Posted on 04/13/2005 9:18:26 PM PDT by gilor
Remember when 'killer app' started the buzzword lexicon of today?
What was the first program or game that made you realize: 'these computer things might catch on'?
I used to mess around with the early stuff (ATARI 800XL w/ dual 5 1/4" 360K drives was my first), but once way back when a friend of mine upgraded his XT to CGA, added one of those new 'sound cards' and replaced a failed 20MB HD(it sucked loading games up off multiple floppies) he installed "INCUNABELLA"(sic) the game had shit graphics but excellent game play.
word processing.
It's also the app that tought me to save my work frequently.
App = Xtree
Game = Wolfenstein
Early stuff? I go back to 1966: the IBM 1401, with 16 KB of memory, tape drives, chain-driven printers (that we could program to make music of a sort), writing out programs (in Autocode) on large sheets of paper before typing out each line on a punch card machine.
The "killer app" back then was just being able to do number-crunching/statistics.
Two productivity programs:
"Letter Perfect" by LJK Enterprises (for the Atari 800) [an early word processor]
"Publishing Partner" by Softlogik Publishing Corporation (for the Atari ST) [Now called PageStream and it is a desktop publishing program for the Mac, ST, Amiga, and Windows]
word processing; wirting my first pc based resume in mid 80s on a wang2000.
You are an OLD FART!!
Yep, I belong in a computer museum!
WOLFENSTEIN 3D?
But it had a sign on it saying something like:
We had bought the cheap model, which could only print at 2/3 speed. It differed from the expensive model in that it had a wire shorting out one of the three cycles.
Another memory - the cold boot card, with half of all the holes punched, in some seeming random pattern that made perfect sense, if you knew the machine language.
"the early stuff (ATARI 800XL..."
1982-1985 early? ;')
First killer app... hmm... never been much of a player of computer games, so it would be a free demo disk I got in the mail (dunno why) for a copy-protected word processor, Zardax, which ran on the Apple II (under DOS 3.3, the kind from Apple, not MS). Thinking back on the interface, I still kinda like it, for a menu style.
Jack Tramiel:
http://www.commodore.ca/history/people/1989_you_dont_know_jack.htm
the IIgs version:
http://www.gno.org/pub/apple2/gs.specific/games/arcade/wolf3D/
Yep- model 19 typing reperferators... sometimes you could read the bloody yellow tapes...
I still use Pagestream on my Mac (has to run in Classic mode, but I have already paid for my OSX upgrade) on a daily basis. It blows many of the professional Desktop Publishing packages out of the water!
My first killer app was on the Commodore 64 - SpeedScript, a great text based word processor.
Speal check.
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