exogeny

For the international audience, Mt. Rushmore is a landmark in the US that features the faces of four great Presidents carved into a giant stone edifice. It's a little ridiculous, but it is a good metaphor to use in service of the question: what are the four most influential killer apps in the history of desktop and personal computing?

My votes:

Visicalc Mosaic Photoshop Doom

Visicalc ushered in era of the computer as an essential work and productivity tool, by introducing the concept of a spreadsheet as a catch-all metaphor for all kinds of business work.

Mosaic and Photoshop probably don't warrant further explanation, even if both eventually got improved and largely deprecated by Firefox/Chrome and Figma respectively.

Doom ushered in the era of the PC as a serious gaming platform, and leaned into unique multi-player, networked, and customizable/expandable gameplay modes.

What do you think?