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Programming Software

Ask Slashdot: What's the Most Sophisticated Piece of Software Ever Written? (quora.com) 237

An anonymous reader writes: Stuxnet is the most sophisticated piece of software ever written, given the difficulty of the objective: Deny Iran's efforts to obtain weapons grade uranium without need for diplomacy or use of force, John Byrd, CEO of Gigantic Software (formerly Director of Sega and SPM at EA), argues in a blog post, which is being widely shared in developer circles, with most agreeing with Byrd's conclusion.

He writes, "It's a computer worm. The worm was written, probably, between 2005 and 2010. Because the worm is so complex and sophisticated, I can only give the most superficial outline of what it does. This worm exists first on a USB drive. Someone could just find that USB drive laying around, or get it in the mail, and wonder what was on it. When that USB drive is inserted into a Windows PC, without the user knowing it, that worm will quietly run itself, and copy itself to that PC. It has at least three ways of trying to get itself to run. If one way doesn't work, it tries another. At least two of these methods to launch itself were completely new then, and both of them used two independent, secret bugs in Windows that no one else knew about, until this worm came along."

"Once the worm runs itself on a PC, it tries to get administrator access on that PC. It doesn't mind if there's antivirus software installed -- the worm can sneak around most antivirus software. Then, based on the version of Windows it's running on, the worm will try one of two previously unknown methods of getting that administrator access on that PC. Until this worm was released, no one knew about these secret bugs in Windows either. At this point, the worm is now able to cover its tracks by getting underneath the operating system, so that no antivirus software can detect that it exists. It binds itself secretly to that PC, so that even if you look on the disk for where the worm should be, you will see nothing. This worm hides so well, that the worm ran around the Internet for over a year without any security company in the world recognizing that it even existed."
What do Slashdot readers think?
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Ask Slashdot: What's the Most Sophisticated Piece of Software Ever Written?

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  • by ctilsie242 ( 4841247 ) on Friday May 18, 2018 @01:42PM (#56634056)

    It depends on what you mean by sophisticated:

    If you mean something that does a lot of functions, then I would probably propose Busybox or emacs.

    If you mean something cleverly engineered to handle a lot of attacks, pgp, TrueCrypt, and VeraCrypt come to mind.

    If you mean something that makes a framework, Kubernates can be considered there.

    Then, there are hypervisors that wind up not just doing the functions of an operating system, but providing the same functions to an OS.

    • And if you mean something obfuscated and unnecessarily complicated, newer versions of Windows might be in the running. /snark
    • More (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      seL4 microkernel, which is formally verified (algorithmically proven that all it's functions are correct)

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L4_microkernel_family#High_assurance:_seL4

      I think you could consider when the software was made. For instance, VMS was an incredibly advanced, scalable OS with partitioning and virtualization features, an advanced filesystem (current filesystems are still catching up in some ways) designed to run on hardware less capable than most smartwatches today.

    • by PaulBu ( 473180 )

      I've heard that only TeX and Shuttle avionics were considered bug-free! :)

      But yes, it is weird to call a worm (yes, a sophisticated worm) to be "most sophisticated piece of software", when there is Emacs! :)

      • by rickb928 ( 945187 ) on Friday May 18, 2018 @02:45PM (#56634496) Homepage Journal

        Apollo flight software was pretty damned good. The LM guidance software is remarkable.

        But a lot of core business software, especially core transaction processing, written for 360 class mainframes, is still running today. Not just that software, but the OS it ran under, all versions, are unheralded.

        My brother managed S/32-AS/400 systems and had one uncommanded IPL in 11 years before a wholesale conversion to the AS/400 system he was given. He thought SCP was as good as anything he'd heard of, even VMS he worked with, and RPG was the best until GUIs took over.

        • This whole thread only serves to prove the loss incurred when programming became a comoditized and an area of vocational specialization rather than brilliant people with special additional skills and adaptability.

          Specialization is good for society in that it produces lots of useful idiots who would otherwise be unemployable. It must still be recognized there is a separate tier of genius whose expression is often repressed due to the cacophony of the ignorant masses. This has resulted in languages like PHP
          • by hjf ( 703092 )

            Not every piece of software needs to be the best, most elegant and beautiful solution to a problem. Stupid arguments like yours take us back 40 years. TeX may be the most perfect typesetting software, but I'd rather use Word whenever possible. Because I don't need to learn TeX commands to make a "OPEN" sign.

          • It was a lot easier to write code when you could fit the entire functionality of the computer into your head. Now there's so much going on under the hood that it's pretty much impossible to know what's really going on. When you only had 4k of memory, you could print out the entire contents of memory on a piece of paper and debug it by hand if you needed to. The code of decades ago may have been more stable, but the things we are writing today are much more complex. The amount of stuff that has to happen s

    • by hjf ( 703092 )

      How about SABRE? The airline reservation system started in 1960 that is still running today?

    • When I think of sophistication I naturally start from sophistry, and who could ever beat emacs?! It even used to compile itself by core dumping, but it considered itself too Special for normal compilation.

      It even descended from an Ivory Tower, and is maintained by a bunch of people who consider their actions to be not mere programming, but part of a social and political movement! When they cosplay, they dress up as saints. And they'll defend the costumes straight-faced, instead of by appealing to humor.

      Some

  • by Z00L00K ( 682162 ) on Friday May 18, 2018 @01:44PM (#56634068) Homepage Journal

    The software in the Apollo moon lander is probably one of the most qualified in this category considering that it had to be reliable and it was used in a solution that couldn't be tested for all eventualities on Earth.

    • by mykepredko ( 40154 ) on Friday May 18, 2018 @02:11PM (#56634282) Homepage

      I would disagree as the LM software was pretty straightforward - no routines was started without the astronauts (and NASA) not knowing exactly what the current state of the LM was with expected parameters and then execute quite simple routines. Don't forget that the Apollo Guidance Computers (AGCs) in the LM and CM only had 32k of ROM and 2K of RAM.

      The "1201" and "1202" issues encountered during the Apollo 11 descent are probably the best examples of what you're talking about. They were caused by Aldrin leaving the CM rendezvous radar on during descent (this was done in the simulator without any issues because the landing simulator didn't include this radar because the LM designers didn't think it would be used during landing). Input from the radar was continually passed to the computer even though the software was written to process it or take it out of the memory area that it was automatically stored in...

      This is where the genius of the hardware came in, when the data area the extraneous radar data was dumped into (as I understand it, causing the equivalent of a stack overflow), instead of trying to resolve the issue (which is what I would consider sophisticated software to do) the computer reset itself while returning to the currently executing routine. The landing routine itself would continuously poll altitude and attitude which means that upon reset, it would re-establish where the LM was and make the necessary computations for the engines & thrusters as necessary.

      So, the MIT engineers did design for the unknown and to compensate for it, it just wasn't in the software.

      • by sjames ( 1099 )

        The issue was overscheduling. While the CPU crunched on the radar data, it missed the deadline for frobbing the watchdog, so it was restarted.

        But that ability to restart and do something useful in time was a combination of hardware and software design.

    • I would like to reply to your sig.

      It took humans thousands of years to build houses capable of withstanding natural catastrophes.

      Software's been around, what, ~100 years (200 if you go back to the Jacquard Loom c. 1804).

      We're dumb, and only learn from experience. Gibe us a few thousand more years. :)

  • The Windows Kernel (Score:5, Insightful)

    by xack ( 5304745 ) on Friday May 18, 2018 @01:48PM (#56634106)
    It has to support over a billion different conputers with different drivers and hardware plus support decades of backward compatbility. Android/Linux come close.
    • "It has to support over a billion different" security bugs

      cause can't do stuxnet without windows.
      i for one am waiting on the win10 bugs relase notes by stuxnet2

      • i for one am waiting on the win10 bugs relase notes

        Don't ask for a printout or it will bury you alive. ;)

    • Anyone who really programmed in the day knows that the original Plug and Play effort that was almost universally hated for the cases it didn't work with was unbelievably successful given the problem. Figuring out which of several thousand common cards was present when the cards had not been designed with that in mind was an impossible problem. It involved testing for and documenting quirks of every card and then finding the right set of tests and pattern of performing them to sense those quirks without actu
    • by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      The complexity of keeping the FBI, NSA and CIA tasks per interesting user hidden.
      All that extra spying and decryption in an OS.
  • by Jamu ( 852752 ) on Friday May 18, 2018 @01:48PM (#56634108)
    The GNU Compiler Collection, although this may depend on what you mean by "sophisticated".
  • Virus or the host? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by 140Mandak262Jamuna ( 970587 ) on Friday May 18, 2018 @01:55PM (#56634146) Journal
    In biology, viruses are tiny bits of DNA with replication mechanism and some sort of propagation mechanism that is all. It is never as sophisticated as the host it infects.

    By that analogy, the Micosoft Windows becomes the most sophisticated piece of software.

  • Human DNA (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fredrikv ( 521394 ) on Friday May 18, 2018 @01:56PM (#56634156)

    Human DNA is the most impressive software ever written. It uses extremely complex feedback control structures, analog and digital. It has also lent its name to "genetic algorithms". It is a simple construct but so complex that we have barely understood the outlines of it after five decades of global research. It may not be "written", but that's another story.

    Stuxnet on the other hand is a rather short piece of code that based its success on using secrets obtained from external sources. A good example of cross-domain collaboration and a masterpiece in its own domain. But hardly the most sophisticated piece of code ever written.

    • To add to this: it compresses code dynamically with the use of reading frames and introns. It compiles into more things than you can even represent the state of with every quantum state in the entire known universe used as a single bit, it uses dynamic indexing structures we still don't fully understand in the context of Okazaki fragments, it is capable of dynamically rearranging build outputs without actually changing the code, different environments will execute it in different ways and usually still get
    • (Human) DNA is an excellent example of some very sophisticated software.

    • Re:Human DNA (Score:5, Insightful)

      by HeckRuler ( 1369601 ) on Friday May 18, 2018 @02:37PM (#56634460)

      Impressive maybe, but it's a complete hack.

      Cancer, wisdom teeth, the laryngeal nerve makes a bullshit detour for no reason, appendix, this bullshit self-destructive telomere timeout feature, grey hair, balding, vision decay, and don't get me started on production errors.

      And it's really just a rehash of the earlier Primate model with a few tweaks for brains and butts. The bulk of the code was already there.

      Even the base it's built upon is pretty crufty. Gene DNA takes 3 base pairs to dictate 1 of 20 ways to bend a protein, ignoring the other ~140 combinations that could be used. It's just wasted space. But good luck refactoring that mess.

      • bullshit self-destructive telomere timeout feature

        Otherwise known as delaying the onset of cancer by not replicating from overused source material.

      • You mean to say the software handles refreshing the environment with better, improved software and hardware while automatically removing the legacy hardware.

        Bitching about aging, death, and defects is ignoring the need for progress. Gerontology and related longevity fields are for narcissists too short sighted to see the ultimate harms.
    • by Subm ( 79417 )

      > Human DNA is the most impressive software ever written

      I see you haven't met my mother-in-law.

  • The meaning of "sophisticated" will influence the answer. But if we go with a combination of many different uses, complexity and nuanced output, then I would suggest one of those two categories would take the title.
  • The landing software of the Curiosity rover. Not only did it need to land on Mars, it did it in a highly complex sequence, fully automated, in conditions impossible to simulate and fully replicate here on Earth prior to launch. The distance from Earth also ment the signals confirming (or denying) a successful landing, took 14 minutes to reach the Earth.
  • The WOPR (Score:5, Funny)

    by JoeyRox ( 2711699 ) on Friday May 18, 2018 @02:00PM (#56634196)
    It can do it all, from simple Tic Tac Toe to Global Thermonuclear War.
  • Slashcode (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 18, 2018 @02:01PM (#56634202)

    So sophisticated it's impossible to add proper Unicode support.

  • Hands down.... nothing we've written ourselves comes close to it.

    While perhaps not exactly "written", per se.... it still seems very much like software.

  • People have already commented on other (RTOS) apps etc.
    But how about this, for its time?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

  • by Thelasko ( 1196535 ) on Friday May 18, 2018 @02:03PM (#56634222) Journal
    I've seen some ridiculous spreadsheets. Real works of art. Iterative computations, beautiful plots. So resource intense, it will bring a modern PC to its knees.

    It's a shame someone wasted their talents on Microsoft Excel.
  • by kila_m ( 548924 ) on Friday May 18, 2018 @02:05PM (#56634228) Homepage
    MAME = stuxnet x 1000
  • by blind biker ( 1066130 ) on Friday May 18, 2018 @02:05PM (#56634230) Journal

    COMSOL is a physics and chemistry finite element simulation package. it's a huge, monstrously big package comprised of an encompassing (and respectably well done) UI, a programming interface, and a large number of interlocking modules (interlocking done through the physical models the user creates). So it's rather challenging and sophisticated purely from a software point of view. But then you have to consider the fact that each module implements some very sophisticated computational math for solving some very sophisticated set of physical or chemical/physical equations.

    • by epine ( 68316 )

      COMSOL is a physics and chemistry finite element simulation package.

      That's nothing compared to the Itanium compiler that Intel once envisioned.

      I'm guessing the software used to synthesize Itanium (and the 10 billion transistor chips of the near future) is fairly sophisticated, too.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 18, 2018 @02:06PM (#56634242)

    at the current pace, systemd will include all other software within the next 5 years, so by definition it will include the most sophisticated software ever devised

  • Impossible to know (Score:5, Insightful)

    by AlanBDee ( 2261976 ) on Friday May 18, 2018 @02:06PM (#56634244)

    First lets define Sophisticated: "developed to a high degree of complexity"
    Second, it would be impossible to any one person to accurately compare different pieces of software as it's too much information to know.

    So, what software program has the highest degree of complexity? My first thought is Windows 10. Linux/Unix has a philosophy of lots of smaller programs combining together to make a useful system, even if we counted that, I think the Windows Core is more complex then the Linux kernel and Windows 10 is more complex then say Ubuntu.

    But who knows what the department of defense has, the NSA, Google's algorithms, Amazon, YouTube, China, North Korea, Russia? The more I go down this rabbit hole the more I come back to my second statement: it is impossible for any one person to accurately compare them because no one person knows them all.

    • I think the Windows Core is more complex then the Linux kernel and Windows 10 is more complex then say Ubuntu

      Are but is it? I mean the result is sold as one single piece of software, but the reality is they are multiple different stacks sitting on top of each other providing all manner of interactions but each independent.

      So what makes something independent? Just because it has a different project name? Or maybe it's a functionally different piece of software developed by a different person?

      I would actually think the Linux Kernel is more complicated than Windows' due to the insane amount of hardware support baked

      • So what makes something independent? Just because it has a different project name? Or maybe it's a functionally different piece of software developed by a different person?

        I did consider that question but ultimately decided that it didn't matter. I'll never be able to see the code base for Windows but I've heard developers say it's so massive that they only ever look as one small part at a time.

        Sadly, even though I'm not only able but capable of going through the Linux source code I've never actually done so. I have no idea how complex it is and I suspect almost everyone here is the same. We're assuming it's complex based on what it does or the features it does. How many time

  • The question implies that we know about all of the software that has ever been written. We don't. Therefore we cannot judge what the most sophisticated piece of software ever written is or was. We can, however, discuss software that is widely known about, known beyond a relatively few that wrote or used it.
  • Puffery (Score:4, Interesting)

    by HeckRuler ( 1369601 ) on Friday May 18, 2018 @02:10PM (#56634280)

    Because the worm is so complex and sophisticated, I can only give the most superficial outline of what it does

    Everything else aside, this is bullshit.

    You could say "I don't know how it works, so I can only give the most superficial outline of what it does". No matter how complex a thing is, if you know it well enough, you can explain it to a 5 year old. And that has a cool feedback system that helps kids get smarter faster. Standing on shoulders of giants and all that.

    The use of 4 zero-days is indeed pretty sophisticated. The rest is pretty run of the mill standard operation that would have been neat in the 90's. I think this guy just isn't familiar with the industry and was pretty amazed when he took the tour. That or it's more puffery.

    Personally, I wouldn't count any layers underneath, or library calls or such, that a thing makes when trying to figure out complexity and sophistication. Otherwise we'd include EVERYTHING that goes into a linux distro. So early projects that had to do it themselves all by hand would be the most sophisticated. To that extent, I'd have to go with something from early NASA. The software for the Apollo program sounds good, solely form that one picture with Margret Hamilton and the stack of sourcecode. It got man on the moon, which is way more impressive than taking a metaphorical wrench to some centrifuges.

    Hmmmm, I don't want to worship lines of code though... a really sophisticated piece of software would be short and sweet and do something amazing and new.

    • No matter how complex a thing is, if you know it well enough, you can explain it to a 5 year old.

      No, because some things take more than a year to explain.

      • No matter how complex a thing is, if you know it well enough, you can explain it to a 5 year old.

        No, because some things take more than a year to explain.

        Then you can begin by explaining to a 5 year old, and finish explaining to a 6 year old. Problem solved! Longer problems reduce to this existing solution with some trivial additions...

      • Off topic: Is there a word for "a problem that takes longer than one lifetime just to explain"?
  • Candidates (Score:5, Interesting)

    by sjbe ( 173966 ) on Friday May 18, 2018 @02:16PM (#56634324)

    As others have pointed out it depends on what you mean by sophisticated. Several candidates come to mind though each are sophisticated for different reasons. This is obviously a very incomplete list.

    1) The code to control the Space Shuttle
    2) The code for the Voyager probes
    3) The code controlling the Curiosity rover, particular the bit to land it
    4) Emacs
    5) Unix and derivatives
    6) GNU software stack
    7) Encryption software
    8) Self driving car code
    9) Cruise missile control code
    10) Weather modeling code
    11) Code to control the Large Hadron Collider
    12) Microsoft Windows
    13) Control software for the F22 and F35
    14) Sonar code for navy nuclear submarines
    15) TCP/IP
    16) Code to evaluate the human genome and proteome.
    17) Nuclear explosion simulation software
    18) Code breaking software

    • There's no way TCP/IP is on the level of those other ones.

      You don't need much code to write a TCP/IP implementation that will meet all standard use cases.

      To deal with all the corner cases is harder (especially if you're a middlebox like a firewall), but you're talking 100-1000 of times less code in TCP/IP as a whole than most of the other items on this list - and in fact most of those items would include a TCP/IP implementation themselves anyway.

  • Depending on how you define "sophisticated", Stuxnet may or may not be very sophisticated. For example, a sophisticated program may be one that needs no documentation to be easily understood. Similarly, highly obfuscated code (such as http://udel.edu/~mm/xmas/ [udel.edu]) may be considered quite sophisticated.

    So, where does exploiting OS bugs and writing USB malware lie on the sophisticated spectrum?

  • NeXTStep is the most sophisticated piece of software ever. It started out on 68k hardware, moved to x86 and ppc, then got a new couple of layers (Mac OS X), was ported to iOS, and is still going strong.

  • It could play games and learn that war is wrong.

    QED

  • 'nuff said.
  • From a high level view, an OS is a library, not a program. So they don't qualify.
    Quirky or clever code does not qualify.
    Reliability is all.

    I think a really sophisticated program probably would be one where your bugs can kill you. I have worked on a few of those... 8-)

  • Google Search has been maybe ten thousand people working for more than a decade, and they're largely solid engineers.

    I'm... guessing Stuxnet isn't within many orders of magnitude of that effort.

    • I was thinking about Google Search too, but I was considering the early PC farm version running fully in RAM on a bunch of COTS machines. That required more of what I consider "sophistication" relative to the general environment at the time than the modern day version. I can appreciate the headaches of getting that to happen.

  • by RhettLivingston ( 544140 ) on Friday May 18, 2018 @02:46PM (#56634504) Journal

    The crux of this question is the interpretation of the phrase "most sophisticated". I feel it has a density of complexity component. So I'd lean towards candidates that must perform complex tasks under difficult constraints, either physical or virtual.

    It actually makes me think back to bygone days of trying to cram complex tasks into 8-bit embedded controllers.

    A representative case that comes to mind was a function in an armament controller - the computer that controlled dropping dumb bombs from a fighter travelling 500+ miles an hour. The processor was an Intel 8080 in the days when 64K was a lot of memory. The specification we had to hit was for the bombs to hit the ground at the spacing dialed in, typically 50 or 100 ft, with +/- 1 foot of accuracy. We were not allowed to require that the plane be flying level or at constant speed. Also, when you drop a 2000 pound bomb off a wingtip, the plane lurches in the opposite direction so that the next one dropping from the other side a second later has an additional acceleration. These and other factors required that we be able to perform a multivariable integration problem in real time on an 8 bit processor running something like 5MHz with no floating point capability. It took a lot of thought, creativity, and simulation. Carefully constructed tables were used to speed the integration and a tremendous amount of trial and error to make it always converge. All of the code was in assembly language though it had been prototyped in a slightly higher level language that is likely long dead. But, the specification was met. That software was sophisticated. I've worked multi-million line projects since that didn't begin to approach the art that went into those KBs of assembly.

    Other examples I'd think of are in the device logic arena, which I also consider software. Getting PLAs to perform more sophisticated operations often involved dispensing with synchronous logic and working in the asynchronous realm. Getting that to be stable across devices with gate speed variations could be pretty tricky, but the end result of having functions performed at throughput levels that others considered impossible at the time was oh so satisfying.

    I can understand the anonymous reader's thoughts of the complexity of the worm. It has constraints that fall in that "virtual" arena. It must do its job without being detected until it is too late or having a signature that indisputably reveals its creator. That is very challenging. The task of creating software like that is more art than science. Requiring "art" is also a very necessary component of "most sophisticated" IMO.

  • They come pretty close and there's a ton of them.

  • I don't know how you would define 'sophisticated' or 'software' but allow me to tell you about some software I like by creating my own definitions.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • nah, the programming language is crap, on the level of basic or fortran. Sagemath uses python and for most people can do with Mathematica does with less effort.

      Yes, I've used both. used to own Mathematica

  • by UnknownSoldier ( 67820 ) on Friday May 18, 2018 @02:53PM (#56634536)

    This "most sophisticated software" question is from the same doofus who also asked / answered:

    How is murdering people considered fun in video games? What happened to all those innocent games such as Frogger, Qbert, and Donkey Kong? [quora.com]

    Apparently he doesn't understand games are an escape from reality and has to be told what fun is. Games are fun because we don't have to worry about real-life consequences and can do things that we normally could never do in physical reality, dumbass.

    e.g. Frag my buddies, drive an expensive sports car, slay dragons, virtual fishing, etc.

    Maybe he should go play DnD to actually learn the answer.

    Genocide in video games isn't (solely) the problem when you want to take a break from the stress of day-to-day responsibility. It becomes a problem when you do that to the exclusion of all your other responsibilities.

    If you don't like violence in games there are enough good puzzle games like The Witness [steampowered.com], Pythagorea [apple.com], Top 10 Geometric Puzzles for iOS (2016) [applegazette.com], etc.

  • Not really software, but some really sophisticated and clever "programming" on mechanical computers like an old Mark 37 gun director or the old Soyuz astronavigators. F-15's CAS box or F-16A analog FBW setups are more modern examples.
  • Obviously the OP hasn't read The Story of Mel [catb.org]
  • It's obviously Microsoft BOB. It was a very sophisticated piece of "work." Don't confuse sophisticated with good or anything like that, but I would maintain it was "sophisticated."
  • by swell ( 195815 ) <jabberwock@poetic.com> on Friday May 18, 2018 @03:31PM (#56634740)
    Sophisticated? Not sure how to evaluate that, but 'elegant' seems to fit that 1984 ROM. Doing more with less was an Apple tradition begun with the Woz' original design and continued with Bill Atkinson & Andy Herzfeld's Mac ROM. Similar elegance would bring MS Office down to a 2MB size.
  • For me, that has been a FOR NEXT loop, a long time ago.
  • Given how cumbersome it was, that must have been a very sophisticated implementation.
  • If we are admiring clever malware then surely the most sophisticated are the ones even older than stuxnet that even been discovered yet. You know, the ones on the computers used by Trump/Putin/Assad/Netanyahu/Kim/Macron/Merkel/May/Trudeau/...........
  • Earth (Score:4, Funny)

    by skoskav ( 1551805 ) on Friday May 18, 2018 @04:03PM (#56634962)
    Commonly mistaken for a planet, the Earth supercomputer has been working on finding the The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything for quite a while now, whose answer we know to be 42.
  • Unexpected, but I'd go for Excel - it is very, very damn good at what it does (and it does a lot).
  • What else could it be? Seriously...

  • Looking at the Merriam Webster definition of sophisticated, it mentions deprived of native simpliticy (emphasis mine). Highly complicated or developed, having refined knowledge. So my take on sophisticated with respect to software is that it's been worked over and improved a lot, and where possible, simplified (not the 'native' simplicity of Merriam-Webster's def). It also requires a lot of knowledge, including the kind of knowledge that only comes with experience, being savvy. Stuxnet was probably a te

  • by Nick ( 109 )
    EMACS 4 LYFE.
  • IMHO, if it's any spacecraft or probe it's Voyager not Apollo. Apollo had humans on board who could take over and manually control things if they had to. They did that on Apollo 13. Here's an interesting read about the Voyagers [nytimes.com]

    They have to patch that stuff with light-hours of delay, and no humans on board. It's been running for decades. That's certainly some of the most *robust* code, if not the most sophisticated.

  • by ka9dgx ( 72702 ) on Friday May 18, 2018 @05:54PM (#56635758) Homepage Journal

    1, Engelbart's Demo - All of the wonders of GUI well before everyone else.
    2. Lisp / Forth / APL - Pick your favorite
    3. OS/9 on the Radio Shack CoCo, it supported multiple users, and the hardware didn't even have a real UART for serial communication.
    4. VAX/VMS
    5. Any of the "4k Demo Scene" type programs.... it's amazing what they pack into 4k, or 1k, or whatever.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

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