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Comment by mard | Hacker News Reader

It's weird to see the term "App" in relation to anything before iOS era. Back then such software used to be mostly called applications or just programs. [1]

[1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=app%2Ccomputer...

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I definitely remember hearing the phrase "killer app" plenty of times in the early 2000s, and Macworld definitely shortened "application" to "app" frequently in the late 90s and early 2000s.

I heard app the first time in connection with "killer app", before I only remember the term "program". If my memory serves me right I heard "killer app" the first time in the late 90s

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content="killer+app"

With a peak in 2002 it seems.

RISC OS was using the term App from around 1987 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_OS), to describe an executable collection of files wrapped up in a folder. The folder had to start with a "!" to distinguish it as an app rather than a standard folder.

It’s weird. They were called programs. Startups were called businesses.

I find it weird how generations need to change words. I guess Startup was new, and unconventional? For a few seconds they were? Then they got real slick with MBA’s?

It's good, it shows that the newer generation is invested in the same things, and they want to build their own culture. However, i m afraid the "app" culture is all about marketing, addictiveness and locking-in users, not about making faster bicycles for the mind

Yeah now even microsoft has renamed "programs" to "apps" in windows. On the one hand it s bad because they are all programs made by programmers who know programming, and it's all that people need to know. OTOH , it's kinda good that the status of mobile apps is equated with ordinary desktop apps, because it makes users realize that their walled garden is needlessly walled.

Microsoft is inconsistent with this. At one point, based on my understanding, "programs" meant traditional Windows apps and "apps" meant those "Modern" Windows 8 apps that they tried to foist on us. Then, at some point, it seems "apps" came to mean any application. Of course, Microsoft hasn't had consistency for a long time.

In some ways, I miss the Microsoft of the 80s and 90s. Sure, they were totally evil, but at least they made good UIs.

NeXTstep applications (and by extension macOS, iOS) have been directories (bundles) with the extension ".app" since at least 1988.

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