Software That Changed the Game
Recently someone asked me for the software where I had some sort of “A-ha” moment, or more simply stated, software that blew my mind. I did a bit of thinking about it and decided to take it all the way back to (my) beginning…
Pong (1970s): 7 year-old me’s mind was blown when my dad brought home an Atari Pong video game system, MADE BY SEARS! A video game system that was actually in my home, connected to my family’s TV! It’s almost impossible to describe how it felt to turn the experience of TV, something that was up to that point was entirely “View-only” — ie you just sat there and watched it, into something that was interactive.
Planetfall (1980s): IMHO the penultimate Infocom pure text adventure. There were no graphics, and at no point did it lack for them. The world it created was in your mind.
Ultima IV (1980s): The most massive and open game I had ever played up to that point. It wasn’t marginally better than anything else, it was 10x better. It also “judged” you for your actions, which felt like a shift. Bonus, it came with a cool cloth map of Britannia.
Microsoft Word (1990s): The first non-ASCII version for Windows — there were WYSIWYG word processors before it (Mac Write), however, this was the first time I really dug my teeth into and compared to mucking around with WordPerfect “reveal codes”, and it was a dream.
Lotus 1–2–3 (1990s): I actually toyed with Visicalc on my parent’s Apple II in the early 1980s, but I was a kid and thought spreadsheets were stupid. 1–2–3 and the power of spreadsheets coincided with my understanding of how to use them. Took Excel 10 years to match 1–2–3.
Quake (1990s):I had dabbled with dial-up based BBS games in the 80s, however, nothing prepared me for the fully networked (well LAN) first-person shooter that changed gaming forever. Almost 27 years later, I am still playing online games with my friends weekly.
Mosaic / Netscape browsers (1990s): The first browsers showed up my senior year of college — I thought Mosaic was okay, however distinctly remember telling people that browsers were “nothing more than a gussied up Gopher clients” — Gopher was a popular ASCII based-tool for sharing documents at the time. Oops.
Microsoft Xenix / SCO Unix (1990s): My first job out of college was installing/configuring Microsoft Xenix. I had no idea Microsoft even shipped a Unix distribution OR that Unix could run on a PC server. The learning curve was steep, however, it’s where my love affair with Unix began.
Kazaa / Napster (1990s): Not sure which came first, Kazaa or Napster? The sudden truth that any song I wanted was available to me if I was willing to wait the 5 minutes for the download forced me, for the first time, to grapple with the moral/ethical dimension of software.
Linux (1990s): My first Linux install required over 30 floppies and was beyond glorious. Displaying xclock and xeyes on my very own computer seemed taboo vs the $5000 Sun and SGI workstations I was using at work.
Lotus Notes (1990s): Biggest paradigm shift I’ve ever encountered in my professional career — a team-oriented database that allowed you to create just about any app you could dream off. It was so unbounded vs anything else that existed at the time. It almost felt like an operating system.
Unreal Tournament (1990s): My introduction to a new generation of frenetic multiplayer FPSs. I’ll never forget the guilty feeling of secretly loving the game, loudly announcing “Headshot” when you successfully sniped an opponent. It felt subversive.
VMware Workstation (1990s): From the moment I booted up the Beta and installed a virtual instance of Windows 98 INSIDE MY FREAKING Windows 98, I knew I was dealing with some sort of voodoo. If you had described VMware to me before I saw it, I would have told you it was impossible.
MAME (1990s): Common theme here — I love emulators. MAME’s ability to run the exact arcade games I pumped millions of quarters into when I was a kid/teenager, all on my own PC, is just something that will always make me smile.
Google Earth (2000s): Mapquest, a few years earlier, itself was game-changing. Then Google Earth showed up and took it to a whole other level. The ability to spin the earth around and zoom in anywhere made you feel almost godlike.
Minecraft (2010s): At first Minecraft seemed like modern Legos which was awesome enough; however, it’s evolution into a massive unbounded tool/platform to create worlds, structures, even fully functional CPUs is the penultimate example of the possibility of software.
The software listed above spans a roughly 45-year period and cover the gambit from video games to spreadsheets to operating systems. I fully acknowledge some of these software packages were likely impactful to me, due to the time and place I encountered them in <my> life, and not a wider audience. Everybody has their own journey. I’m curious what <your> Top 15 looks like and why.
