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The Post-Punch-Card Canon

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

  1. UNIX Everything is a file. Everything since has borrowed the idea. 1969
  2. C Portable assembly. Still the substrate under almost everything that matters. 1972
  3. SQL Let non-programmers interrogate data. Somehow still irreplaceable fifty years on. 1974
  4. VisiCalc The spreadsheet. First piece of software worth buying a computer for. 1979
  5. Email / SMTP Federated, asynchronous, universal. Forty years on and nothing has replaced it. 1982
  6. TCP/IP stack The boring plumbing that made one network out of thousands of incompatible ones. 1983
  7. GNU toolchain Free-as-in-freedom tools that made an entire ecosystem possible. 1983
  8. Macintosh System Software Shipped the desktop metaphor to real people for the first time. 1984
  9. Photoshop Made ‘digital’ a creative medium, not just a distribution format. 1990
  10. Linux kernel Volunteer-built UNIX clone that quietly ended up running most of the internet. 1991
  11. Mosaic / Netscape Turned the web into something you looked at, not just something you read. 1993/1994
  12. Windows 95 Brought the GUI to the mass market. Start menu, taskbar, plug and play. 1995
  13. Apache HTTP Server Open-source HTTP server that ran the majority of the early web. 1995
  14. Java Cross-platform runtime that became the default for enterprise software. 1995
  15. JavaScript Brendan Eich’s ten-day prototype became the runtime of the entire web. 1995
  16. PageRank / Google Search Ranked the web by what other pages thought was important. Changed everything. 1998
  17. Wikipedia Volunteer-written encyclopaedia that actually works. Still free. 2001
  18. BitTorrent Solved large-scale file distribution by making every downloader an uploader. 2001
  19. Google Maps AJAX before anyone called it that. Ended the era of MapQuest printouts. 2005
  20. Git Linus needed version control for the kernel. Now every developer uses it. 2005
  21. YouTube Solved video hosting, then became the world’s second-largest search engine. 2005
  22. AWS Rent a server with an API call. Changed the economics of starting a company. 2006
  23. iOS / Android The phone became the computer. Two billion people carry one now. 2007/2008
  24. WhatsApp End-to-end encrypted messaging that quietly replaced SMS across most of the world. 2009
  25. GPT / ChatGPT Language model that made ‘AI’ a consumer product overnight. 2018/2022

Honourable Mentions

  • BASIC gave non-engineers a way in 1964
  • ARPANET proto-internet 1969
  • Pascal taught a generation to program 1970
  • WordPerfect the word processor before Word 1980
  • MS-DOS IBM’s accidental kingmaker 1981
  • PostScript made desktop publishing possible 1984
  • Microsoft Excel VisiCalc’s better-funded successor 1985
  • Perl duct tape of the early web 1987
  • Python readable enough to become universal 1991
  • Doom networked 3D, modding culture, shareware 1993
  • MP3 compressed audio, decompressed the music industry 1993
  • PHP ran half the web, for better or worse 1994
  • SSL/HTTPS made commerce on the web viable 1995
  • Flash rich media before HTML5 caught up 1996
  • Winamp it really whipped the llama’s ass 1997
  • Napster forced the music industry to evolve 1999
  • iTunes legitimate digital music distribution 2001
  • Steam digital distribution killed the boxed game 2003
  • Spotify streaming won 2008
  • Google Chrome fast enough to make the browser the platform 2008
  • Bitcoin trustless consensus, for better or worse 2009
  • Docker containers for the rest of us 2013
  • Transformers / PyTorch the architecture and toolkit behind the AI wave 2017
  • Stable Diffusion open-source image generation 2022