Top 10 industry-changing applications

2. QuarkXPress
Shaun Nichols: Though it is one of many page layout and desktop publishing platforms, QuarkXPress has long been considered to be the most successful tool for designing a printed publication.

QuarkXPress and its peers have become so ubiquitous that those of us who grew up with personal computers sometimes have a hard time imagining that these sort of tasks were once done by hand.

As a result, Quark allowed many smaller companies to enter the publishing business, and made print publications as a whole much more aesthetically appealing.

I was first introduced to Quark in grade school when my stepmother, a graphic designer, showed me how to piece together a template for writing school reports. I still say with a fair amount of confidence that my science paper that year is perhaps the best-looking report on baboons written by an 11 year-old ever to earn a C.

Iain Thomson: Way to make me feel old Shaun. I used Quark in my first journalism job a couple of years after graduation. A quick mental calculation shows you weren't even in double figures back then.

Quark basically drove the entire desktop publishing industry and we were tremendously excited when it came out. It may seem hard to believe but back in the day we had to physically bike pages to the repro shop before sending them to the printers. Quark made magazine publishing quick, easy and cheap.

There have been some disadvantages to be sure. Quark eliminated whole industries, like typesetting and put a sizable dent in the courier business. But that's the thing with new technology: sometimes older professions have to go to the wall. At the same time the rise in the number of publications was dramatic and it's fair to say that without it Shaun or myself might not have had a career.

1. Mosaic
Iain Thomson: Usually with a top 10 list the number one is the easiest to work out. This week's was tough, not so much for the application - a web browser was the obvious choice - but the people behind it.

I argued hard for Firefox and Mozilla, Shaun disagreed and things got so acrimonious I nearly didn't get the second round of beers in. In the end he won down to the force of logic. If we're talking change then the Mosaic team were the ones who did it.

There were other browsers to be sure. Berners-Lee may have kicked things off but he had no idea about the future potential of the internet. Other programmers did, however. Four Finnish students built Erwise in 1992 and a Berkeley student invented ViolaWWW, the most popular browser before Mosiac.

Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina simply built the best product out there. Not the best technically, but one with features that made sense to the majority of computer users, such as the ability to have pictures and text in the same window – something Berners-Lee vehemently objected to at the time. Mosiac proved that the web was more than just text.

The other reason I agreed with Shaun is that in the end we're both right. Mosiac gets the prize rightly, but the team behind it went on to form Netscape, which begot Mozilla and thus Firefox. Just goes to show, you can seldom kill a good idea.

Shaun Nichols: This one was tough. We knew that number one would have to be something to do with browsers, but which one? Netscape Navigator was the first huge commercial success, but with walled garden ISPs such as AOL and Prodigy in the early days of the internet, it wasn't a necessity for users.

Firefox was important, but the browser market had been long developed and established by the time it arrived. And Internet Explorer, well, it was Internet Explorer.

In the end, we decided to go with Mosaic for the simple reason that it established the format and basic design concepts for what would become the web. Mosaic introduced the concept that a web page could be ordered and viewed visually in the same way a regular sheet of paper, with images and text laid out together.

Everyone loves to talk about how the GUI in MacOS and Windows changed the computing world by insulating users from a complicated command line. In a way, Mosaic did the same thing for the internet. It marked a transition from the text-only bulletin board system of ARPAnet and made the internet something which could be accessible and appealing to average users.