What is your pick for the most mind bogglingly incredible software of all time?

[hoodoof]

For me it is the EA/Dice FrostBite engine that powers the Battlefield game series.

If you've ever played this game you'll be startled that a computer can do so much, and the more you know about writing software, the more amazed you'll be that they managed to build something with such scope. Here's some links if you're interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVOiVIXXrPE https://www.engadget.com/2013/11/19/electronic-arts-frostbite-battlefield-mass-effect (I have no connection to EA/Dice).

So what other software is so amazing that you think "its hard to believe they managed to achieve this"?

[anexprogrammer]

The Amiga kernel and Intuition (the GUI).

Partly because it was just so damn clean and intuitive. Equivalent Windows apps were an order of magnitude larger, but seemed to offer less.

Partly because each was almost entirely the work of one - RJ Mical for Intuition, and Carl Sassenrath, who would later create Rebol mentioned below, for the kernel.

Lastly the whole was greater than the sum of very excellent parts.

Xwindows and Windows etc were an endless series of disappointments after cutting my teeth on Intuition. I often used to wonder what might have been had it continued to be developed... Or succeeded as it deserved.

[alexanderson]

I'd have to say Starcraft. The multiplayer mode with super low latency was designed to be run over 56k modems (or less). It's become a case study for the right way to handle realtime gaming networking.

[basename]

It amazes me what git is capable of, fresh out of the box.

Most of the things that I've found useful over the years - procmail and mutt, or vim - need quite a bit of configuring before unleashing their full power. Writing procmail recipes is like potting-training a pig.

But for the most part, git shows up ready to work.

[27182818284]

Excel must be the closest thing to a swiss-army-knife piece of software. You find it everywhere from your Church choir's organization to statistics classes to DnD organization.

It opens versions of files from twenty years ago just fine today.

[cm2012]

Excel is the most useful software in business, period.

[4SomeReason]

As someone who has studied a lot of words, and a lot of CS, I like this challenge. It's like asking what's the best book ever written (which is why I think the first answers are about excel).

Lemme breaka dis down:

Most mind bogglingly incredible....that means that piece of software that is the most difficult to fully grok, but is ostensibly the most useful while simultaneously speaking to the coding mastery of whomever (likelier than not, mor ethan one person) wrote/typed, prolly both, it.

And I have a really good answer that I bet almost nowon reading this illuminated pixel array would have thought.

PLATO, baby, and its TUTOR programming language. Yeah, it's hardware and software, but Steve Jobs would allow it, and I bet Woz wood too. The computational invention that heralds nearly every single computer-oriented advance made since its inception. Made to train GI's to make up for a lack of funds after the dudes and dudettes returning from WWII needed to get their education funded like they were promised. Nothing like making up for overpromising to spur progress way beyond expectations. Moon(shine) landing, anyone? Get this: the dude's name who is credited as being the father of PLATO: Bitzer, adn a dude named Tenczar (Tensor flow?). Fucking Bitzer and 10czar....God, or whtaever logic governs our universe, has an amazing sense of humor.

Anyway, here's a link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_%28computer_system%29

[Jtsummers]

Rebol was this for me, it came out when I was in HS and had been programming for about half my life at that point (BASIC and, later, C). The size of the runtime, the simplicity but capability of the language and its built-in libraries were impressive. I played around with it quite a bit, and still regret that it didn't really take hold (though I perfectly understand the market forces and choices that prevented this).

I later discovered other languages and environments with similar capabilities, but that one was my first taste of how using computers should be (dynamic, flexible, bending to the will of the user; not these mostly-static environments we typically deal in).

[dijkstra123]

For me it's Google search :)

[webmaven]

Kai's Power Tools, and later on Fractal Design Painter.

The fact that these achieved live, direct-manipulation natural media effects such as pencils, crayons, markers, oil paints, watercolors (complete with wetting effects and paper diffusion), etc. on then-contemporary (early 90s) hardware (it worked well even on lower end hardware, though not really "live" anymore) was nothing short of MIRACULOUS.

I am still in awe of the achievement.