7 items
Before Google Images, decorating a book report meant clip art: flipping through a phone-book-thick catalog of tiny thumbnails, finding the picture you wanted by number, digging out the right CD-ROM, and printing it one image at a time. Every 90s birthday flyer and school newsletter was built from these libraries.
The CD-ROM encyclopedia that killed the twenty-volume set on the shelf. Encarta turned book reports into a multimedia experience — clickable maps, audio clips of national anthems and animal sounds, video snippets — and hid the MindMaze trivia game inside for when you were supposed to be studying.
Broderbund's gloriously chaotic kids' drawing program — the one with the honking sound effects, the rubber stamps, and the stick of dynamite that blew your whole picture apart in a burst of black-and-white circles. For a generation of 90s kids it was the first "art" they ever made on a computer.
The free app that made video-calling normal, with its blue logo and unmistakable ringtone bloop. Launched in 2003, Skype connected long-distance friends and family over early broadband — and became a verb before Microsoft bought it.
The media player that ran the MP3 era. Winamp's dark little window with the glowing green equalizer, endlessly customizable skins, and the MilkDrop visualizer pulsing to your music was where a generation organized its first ripped-and-downloaded music collection — and yes, it really whipped the llama's ass.
The operating system with the rolling green hill wallpaper—Windows XP arrived in October 2001 with Luna's glossy blue taskbar, the green Start button, and the cheerful startup chime that defined a generation's relationship with computers. It was stable, beloved, and so enduring that users clung to it long after Microsoft stopped supporting it, making it the most iconic OS of the 2000s.
The software that turned a blank disc into a mix CD, a backup, or a copy of something you probably shouldn't have had. Nero came bundled with drive after drive, so for a lot of people it wasn't the disc burner they chose — it was simply the one that was there. Its icon is a burning Colosseum, which is both a pun and a historical error.