4 of the Most Significant Programs Ever Released

Software programs are all around us. Applications allow our computers and mobile devices to actually function. They are immensely significant, and some have had a huge impact on culture and industry. Here are four of the most groundbreaking and widely used kinds of software that were ever released. It is worth noting that all of these programs are still available and popular – even though they are all over 10 years old. This is a real achievement in the fast-moving IT industry.

Microsoft Excel

Since 1993, Microsoft Excel has been the industry standard for spreadsheets, replacing Lotus 1-2-3 in this dominant position. Today, Excel is used in all sorts of industries, and it doesn’t appear to be going away any time soon. Knowledge of Excel processes is a great employability booster. Plenty of companies offer the opportunity to learn Excel online so that you can be better suited to the modern office environment.

Excel rules the roost partially because of how adaptable it is. In almost any industry, there is equations to be done and numbers to crunch: Excel comes in extremely handy for these applications.

Adobe Photoshop

Photo manipulation and editing have been practiced since the very dawn of photography, but it really became prevalent after the introduction of Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop is an immensely powerful image manipulation program that allows users to change almost any aspect of an image. Photoshop is currently the industry standard for professional editors, photographers and designers. Several open source copies of the program have been released for users that cannot afford the hefty price tag of the original.

ProTools

ProTools is the most significant audio production software ever released. Although its development was started all the way back in 1984, ProTools really revolutionized the music world when its second edition was released in 1993. ProTools 2.0 allowed producers to fully digitize their recording studio setups. Not only did it replace the functions of a tape recorder, it could also do things that no tape recorder could do. Endless multitrack channels, software synthesizers and powerful arrangement functions were all possible. ProTools 2.0 ushered in the age of the Digital Audio Workstation. DAW software is now used to make almost all modern music and has opened up some truly amazing compositional possibilities. Pioneers of DAW composition like Aphex Twin used DAW software to create songs that would have been impossible to compose outside of a computer.

World of Warcraft

It is hard to overstate just how important World of Warcraft was for the development of online communities and gaming. World of Warcraft was one of the most successful early Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games. Millions of players inhabited a fantasy world. Although the game itself was addictive, it was the social aspect of World of Warcraft that made it such a phenomenon. After the huge success of the game, online multiplayer sociability was a standard in game design, and is still a prerequisite for A-list multiplayer games.