Life changing software

Great meme- Software that changed my life...

DOS
WordPerfect
Prodigy on an early 80's PC-
Made me aware of just how inimical that platform was to actually using it.

After being introduced to and encouraged to use the Mac-
Mac OS 6.x
MacDraw
FreeHand
PageMaker
Digital Darkroom
MS Word 2 & 3
...Taught me in the late 80's that the Mac was not only *much* easier to learn and use but enabled my creativity to have a new kind of outlet.

Mac OS 7.x, OS 8.x and OS 9.x
Excel
PowerPoint
MacDraw Pro
FreeHand
Illustrator
FileMaker Pro
These apps facilitated my transition from professional photographer to Mac Guru- which is how I now kept the bills paid all thru the 90's.

Now in my 2nd decade of Mac use and administration,
Mac OS X, Mac OS X Server
Windows (all versions) and Windows Server (all versions)
Unix
...Keep me gainfully employed to this very day.
I gotta say Mac is where its at. Working with all those (nasty, icky) flavors of Windows is like beating my head on shards of glass.

6.0.3!!!

kGTD - surprised not to see it on this list more
OS X
Entourage / Outlook

NewsFire and Quicksilver

if only I could pay for the former!

Calamus SL (Atari ST)
Photoshop
Quicksilver

Quicksilver. And not so much for the functionality of the app, which has blown me away so far after 2 weeks, but becuase I have been introduced to the concept of metadata and an entirely new method for maintaining information. It has blown me away!

AppleScript!

Lightspeed C

Without this, I would have likely given up on trying to develop software for my Mac Plus. The first good, fast C compiler for the Mac, Lightspeed was the IDE that encouraged me to get the Inside Mac series and start coding. And now that I develop Mac software for a living (and have since 1991), it was probably the most life changing software I have had the pleasure of owning.

In no particular order:

1. WordPerfect for DOS - my introduction to almost every possible combination of function keys with Ctrl, Alt, and Shift modifiers. I created my first macro in
WP.
2. Ventura Publisher, pre Corel - one of the first typesetting programs to incorporate the concept of style sheets.
3. SoundJam MP - iTunes' precursor and the start of my addiction to MP3s.
4. Acrobat, esp. the full/Pro versions - I'm still finding new ways to work with this thing.
5. MacPaint - chock full o' monochrome bitmap goodness! Drawing? On a computer? How cool is that?

Mac's System 7 (or maybe System 6) was my introduction to GUIs. I don't consider it software, but it was definitely life changing. Mosaic didn't make as much of an impression on me as the sites -- and possibilities -- it showed me. To this day, there's a special place in my heart for the blink tag.

A piece of software is a "bucket of bits and bytes" in a similar way that a cat is a "bucket of atoms and molecules." (Similar in kind, but of course very dissimilar in scale.)

I suppose GW-Basic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GW-BASIC) changed my life, since it got me into programming.

Google changed my life, because it essentially grafted the internet to my brain.

OS X changed my life, because I now own a computer that I am not offended by whenever I use it.