
Come to think of it, we upgraded one of my earliest computers to use some clunky GUI. I want to say it was called Headstart Enviroment, but I can’t find anything on the internet about that.
If you didn’t like DOS, it was a big step up, even if it wasn’t very powerful and you still ended up dropping back to DOS for a lot of things.
Also, Prodigy (or even AOL). It was the earliest program I can think of that allowed the unwashed masses to start getting online. Random computer owners didn’t want to find phone numbers and dial into individual BBSs.
I was going to suggest Netscape Navigator, but I think Prodigy/AOL is a better contender for being influential.
SPICE (Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis) is a circuit simulation program developed at UC Berkeley in the early 70s. It revolutionized the development of integrated circuits, allowing design of circuits which were too complex for hand analysis. It remains an industry standard more than 45 years after its initial release. Literally every integrated circuit in use today was at least partially designed using SPICE (likely one of the commercial variants like HSPICE) or SPICE-like competitors (SPECTRE or ELDO).
And, as far as I’m concerned, the jump from Windows 3.x to 95 is bigger than any other jump, even going from 95 to XP/Vista/ME/10 etc.
It could have been given an entirely different name and I don’t think anyone would have said ‘hey, this is just an upgrade’.
To go in a slightly different direction, there’s Photoshop. Damn near every commercial (magazine, billboard etc) picture you see has been run through Photoshop for one reason or another. It’s used enough that ‘photoshop’ is now just another word for ‘edit’. How many people say ‘do you like this selfie, I know it’s photoshopped, but it looks good’ when they wouldn’t recognize an open copy of photoshop if they’re were staring at it.
What is the greatest (most influential, whatever) computer program ever written?
I would argue that the answer is Word Perfect. I think that’s the program that actually convinced Joe and Jane average that there’s a reason to write stuff on a computer rather than a typewriter or by hand.
Hello World, in all its myriad forms and iterations. All those other programs were written by people who started learning to program by writing Hello World.
The Xerox Alto operating system. It pioneered window and icon based GUIs we are all now familiar with and introduced Smalltalk that led the way into modern OO systems.