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Hi Paul,

This "Great Works of Software" piece is fantastic. Of course I want to correct it, and I'm sure everyone does and I'm fairly confident that was the intention of it, and getting everyone to reflect and debate the greatest pieces of software is as worthy of an intention for a blog post (even one hosted on Medium) as any I can think of.

I don't dispute any of your five [0], but I was surprised by something: where are the Internet and the Web? Sure, the Web is a little young at 25, but it's old enough to have been declared dead a good handful of times and the Internet calls Word and Photoshop young whippersnappers. Does the Web satisfy your criteria of everyday, meaningful use? Of course. But I'm guessing that you didn't just forget the Web when writing about meaningful software. Instead, I suspect you very intentionally chose [1] to leave these out to illustrate an important point: that the Web isn't a single piece of software in the same sense that the programs you listed are.

The Web is made up of software (and hardware): web server software running on millions of machines all around the world; user agents running on every client machine we can think of (desktop, mobile, laptop, refrigerator); proxies and caching middleboxes; DNS servers; software and firmware running on routers and switches, in Internet Exchange Points and Internet Service Providers; software not included in this classification; crawlers constantly indexing and archiving Web pages; open source libraries which encrypt communications for Transport Layer Security; et cetera. But even if one had an overly-simplified view of Web architecture (and I wouldn't criticize anyone for this; this is the poor-man's Web architecture that I teach students all the time) consisting of servers and browsers, anyone would see that there's no singular piece of software involved. You mentioned the TCP/IP stack as a runner up, but there's no single TCP/IP implementation that's particularly great or important: what's important is that separate implementations of the relevant IETF standards interoperate [2]. Other listmakers included a browser (Kirschenbaum highlighted Mosaic [3]; PC World, Navigator) or you could imagine listing Apache as a canonical server (and the corresponding foundation and software development methodology), but even as important as those pieces were (and are!), alone they just don't make a difference.

As a thought experiment then, I submit a preliminary list for a Web software canon, listing not single pieces of software but systems of software, standards and people.

• Blogs (RSS/OPML/Dave Winer/Blogger/Medium): anyone can write for the world to see
• Wikis (c2/Ward Cunningham/Portland Pattern Repository/Jimmy Wales/Wikipedia/MediaWiki): we can write together, not just alone
• SSL (TLS/certificate authorities/CAB Forum/OpenSSL): we can communicate privately and do business online
• Search (Google): we can find each other, and information -- true and untrue -- about anything and everything

Non-exhaustive, of course, but I hope it's helpful for your next blog post, which I hope to see on ftrain.com. Is there something distinctive to these systems of software that are intrinsically tied up with the communities that use and develop them? Whole publics that are recursive, say [4]? I hope there are a few people out there writing books and dissertations about that. (I should really get back to writing that prospectus.)

Sincerely,
Nick

[0] Okay, I'm skeptical about Emacs -- isn't the operating system/joining of small software pieces already well-covered by Unix?

[1] By the Principle of Charity.

[2] It might be tempting, for someone who works on Web standards like I do, to claim that the Web is really just a set of interoperable standards, but that's nonsense as soon as I think about it at all. Sure, I think standards are important, but a standard without an implementation is just a bit of text somewhere. An of course, that's not hypothetical at all: standards without widespread implementation are commonplace, and bittersweet.

[3] Also, Kirschenbaum includes Hypercard in his list, with a reference to Vannevar Bush and the Memex, which I love, and it might be the closest in these lists to something that looks like the Web/hypertext but in non-networked single-piece-of-software form.

[4] Kelty, Christopher M. Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software. Duke University Press Books, 2008.