Things I remember being blown away by..

Frontpage 2000. When I was a youngerster and playing with what I had on my computer, this program opened a lot to me. I loved being able to switch back and forth between the coded mode and the viewable mode. I did learn some bad practices at first... the <br> tag was new to me later as I'd copied FrontPage's insistence on <p>nbsp;</p> instead, for instance. But it was what set me off to look at anything relating to hacking.. ;)

Netscape 6. It sucks as we see it now, but the integrated suite was so much nicer than the older versions of Netscape and the AOL-based thing I'd used. The mail client was phenominal to me, having used Outlook before, the web browser feeled so much nicer and more modern, and so on.

SuSE Linux 9.3. The first Linux distro that became my main OS instead of just a plaything. It perfectly supported all of my desktop's hardware and made me fall in love with Linux and especially KDE 3.x.

Amarok. This was the first media player that I really loved. Unfortunately it's been messed up badly with the release of KDE 4 in my opinion.. I've yet to try the backports. But after playing with stuff like Musicmatch and Media Player on Windows and then JuK and the like on Linux, Amarok seemed just incredible.

The Web+Internet, by far. If you stop and think for a sec, temporarily absolve the ubiquitous aspect we all take for granted, it can blow your mind.

1) MacPaint - the original, on a Black & White 128kb Mac.

2) Usenet, Unix, VMS & Slirp (http://slirp.sourceforge.net/). I got to university and didn't know where to start

2) Doom. OMFG

3) Eclipse. The first time I saw the "Extract Method" refactoring I was speechless.

4) Google desktop search. Back when I had to use Outlook this let me actually find my email messages.

5) Dropbox. Been mentioned before, but it really did impress me that much.

I used to love a game called Stuntcopter on our family's old grayscale macintosh. You'd drop the guy out of the helicopter through the clouds into a horse-drawn hay wagon.

We also had Microleague Baseball, which I wish I could find now it would be amazing. That game was awesome, it had custom speech capability and everything. EA Sports could learn a thing or three from them.

PC Outline, a brilliant little DOS-based outliner my manager gave me in 1987. He said, "Here, you're organised - you'll like this" and I really did. I use it for everything - prioritised todo lists, packing lists, pseudo code, shopping lists. If you don't have DOS or Windows available, run it in DOSBox. The outliner is available from http://www.developer-resource.com/free-download/Text-Utiliti...

Drumbeat by Elemental Software

The first time I used this program, I was amazed. I had just started coding and here was a WYSIWG editor for data driven pages.

The program was buggy as hell and it was almost like learning another language the way I had to learn all the quirks of this program. But it gave me my start and I probably wouldn't have learned to code better if it had created halfway decent code.

I just found zenbe lists after so much extensive searching that I considered coding my own. I make lists of things, but not todo lists, just lists of books to read, things to code, music to buy, things to do before releasing a version etc. So I didn't like all the list apps that forced the todo aspect. Zenbe lists didn't though, and it works nice on my iPhone, which is also a plus/

Just signed up, impressive. The fact you can generate an entire list just by text + return key is great design.

I've been using notepad for this kind of thing previously because I just want a simple think of it / dump it / get back to it later type catchall. This suits the function perfectly.

The only problem is the UI isn't as sexy as it could be, and they have some weird sync ux with the iPhone app. All works fine however.

Recently: Dropbox. Just Brilliant, solved all my problems.

Slightly off topic: MidWinter. Massive believable world, multiple forms of transport. This game sticks in my memory.

Emacs. It's the one I still go to for an awful lot of text based work.

(Eclipse has managed to win me over for Java development now.)

Turbo Pascal 3 blew my mind them... after that was Scheme48 and then LiveCode. Oh and Scorched3D, the mother of all games.

Scorched3D as in Scorch the Earth right? The tank/weapon game?

slrn. That little piece of software is responsible for countless hours of some of the best and most rewarding discussions I've ever had, several international trips, countless drinking sessions with awesome people, and, on at least a couple of occasions, getting me laid.

What more could you want out of software?

Dropbox. Simple concept well executed.

Not so relevant these days, but over all time, I would probably have to give it to Netscape

Winkey, the windows hotkey mapper has postponed carpal tunnel syndrome a few years.

Checking my command history, grep comes out on top.

Notepad and I am not even that much of programmer.

TextMate, by far.

Google, by far.

Mosaic.

email.