10 Oldest And Most Important Open-Source Programs Ever!

Today, open-source software is everywhere but many people still think of it as relatively new. It's not! Open-source software actually goes back decades. This list excludes numerous small programs like the NASA COSMIC software collection. So here goes the list of the 10 oldest but indeed gold program of open-source world:

1. Linux: August 25, 1991

Undoubtedly, there were other free programs before Linux as well but the impact of this program created by Linus Torvalds cannot stand second to anything. Linux is today the foundation for Internet, for operating system for super-computers and base of the most popular end-user operating systems today. We doubt Linus had any idea that his program will come up this far when he made his first announcement.

2. Python: February 20, 1991

Python's creator, Guido van Rossum, began to work on Python in December 1989 and finally released the same in February 1991. And since then, Python is indeed the fastest growing language in the open source world.

And it's not just the open-source developers who are supporting Python infact the folks at Microsoft are providing Python IDE (integrated development environment) for Visual Studio.

3. GNU C Library (glibc): February 1988

C ofcourse remains one important language in open-source circles but to do much on C, one needs a good, general purpose library. And over decades the most important of these libraries has been glibc. Most of the credit for early success of glibc's goes to Roland McGrath. By early 1988, McGrath gave the world a nearly complete set of ANSI C library functions as glibc. And many important open source work including Linux were developed using glibc.

4. Perl: December 18, 1987

We doubt that there are too many system or network administrators around the world who have never written at least one script in Perl. The creation of Larry Wall is today's the go-to scripting language for all servers. The language was kind of designed to make awk and sed semi-obsolete.

5. GNU C compiler (gcc): March 22, 1987

If glibc is an important program in open source, then gcc is vital. Although gcc only supported C initially but today, it supports, C, C++, Objective C, Fortran, and Java. Almost every free software software project atleast owes gcc a lot of its foundation programming.

6. GNU Emacs: 1984

The first major GNU program even before gcc was the GNU Emacs programming editor. It holds to itself names of uncountable programs. Infact, many people assume that GNU Emacs was the first version of the editor.

7. X Window System: 1983

While Emacs and gcc were rolling, others at MIT were working on the X Window System which is a TCP/IP-based networking windowing system. No one at that time guessed that X Window would slowly become the basis for all major Linux and Unix interfaces, and the foundation for the Mac OS X interface.

8. BRL-CAD: Dec 16, 1983

Never heard of Ballistic Research Laboratory-computer-aided design (BRL-CAD)? Well this program, which is still being worked on today, is used by the U.S. military to model ballistic attacks on vehicles.

9. First Berkeley Software Distribution (1BSD) Unix: March 9, 1978

Linux might be the most popular open source OS, but it was definitely not the first one. The honor of first open-source operating system goes to Bill Joy's first version of BSD Unix. When Unix first showed up in 1969, it was open source which was later closed. But the first fork BSD kept the free software tag with it. Besides the basic BSD distros like FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD, Solaris and Mac OS X also got their start from BSD Unix.

10. VistA: 1975

And finally we come to the oldest open-source program ever known which is still commonly used. VistA the Veterans Health Information System and Technology Architecture was the first electronics health record (EHR) system. Different versions of VistA like the WorldVistA, Medsphere's OpenVista, and DSS are still being used Today to bring EHR to doctors and hospitals throughout the U.S.