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Comment by cosgroveb | Hacker News Reader

I've never heard of any software being called "apps" on any other platform I used

I heard the term "killer app" at least 10 years ago. "App" is not only generic but it's been out there for a long time.

Edit: Here's the earliest I can find the word in print. It's from 2002. http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/55/love.html

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The OED has quotations for "app, n." dating back to 1985:

"1985 Info World (Nexis) 9 Dec. 41 At first look, the user sees only one new menu (‘apps’ for applications) at the top of the screen."

Here it is in a book from 1995: http://books.google.com/books?id=JSnOPYKwwtQC&lpg=PA350&...

Google Books also has a lot of uses in the early 1990s of the phrases "Windows apps", "Mac apps", "DOS apps", and "Unix apps". They appear to be used in a way that's pretty similar to how the terms "iPhone apps" or "Android apps" are used today.

Steve Jobs has been trying to popularize the word 'app' for several decades. At the very least since the 1989 launch of NeXTSTEP, an OS that used the word all over. For instance, watch this 1992 demo of NeXTSTEP 3.0: http://hivelogic.com/articles/classic-steve-jobs/

Because of its NeXTSTEP heritage, Mac OS X uses a lot of NeXTSTEP lingo, like 'app', 'dock' and 'plist'.

A blog article on Click N Run, an app store for Linux that was started in the early 2000s with screenshots, ratings, etc. :

' And, of course: make the apps available with just one click. '

Date is Jan 2007, before the iPhone was ever released.

http://liquidat.wordpress.com/2007/01/24/clickn-run-for-fedo...

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