Summary: The article discusses 33 influential computer programs and software systems that have significantly impacted the world. It sets criteria for inclusion, such as societal impact and being self-contained. The list includes operating systems, programming languages, and tools that shaped various industries and technologies.
It is specifically worth calling out Windows NT as the pivotal transition from the classic desktop O/S to what became server class capabilities. (View Highlight)
it was Linux that swept them all away. It also swept away many proprietary O/S’s and delivered not only the pervasive enterprise and cloud environment we have today but also Android for mobile devices, itself derived from Linux / SE-Linux. (View Highlight)
There are clearly a plethora of IDEs, version control systems, packaging and deployment environments but I don’t really think any of them truly stand out enough to be something that “changed the world” in itself - except for Git and all that came of it. (View Highlight)
It was the precursor to the open source Kubernetes now prevalent in many clouds and on-premise IT, and changed how the industry looked at distributed systems and, so called, warehouse scale computing. It, arguably, paved the way for how the world now thinks about declaratively specified infrastructure as code. (View Highlight)
SecDB was (and still is) a highly innovative system for risk management, analytics and securities pricing. (View Highlight)