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Comment by hkmurakami | Hacker News Reader

Pretty sad they're calling this an "app". If it's dated to 1996, clearly it's a "program"!

Everything is an "app" now. For me it sounds cheaper, somehow trivializing the work of many.

Yes, it definitely has a connotation of commoditization.

for many of its uses, it isn't just a connotation. mobiles apps have been commoditized to a point. social apps, messaging apps, cloud storage apps, mobile games, etc. are all basically commodities.

NeXTSTEP was around in the early 90s and used the file extension .app

Oh that’s a good point you have there and app is just an abbreviation of Application which I think philosophically was a subset of Programs / Programmes.

It's always Program; in British English Program and Programme are not interchangeable and mean something quite different. A Program is a piece of computer software, a Programme is a series of planned events or a sheet of paper/booklet listing a series of details about an events. That we use the two distinctly is pretty powerful and the ambiguity of using one spelling is removed.

The Atari ST operating system used .APP as well. This was in 1985.

.app was rarely used though. Most things used the .prg extension.

NeXTSTEP was around in the late 80s, came out in 1988.

"Application" was around way earlier, as shorthand for "application program" (to be distinguished from "utility program", and, possibly, "game")

For examples look at the search hits in https://archive.org/stream/1981-03-compute-magazine/Compute_....

I wouldn't call this an application, though.

"App" is completely wrong, as it was introduced by Apple for user-facing programs running on a mobile phone (if Android had been the OS popularizing this, Google would have picked the first three letters of its company name as the new name for these things, and every web site would have a banner "install our goo" :-))

"App" significantly predates the iPhone. Binary/warez sites regularly used "apps" as a shorthand, NeXTSTEP used .app before Apple bought it...heck, Apple called an early Mac development framework "MacApp".

We've been calling applications "apps" for going on thirty years at a minimum.

Mobiles pre-smartphone boasted of their 'Java App Library', too. I don't know anyone who used one deliberately though, with the slow and extortionately priced data of the time.

Also Java applets

The term "killer app" goes all the way back to the 80s. Back then, Lotus 1-2-3 was considered a killer app as was Wordperfect/Wordstar depending on your needs.

As others have pointed out, it was also used as the file extension for "application programs" on NeXTStep (.app). It continued to OS X which is where "App" came from for iOS applications. It has nothing to do with the name "Apple".

App is short for Application, not Apple.

MIME was using "application" in media type names in 1996. I think macOS may have started it because they needed to distinguish them from desk accessories.

That was in a different world, this is the home computer sphere, its a program.

RISC OS, the OS from the company that later became ARM, used "application" from at least 1987, and by 1991 that had been abbreviated to "Apps" in some of the UI, although I think we still said "application."

These were school or home computers.

Picture under RISC OS 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_RISC_OS

The term "killer app" goes back a long way (back to the early 80s) and was first used for Visicalc, I think.

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