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The Post-Punch-Card Canon

Marc Andreessen asked the question and then answered it poorly. Here’s a proper attempt.

The canon on one time axisThe 25 programs sit above a 1960 to 2025 axis by year, the honourable mentions below it.196019701980199020002010202001 UNIX02 C03 SQL04 VisiCalc05 Email / SMTP06 TCP/IP stack07 GNU toolchain08 Macintosh System Software09 Photoshop10 Linux kernel11 Mosaic / Netscape12 Windows 9513 Apache HTTP Server14 Java15 JavaScript16 PageRank / Google Search17 Wikipedia18 BitTorrent19 Google Maps20 Git21 YouTube22 AWS23 iOS / Android24 WhatsApp25 GPT / ChatGPTBASICARPANETPascalWordPerfectMS-DOSPostScriptMicrosoft ExcelPerlPythonDoomMP3PHPSSL/HTTPSFlashWinampNapsteriTunesSteamSpotifyGoogle ChromeBitcoinDockerTransformers / PyTorchStable Diffusion
The canon Honourable mention

  1. UNIX

    1969

    Everything is a file and every tool does one job. Your Mac, your phone and most servers still work that way.

  2. C

    1972

    Portable assembly. The kernels, databases and language runtimes you use every day are still written in it.

  3. SQL

    1974

    You describe the data you want and the database works out how to fetch it. Fifty years on, nobody has replaced it.

  4. VisiCalc

    1979

    The spreadsheet. The first program people bought a computer just to run.

  5. Email / SMTP

    1982

    Any address can reach any other, on any server, and no company owns it. Forty years on, nothing has replaced it.

  6. TCP/IP stack

    1983

    The boring plumbing that turned thousands of incompatible networks into one internet.

  7. GNU toolchain

    1983

    Stallman’s free compiler, shell and utilities. When Linux arrived, GNU had already written almost everything except the kernel.

  8. Macintosh System Software

    1984

    Windows, icons and a mouse, sold to ordinary people for the first time.

    Not conflated with macOS

  9. Photoshop

    1990

    Turned the photograph into something you edit, and its own name into a verb.

  10. Linux kernel

    1991

    A Finnish student’s hobby project. It now runs most servers, every Android phone and every one of the 500 fastest supercomputers.

  11. Mosaic / Netscape

    1993/1994

    Put pictures on the page next to the text. After that, people looked at the web instead of reading it.

    Take your pick

  12. Windows 95

    1995

    The Start menu, the taskbar and plug and play. People queued outside shops at midnight for an operating system.

  13. Apache HTTP Server

    1995

    The free web server behind most of the early web, maintained by volunteers.

  14. Java

    1995

    Write once, run anywhere. It ended up running bank back offices and, later, Android apps.

  15. JavaScript

    1995

    Brendan Eich wrote the first version in ten days. Every browser on earth now runs it.

  16. PageRank / Google Search

    1998

    Ranked pages by who linked to them. Its rivals mostly counted keywords.

  17. Wikipedia

    2001

    An encyclopaedia anyone can edit, which should not work and does. Still free, still no ads.

  18. BitTorrent

    2001

    Every downloader is also an uploader, so a popular file gets faster to fetch, not slower.

  19. Google Maps

    2005

    A map you could drag around inside a browser tab. It made AJAX famous and ended the MapQuest printout.

  20. Git

    2005

    Linus wrote it to manage the kernel after losing his old tool. Now nearly every developer uses it.

  21. YouTube

    2005

    Made posting a video as easy as posting a photo, then became the second-largest search engine in the world.

  22. AWS

    2006

    Rent a server with an API call and pay by the hour. Starting a company stopped requiring a hardware budget.

  23. iOS / Android

    2007/2008

    The phone became the computer, and for most people the only one they own.

    Need both for the full picture, just iOS if pushed

  24. WhatsApp

    2009

    Replaced the text message across most of the world, and encrypted every conversation end to end in 2016.

  25. GPT / ChatGPT

    2018/2022

    Put a chat box on a language model and made ‘AI’ a consumer product overnight.

    Does GPT count as "software"?

Honourable Mentions

  • BASIC how non-engineers learned to program 1964
  • ARPANET the network the internet grew out of 1969
  • Pascal the language a generation of students learned on 1970
  • WordPerfect the word processor everyone used before Word 1980
  • MS-DOS licensed to IBM, and the making of Microsoft 1981
  • PostScript let a Mac and a laser printer do a typesetter’s job 1984
  • Microsoft Excel VisiCalc’s better-funded successor 1985
  • Perl held the early web together with regular expressions 1987
  • Python readable enough for scientists and beginners alike 1991
  • Doom shareware that made modding a hobby and deathmatch a word 1993
  • MP3 compressed audio, decompressed the music industry 1993
  • PHP the language under WordPress, and so under a lot of the web 1994
  • SSL/HTTPS made it safe to type a card number into a web page 1995
  • Flash games and video in the browser, until the iPhone refused it 1996
  • Winamp it really whipped the llama’s ass 1997
  • Napster showed the labels what listeners wanted, then lost in court 1999
  • iTunes made buying music one song at a time normal 2001
  • Steam the reason PC games stopped coming in boxes 2003
  • Spotify streaming won 2008
  • Google Chrome a JavaScript engine fast enough to run real applications in a tab 2008
  • Bitcoin money with no bank behind it, for better or worse 2009
  • Docker made shipping a whole Linux environment a single command 2013
  • Transformers / PyTorch the model design and the library most modern AI is built on 2017
  • Stable Diffusion image generation you could download and run on your own machine 2022