Miscellaneous Operating Systems/Hardware

Most successful OS's have had a killer app.
An app that made people buy a certain machine.

It would be interesting to hear your thoughts on what you think THE killer app was for a platform.

MacOS 7.x on 68040: QuarkXPress.
IRIX: discreet IFFFS.
Windows 95 on Pentium: 3DS MAX?
The more successful systems have many "killer apps", so it's harder to point to a single one.

For me, on the PC in the 80s it was Wordstar, then a few years later (and still to this day) it's Turbocad. Any other die hard Turbocad users hereabout?

On Irix, I'd say it was all the CAD apps. Solid modelling is what drove those thousands of leased Octanes to Ford, GM, Chrysler. Then related but more specialized would be the molecular modelling and geology applications. I'm guessing that those were the guys who paid the bills.

It also depends on which market segment you look at.

For example, one piece of software responsible for shifting millions of PCs into businesses - especially in the later 90s has to be Microsoft Office (Office 97 probably being the most successful version of the time). Regardless of how much it may suck compared with alternatives, you can't deny it certainly helped sell a lot of PCs to businesses, schools etc.

ivelegacy wrote: Absolutely the top of the top of my list is for DevKit for RISCOS .

The real killer app for RISCOS - pay a hefty premium for the hardware because the app was on that platform, even if you already had a Mac/PC for everything else - was Sibelius in the mid-90s.

hamei wrote: Then related but more specialized would be the molecular modelling and geology applications. I'm guessing that those were the guys who paid the bills.

Molecular modelling - I acquired an SGI because I remember seeing Biosym's "Insight" in 1995; the 35mm slides of screenshots were (at the time) stunning.

TrippyNet wrote: one piece of software responsible for shifting millions of PCs into businesses

Lotus123?
Office got into schools on the back of the myth that it's good to know how to use the supposed "industry standard" - surely better to learn how to adapt to use the tools available rather than panic because "save" is F3 rather than Alt-F,S (or even to learn what really happens when you press F3 or Alt-F,S). And don't get me started on the use, misuse and abuse of Powerpoint!