NeXTSTEP
The Unix-based, Objective-C, Display PostScript operating system from NeXT, whose object-oriented frameworks and Interface Builder became the technical foundation of macOS and iOS.
Tools
The compilers, IDEs, and systems that programmers actually used.
326 entries, all primary-sourced
CVS (Concurrent Versions System)
The Concurrent Versions System, the dominant open-source version control tool of the 1990s, which let many developers work on a shared repository over a network.
Expect
Don Libes's Tcl-based tool for automating interactive programs such as telnet, ftp, and passwd, driven by the spawn, send, and expect commands.
Zsh (Z Shell)
Zsh is a feature-rich Unix shell created by Paul Falstad in 1990, combining Bourne-shell compatibility with powerful interactive features such as programmable completion, advanced globbing, and theming. Apple made it the default shell on macOS in 2019, and the Oh My Zsh framework popularized it widely.
GNU Autotools (autoconf, automake, libtool)
The GNU build system behind './configure && make && make install', which made C programs portable across the many incompatible Unix variants.
strace
strace is the Unix and Linux system-call tracer that uses the ptrace mechanism to intercept and record the system calls a process makes and the signals it receives, making it a standard tool for diagnosing programs at the user/kernel boundary.
PGP (Pretty Good Privacy)
Phil Zimmermann's 1991 encryption software that made strong public-key encryption and digital signatures available to ordinary people for email and files.
Linux
The free Unix-like kernel Linus Torvalds began in 1991, which combined with GNU tools to make complete operating systems that now run most servers and, via Android, most phones.
Vim
Vim (Vi IMproved), Bram Moolenaar's modal text editor first released in 1991, is distributed as charityware and became one of the most widely used editors on Unix-like systems.
CFEngine
Mark Burgess's pioneering configuration-management system, begun in 1993, that introduced the academic ideas of convergence and, later, Promise Theory to automated system administration.
NCSA Mosaic
The early graphical web browser from NCSA that popularized the Web by showing inline images and being easy to install.
Windows NT
Microsoft's from-scratch 32-bit operating-system line, whose kernel architecture still underlies every modern version of Windows.
Debian
The volunteer-driven, community-governed GNU/Linux distribution Ian Murdock began in August 1993; its package system and free-software principles became the basis for Ubuntu and many other distributions.
dpkg
Debian's low-level package manager and the .deb package format, the foundation that higher-level tools like apt are built on top of.
Foundation (Framework)
The non-GUI core framework (NSObject, NSString, NSArray and other collections, dates, file and network access) shared by Cocoa on macOS and Cocoa Touch on iOS, originating in NeXT's OpenStep Foundation library.
MySQL
The open-source relational database, created in 1995, that paired with Linux and PHP to power the dynamic web as the M in the LAMP stack.
Perforce (Helix Core / P4)
A proprietary centralized version-control system, founded in 1995, long favored by large enterprises and game studios for huge codebases and binary assets.
Apache HTTP Server
The open-source web server, first released in 1995, that served most of the early web and became the A in the LAMP stack.
Internet Explorer
Microsoft's web browser, bundled with Windows, that won the first browser war and then stagnated before being retired in 2022.
RPM (RPM Package Manager)
Red Hat's package manager and the .rpm format, the packaging foundation of Red Hat, Fedora, SUSE, CentOS, and many other Linux distributions.
PostgreSQL
The open-source object-relational database descended from Berkeley's Postgres, known for standards compliance and extensibility.
Palm OS
Palm OS was the operating system and application platform for Palm and Handspring handhelds; its compact event-driven model and .prc resource-database application format powered a large catalog of third-party software.
Palm Pilot
The Palm Pilot, released by Palm Computing in 1996, was the first wildly popular handheld computer; its Graffiti handwriting recognition and one-button HotSync synchronization made personal digital assistants mainstream.
KDE
The Qt-based desktop environment announced by Matthias Ettrich in 1996; the non-free status of its Qt toolkit triggered a licensing controversy that helped spur the creation of GNOME and ultimately pushed Qt to be relicensed under free terms.
JUnit
The Java unit-testing framework created by Kent Beck and Erich Gamma in 1997 that defined the modern 'xUnit' style and helped make automated developer testing mainstream.
Visual Studio
Microsoft's flagship integrated development environment, first announced in 1997 as a single suite bundling its previously separate Visual development tools.
GNOME
The GTK-based free desktop environment for Unix and Linux, founded in 1997 partly because the Qt toolkit underlying the rival KDE was then non-free; it is stewarded by the nonprofit GNOME Foundation.
Slashdot
The pioneering 'News for Nerds' tech-news aggregator founded in 1997, whose karma, comment moderation, and meta-moderation systems shaped how online communities self-govern.
curl
Daniel Stenberg's command-line tool and library (libcurl) for transferring data with URLs, the default way to poke an HTTP API from a terminal or a program.
Symbian OS
Symbian OS, descended from Psion's EPOC and backed by Nokia, was the dominant smartphone operating system before the iPhone; its C++ application framework and Nokia's Series 60 platform powered a vast catalog of mobile software.
APT (Advanced Package Tool)
Debian's higher-level package tool that added automatic dependency resolution and network installs on top of dpkg, the model most Linux users know as apt-get install.
Bugzilla
The open-source web-based bug-tracking system that came out of the Netscape and Mozilla project in 1998 and became one of the first widely used issue trackers.
BlackBerry
BlackBerry, made by Research In Motion, was the secure push-email smartphone that dominated enterprise mobility before the iPhone; it was known for its physical QWERTY keyboard, BlackBerry Messenger, and a Java application platform built on the BlackBerry JDE.
NetBeans
An open-source Java IDE and application framework that began as a student project, was acquired and open-sourced by Sun Microsystems, and is now developed as Apache NetBeans under the Apache Software Foundation.
SourceForge
The first large web platform for hosting open-source projects, bundling version control, bug tracking, mailing lists, and downloads in one place.
Apache Ant
An XML-driven Java build tool from 2000 that replaced platform-specific Makefiles, created by James Duncan Davidson.
BitKeeper
The proprietary distributed version control system from BitMover that the Linux kernel used from 2002 to 2005, open-sourced under Apache 2.0 in 2016.
CMake
A cross-platform build-system generator from Kitware that produces native build files from a single project description, now the de-facto standard for C and C++.
Windows Mobile
Windows CE was Microsoft's compact operating system for handhelds, and the Pocket PC and Windows Mobile platforms built on it were Microsoft's pre-2010 answer to the PDA and smartphone, programmed with eMbedded Visual Tools and later the .NET Compact Framework.
SQLite
A small, self-contained, serverless SQL database engine embedded directly in applications, and the most widely deployed database in the world.
Apache Subversion (SVN)
Apache Subversion, the centralized version control system started in 2000 to be CVS done right, and the leading centralized tool of the 2000s before git.
Hibernate ORM
The influential Java object-relational mapping framework that popularized mapping objects to relational tables and shaped the JPA standard.
IntelliJ IDEA
JetBrains' Java and Kotlin IDE, first released in January 2001, that brought deep code analysis, navigation, and integrated refactoring into mainstream development and became the platform under Android Studio, PyCharm, and other tools.
Cocoa
Apple's set of Objective-C application frameworks (AppKit plus Foundation) for macOS, descended directly from the NeXTSTEP and OpenStep object libraries acquired with NeXT.
Eclipse IDE
The extensible, open-source Java IDE and plug-in platform created by IBM in 2001 and later stewarded by the Eclipse Foundation, built on the OSGi-based Equinox runtime and home to Erich Gamma's Java Development Tools.
ASP.NET
Microsoft's web framework for .NET, which evolved from Web Forms (2002) through MVC to the open-source, cross-platform ASP.NET Core.
Jira
Atlassian's issue- and project-tracking system, launched in 2002, which became dominant in commercial software teams and especially in agile workflows.
MacPorts
A macOS package manager modeled on the BSD ports system; the main way to install open-source software on the Mac before Homebrew.