Growing up it was mostly music and games. On the East Coast, with parents tolerant of tying up the phone line with lots of BBSing, I waited for software to percolate over to my local BBSs, and probably half of it came from Europe.
An awful lot of stuff written for the C64 and Amiga. And then when the same dev traditions moved onto the PC, that stuff. The demoscene and peripheral software movements figured pretty heavily into it.
For example, I spent thousands of hours in Protracker (Finland I believe), Scream Tacker III (Finland), Fast Tracker 2 (Sweden I think)...there was also a few graphic programs I mucked around with Sculpt 3d (England I believe)..a few toy fractal programs, there was a great piece of music software I used for a spell from Spain that I can't for the life of me remember, some ANSI graphics editors. I'm currently keeping a copy of the pro-audio level Renoise installed (a pile of Euro-authors if I've ever seen one) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renoise
but I also spent thousands of hours watching the latest scene productions coming out of Europe at the time. Growing up on the East Coast, we ended up with a small, but relatively healthy demoscene in the early and mid 90s and productions routinely (and quickly) found their way onto local BBSs.
But don't forget that Linux is originally a piece of European software (Finland), UAE (which let's me relive some of my youth) was started in Germany, theproduckkt (Germany), and on and on and on...
and then there's other stuff I'm keeping tucked away for when I get some time to start playing around with micro-controllers http://www.linusakesson.net/scene/craft/ (Sweden)
most of this is just stuff I was interested in at the time, there's tons I never even touched
basically a tradition of software on a different axis from commercial proprietary and free (freedom) software, but I bet if you look at the contributor lists for lots of popular open-source/free (freedom) software, you'll find long lists of European contributors.
edit after review I've realized there's more German contribution to my software history than I expected, sorry Germans!
Also, glad to see lots of folks jumping up and calling out some great German softs.
"Scream Tacker III (Finland), Fast Tracker 2 (Sweden I think)"
Yeah, Scream Tacker III was made by demogroup Futurecrew, from which some went on to start Remedy Entertainment (Max Payne, Alan Wake) and other companies. Fast Tracker 2 was made by demogroup Triton, from which some went on to start Starbreeze Studios (Chronicles of Riddick/The Darkness). Also DICE (Battlefield series) has demoscene roots in the form of The Silents. Even Rovio (Angry Birds) got started after winning some compo at Assembly.
An awful lot of stuff written for the C64 and Amiga. And then when the same dev traditions moved onto the PC, that stuff. The demoscene and peripheral software movements figured pretty heavily into it.
For example, I spent thousands of hours in Protracker (Finland I believe), Scream Tacker III (Finland), Fast Tracker 2 (Sweden I think)...there was also a few graphic programs I mucked around with Sculpt 3d (England I believe)..a few toy fractal programs, there was a great piece of music software I used for a spell from Spain that I can't for the life of me remember, some ANSI graphics editors. I'm currently keeping a copy of the pro-audio level Renoise installed (a pile of Euro-authors if I've ever seen one) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renoise
but I also spent thousands of hours watching the latest scene productions coming out of Europe at the time. Growing up on the East Coast, we ended up with a small, but relatively healthy demoscene in the early and mid 90s and productions routinely (and quickly) found their way onto local BBSs.
But don't forget that Linux is originally a piece of European software (Finland), UAE (which let's me relive some of my youth) was started in Germany, theproduckkt (Germany), and on and on and on...
and then there's other stuff I'm keeping tucked away for when I get some time to start playing around with micro-controllers http://www.linusakesson.net/scene/craft/ (Sweden)
most of this is just stuff I was interested in at the time, there's tons I never even touched
basically a tradition of software on a different axis from commercial proprietary and free (freedom) software, but I bet if you look at the contributor lists for lots of popular open-source/free (freedom) software, you'll find long lists of European contributors.
edit after review I've realized there's more German contribution to my software history than I expected, sorry Germans!
Also, glad to see lots of folks jumping up and calling out some great German softs.