25 Killer Apps of All Time ~ for the Personal Computing Age....

Technospin Blog ^ | Friday, December 15th, 2006 at 12:05 pm | Richard Graber

[avg_freeper]

"grep is my pick"

I use grep constantly too. I deal with a lot of output files from an engineering structural analysis. There are many post processing tools to filter out specific pieces of information. But if I need to know something unique about the results I grep it out.

I left sed in there even though I've started using perl command line more often.

Anything that I've been doing with let's say:

sed "s/regex/stuff/" file

I can do with

perl -p -e "s/regex/stuff/" file

and I even have the option of in-place editing with -i

But the biggest reason is that my "time" tests of perl line processing beats sed for large files.

[toddlintown]

"EDLIN"

I remember using EDLIN back in '83.

[tacticalogic]

If you like the linux-y stuff, but circumstances dictatate Windows, you might want to have a look at Powershell.

$a %| -match "regex" | out-file

[zeugma]

Coolest Program Ever .... Celestia.

Excellent Celestia Addons:  Celestia Motherload.

Wikipedia Entry 

Yeah, I know. They were talking about other kinds of software, but Celestia is da bomb.

[tacticalogic]

I remember using EDLIN back in '83.

I'm trying to forget.

[avg_freeper]

I'm looking forward to trying out Powershell if and when they ever install it on my computer at work.

A good terminal and shell is all I need to start doing much of my work on my PC. I already have perl, a good intel fortran compiler, and Matlab.

[tacticalogic]

It's been RTM for about a month. As long as you've got XP SP2 and .net 2.0 you should be good to go.

[dayglored]

> DOS 4.0, DOS 5.0 were the Operating systems. Windows 3.0 and 3.1 were applications that overlayed the OS....i.e, you could delete the Windows directory from the command line using DOS. With the advent of Windows 95....Windows WAS the OS.

Nope, not even Win95 or Win98 or WinME were independent operating systems. They were all still just GUI applications over DOS. You could delete any of those Windows directories from the DOS command line (not from a DOS box within the GUI, of course).

In 95/98/ME, when DOS booted, it ran through AUTOEXEC.BAT, and you could set a line in MSDOS.SYS that would prohibit the automatic transfer to Windows at the end of AUTOEXEC.BAT. It would boot to DOS, and stop at the command line. You could type "WIN" and it would launch Windows. With WinME they made that harder to do, but WinME was still running on DOS.

With the advent of NT -- NT 3.1, 4, 5 (2000), 5.1 (XP), and 6 (Vista) -- Windows was the OS.

Yes, "Vista" is in fact merely "NT6". That designator is all over the Vista codebase -- the old 13-year old NT codebase. With some window-dressing, yes; but it's still NT.

[LibFreeOrDie]

"Big deal. I wrote code on a DEC PDP-11 using a Hazeltine terminal at Univ of Miami back in 1979."

OK, I'm older! I programmed IBM 1401's using Autocoder back in 1966, and learned BASIC on a teletype machine connected to Dartmouth (Kiewit).

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

There is a reluctance to go with a proprietary language [matlab] though.

It's better than Excel, with matlab at least, when you buy the application, you own it. Also, Mathworks sells matlab to ANSII C "compilers". I've written functions in matlab in a day that would take weeks (or more) to code and unit test in C.

[holden]

MS Flight Simulator

Numbers don't lie. The last time I checked, more copies of Flight Simulator had been sold than any other application (other than operating systems), ever.

HF