Dave Plummer

Windows 95 would be number two for me.

I think OS 360 is going to be number one.

Okay, interesting.

If you take a machine and write a COBOL program for it in 1962, jump in your time machine, go to Poughkeepsie and boot up an IBM Z17 mainframe and run it today.

And they've been doing it for however many years that is.

And it's all on the business side, so we as consumers don't have much access to it.

But I think it was probably as influential in the commercial side as Windows 95 was in the home side.

And then probably Linux would be number three for me.

I put Linux as bigger than Unix, which doesn't work because you can't have one without the other.

But the impact of Unix, BSD, and so forth is largely in the academic space.

It's by programmers for programmers.

Yeah, and it's penetration on the server side of things now is, I don't know if it's equivalent to what System360 achieved, but it's almost ubiquitous.

Well, your day starts coming in, and you've got to download the address book, which is Microsoft has between 10,000 and 15,000 employees at this point, and we're all on MS Mail.

We're just getting off of the PDP-11 called Miss Piggy, which we're on WhizMail.

and we're running MS Mail.

But MS Mail has a fixed address book that every user must download every morning.

And when there's 10,000 people downloading 10,000 people, it gets pretty messy.

And I think we're on 10 megabit networking at the time.

So your first hour is downloading the address book, which was always frustrating.

But you'd use that time to look at the crashes that would have happened overnight from a process we called stress, which is NNT.