Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?

Kazaa

USB. It's hard to imagine, but we used to have a thing called SCSI (pronounced "scuzzy", and that's how it felt) which allowed you to connect to exactly one serial device. The plug was huge. And cables cost $50. Mice used an entirely separate interface that was different on Macs and PCs, and since Apple was dying at the time, it was a struggle to get Mac mice for a reasonable price. With USB, you could suddenly attach any device to Mac or PC and often not even need a driver. You could buy a splitter and attach multiple devices. Incredible! Wifi. I remember seeing Apple's Airport demo. You could connect to the internet WITHOUT WIRES! Magic!

1) Emacs. When I was growing up, it was per-language IDEs for development. There was Visual Basic, Visual C++, Borland Pascal and C++, etc. Emacs was an editor that, to a certain extent, understood every programming language out there, and could be taught new ones using Lisp. It took a long time for me to learn Emacs Lisp and understand the true nature of this power, but saying 'M-x psychoanalyze-pinhead' for the first time gave me a glimpse of it.

2) Framework. The best way to understand this 1980s "integrated software" (as office suites were called in the 80s) is as "Emacs for the office". Usually, until Microsoft Office, integrated packages offered cut-down, entry-level versions of a word processor, spreadsheet, rudimentary database like a cardfile, and maybe a telecommunications program. Framework was different. It was basically a self-contained pseudo-GUI, in which documents and spreadsheets were represented with the unifying metaphor of a frame. Each frame, drilling down to individual cells in a spreadsheet which themselves counted as frames, was addressable, and frames could be nested, allowing for compound documents containing word-processed reports, spreadsheets, imported database data, and even graphs and charts. And, much like Emacs, it was scriptable in a Lisp-like language (though Framework's language had a Lotus-inspired @function syntax). Every frame could have code associated with it that responds to events. It was so powerful, it was marketed as an executive decision making tool, not a productivity tool for office drones. It was WAY ahead of its time for 80s software.

3) The Video Toaster. Professional grade video effects in your bedroom studio. Perhaps single-handedly turned amateur video from "home movies" into actual productions. In an era well before YouTube, when video was still analog and equipment was prohibitively expensive. With LightWave, it also gave you an inexpensive option for the then new and hot technology of 3D CG. Required an Amiga because of course it did; what else could handle all this?

4) Tcl/Tk. Still to date, the fastest way to author a GUI, as it was in the 90s. I would take entering a few lines of shell-like script to lay out a GUI over the (admittedly powerful) form designer tools in environments like Delphi any day, just due to the rat wrestling involved in the latter, and the fact that Tk's layout options do a much better job of placing widgets in various window size and configurations than I could manually in the form designers back then. And recently I tried to put together an Electron app with $HOT_FRAMEWORK_OF_THE_WEEK, and spent several hours figuring out how all the pieces fit together. With Tcl/Tk, I said 'sudo apt-get install tcl tk' and was prototyping in wish immediately after. Tcl may be a crazy-pants stringly-typed language from space, but it's still the best thing for throwing together GUIs quickly.

Python (coming from the C/C++ world), amazing productivity gains for basic stuff. Sure, there was Perl, Awk, etc, but I didn't learn those

Zsh/Oh-my-Zsh (from Bash)

Virtualization. Making it practical to run 2 or 3 different OSs on the same machine has saved me countless hours. Docker is good but it's a smaller step