Greatest Software Ever Written 4224

Did they give you any other context like why? Was there any specific ordering? My basic guess is that the list was put together by clueless people who don't know better how to use ink and paper, but if you get Mark Smotherman, he might tally something useful. You lurking Al? Sorry I could not make the Software History meeting, I was watching 3-D films on an iPod.

"System" 3? Why not 4.2BSD? Why not linux? Not R*? Not Oracle? Why not C?

"Apps" Newtonian history. Page rank clearly has influence, but the smarts aren't in the s-w. Hack job, buggy.

So the first thing which comes to mind is:

The Top Ten most important algorithms

1. 1946: The Monte Carlo method (modeling probabilistic phenomena) 2. 1947: The Simplex method (linear optimization) 3. 1950: The Krylov subspace iteration method (fast linear solvers and Eigensolvers) 4. 1951: The Householder matrix decomposition (express a matrix as a product of simpler matrices) 5. 1957: The FORTRAN compiler (liberated scientists and engineers from programming in buttembly language) 6. 1959-1961: The QR algorithm (compute many eigenvalues) 7. 1962: The Quicksort algorithm (put things in numerical or alphabetic order fast) 8. 1965: The fast Fourier transform (reduce operation count in Fourier series representation) 9. 1977: The integer relation detection algorithm (useful for bifurcations and in quantum field theory) 10. 1987: The fast multipole algorithm for N-body problems

J. Dongarra and F. Sullivan, eds., The top 10 algorithms, Computing in Science and Engineering, Vol. 2, No. 1, January-February, 2000.

I am not certain what the influence of Greatness is?

Some unknown clbuttified thermonuclear code (I can think of a name, the run-time was measured in Cray-years). Some unknown clbuttified cryptanalytic code (I can't think of any name, Francis might know). Email. Ftp. (could put web browsers in here) OS. (wor w-o network protocols) Compiler (Wirth's PL-0 is small enough to be understandable). Interpreter (BASIC-LISP) DBMS. What was existed before Ed Codd and the relational model? Spreadsheet (Visicalc:like why Excel over Visicalc? Ok, Frankston is a friend). Net.news (what can I say? I met Ellis before he died, and I know Fair and others).

Weather-meteor-climate code? Maybe. Sabre is arguably a good example. The UIUC code for the 4-color theorem? Maybe CAD-CAM software (Autodesk?) Apollo guidance system: while it was man-rated, Pioneer and Voyager require more accuracy because of their distance. I know the guys who wrote DPTRAJ and ODP at JPL. What ran on the AGC on board was 15-bit and had various real time bits it's because astronaut lives were at stake (so why not Shuttle software?). My and their lists above is lacking a good real-time case (factories.

MY 1st cut.

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