(credit: Jeremy Reimer)
When personal computers first came into the world in the late 1970s, there wasn’t always an obvious use for them. If the market was going to expand beyond hobbyists and early adopter nerds, there needed to be a “killer app”—some piece of software that could justify the purchase of a particular brand of computer.
The first killer app, VisiCalc, came out in 1979. It turned an ordinary Apple II into a financial planning tool that was more powerful and flexible than anything the world had ever seen. A refined version of this spreadsheet, Lotus 1-2-3, became the killer app that put IBM PCs in offices and homes around the world. The Macintosh, which floundered in 1985 after early adopter sales trailed off, found a profitable niche in the new world of desktop publishing with two killer apps: Aldus Pagemaker and Adobe Photoshop.
To keep up with the Joneses, the Amiga needed a killer app to survive—it found one with the Video Toaster.
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