“When Computerworld published its first issue in 1967, the private sector was still using vacuum tubes to exchange information. Technology and the world it has shaped have come a long way since then. Here is our list of the 35 products and technologies that have had the greatest impact on enterprise IT since 1967.” Read the article.OS related rankings:
6. UNIX
17. Novell NetWare
21. Microsoft Windows 3.0
22. Windows NT
32. Linux
35 Technologies that Shaped the Industry
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
No Mac OS. No talk about semiconductors. Nothing about the Altair.
Windows 3.0?
Windows *did* have a profound influence, but it was 3.1 that did.
No SGI? No NeXTStep?
Oh bother…
>technologies that have had the greatest impact on enterprise IT since 1967
SGI and especially NeXT, no matter how cool they sound for geeks, they didnt have this great impact to the technology in general. As for Win 3.1, I agree, it was more important than Win 3.0. However, their biggest difference was that 3.1 could do TrueType fonts…
Java… ranked above Word Processors… I’m truly disgusted
Word processing is perhaps the primary task for which computers began to see use in business environments. For this reason the typewriter was rendered almost entirely obsolete.
I also see “Lotus Notes” placed above “Office Suites”. I’m sorry, but how many computers out there exist to run software from an office suite versus the number used for running Lotus Notes.
And while we’re on the subject of Lotus software, how about “Lotus 1 2 3”, the software which thrust the PC above the Mac in the eyes of businesses, and the software responsible for the proliferation of the IBM PC which also served as the reason for the proliferation of Microsoft’s DOS environment, the foothold which Microsoft leveraged to reach their current Monopoly status today. Lotus 1 2 3… isn’t on the list.
Wireless networking was ranked above Ethernet, the IBM PC, the printer, office suites, and word processors in importance. I’m sorry, but that is ludicrous.
The arbitrary grouping of items in this list is a little odd too. For example, how can you make a list which includes both word processors and office suites considering a word processor is part of an office suite? I think it would be good to distinguish between the two with examples like “Early word processors such as WordStar” and “Modern office suites”
Well, after all that complaining, perhaps you’d like me to forumlate a quick list. I like some of the ideas on the list in the article, but here’s my top 5 really quick:
1) Microprocessors, which made a computer both inexpensive and small enough to seem wieldy in an office or small office environment
2) The printer, the device which allowed the PC to integrate with an office environment powered mainly by paper. What use is a word processor without a printer? What if someone wants a table or chart of your accounts? Considering the importance of integrating with a paper filled environment and the printer’s use with many programs, it ranks head of any one type of application (although without microprocessors, printers would be useless)
3) Word processing software, which thrust the microcomputer into the role of a digital typewriter, thus allowing the computer to quickly take the place of an existing piece of office equipment.
4) TCP and IP, the protocols which would provide a standard means of networking and would allow the already widespread assortment of microcomputers to take on an entirely new role in a networked world. Without the first three, however, the proliferation of microcomputers would not be nearly as widespread, and thus the relevance of TCP and IP would be greatly decreased as microcomputers would be much more expensive and therefore less accessable due to economies of scale.
5) Ethernet, which would become the hardware layer for the deployment of massive networks. Ethernet provided an inexpensive means of networking computer systems, while providing a much more wieldy physical means of networking computer systems in different rooms of a building than Token Ring or FDDI (with the advent of 10bT, of course)
You may disagree with my list, but I hope you disagree much less than you do with the list in the article…
I should add “The World Wide Web” as #6. You’ll notice a chicken-and-egg issue with this and TCP/IP and Ethernet, as well as with word processing software, the printer, and the microprocessor.
I believe the technologies which underlie a particular “killer app” are more important than the killer app itself. The reason for this is that a different killer app may have come along and made those technologies successful, but without those technologies the killer app couldn’t have existed in the first place.
How about open source? – this is more important for our civil rights than the American Bill of Rights and more likely to last in the next several generations.
Open source could have have summed up most of the developments that will still be useful decades from now and encompassing the Internet – the central source for information – the main reason people get computers now.
Do you mean Open Source, or do you mean “Free” Software?
I’ll grant you that the “Free” software movement had a severe impact on the “Industry”, but you’d better not ask for my judgement whether it was beneficial or not…
Notice how many of the biggees on this list came out of the IBM labs?
gcc – without this there wouldn’t be open source
emacs – the mother of all applications, open source, and a whole lot more.
shells & shell scripting and all that followed in it’s footsteps -> sh,csh,ksh,zsh,bash,sed,awk,perl,python,ruby, and so on
the trifecta of graphic design; photoshop et al Bitmap drawing tools, illustrator ( Vector drawing tools ), quark xpress ( page layout tools )
shouldn’t be just PDF but the whole Postscript family lineage; troff/nroff, tex, metafont, PS, PDF, SVG, etc.
tex & metafont – the first bugless killer aps????
AutoCAD?
dBase et al? Do you realize how many government “solve it quick” applications were derived from dBase programs?
Visual IDEs and their programming lanaguages?? TurboPascal->Delphi,Visual Basic,etc.
What about the other programming languages of note ; Fortran, C, C++, Lisp, Basic, etc. I would argue that some of these had more substantial impact then Java did.
What about Version Control?
What about other key operating systems along the way?
They did miss ONE biggie. The CD-ROM!!! It was designed and invented by Phillips.
Jeez, who are they kidding. Whoever wrote this article missed the boat on this one.
The most important factors that caused the increase of computer users in 1990s:
1. Computer games.
2. IRC and IM.
3. Porn industry moving to the internet.
And Java? NO! C, C++ and many other languages are all much more important.
Client/server, P2P file sharing, 32-bit computing, computer/telephony integration, EDI.
Could be wrong about this, but I think TP wasn’t codified until the ’80s, making it one of the few really major advances in the software side of theoretical computer science in the last 20 years, along with internetworking.
4 different times Windows was mentioned and not a damn one about the MacOS. Come one now, even my IT instructor scoffed at this article.
Not to overrate it too much, but how did Linux get to be 32. It should at least be 15 if not higher. Also, the PC clone gets to be 31, what’s up with that? You’d probably be looking at this article on a computer made by the ubermonopoly IBM…
I think that P2P will be important and will grow to be more than the standard mp3/warez sharing software it is today. In 5-10 years, this same list will have p2p very high.
Things like gcc,emacs,etc. yes they are important. But world changing? Industry shaping, to an extent, but far from being at the top of the list.
Email, wireless networking and markup languages more important than the IBM PC? without that PC, the industry wouldn’t have developed to make use of the technologies mentioned.
word processors, at the bottom, electronic spreadsheets at the top, and office suites in the middle. yes, visicalc, how i understand it, was huge. But splitting SS and WP and still mention office suites. Just seems like it could have been organized better.
The list got it right by putting GUI right at the top. Without a usable interface, computers would have been forever limited to the techno-elite. Computers in the home have been one of the most important cultural changes in the last couple of decades. That would not have been possible without “friendly” interaction.
I agree with Bill about the CD-ROM. It’s the storage staple for commercial software, file backup, and temporary storage. Who would play Quake III if it came on 500 floppies?
-Bob
The guy who wanted Lotus 1-2-3 listed obviously missed the mention of VisiCalc, the precursor to both Microsoft’s Multiplan ripoff and 1-2-3. And what happened to Wordstar?
I’d personally like to have seen the BASIC language listed. It made computers accessible for the first time for many, many people.
But all this relies on one’s personal history in the industry, and emphasis on what you were trying to achieve with computers in the early days. Dr. An Wang’s invention of the wirecore memory may have been groundbreaking, but who remembers that now. Only a few of his old employees, I suppose.