Author here. Every time I do one of these lists and it appears on Hacker News, folks go nuts because the obscurity is not what _they_ think of as obscurity. Wit

Author here. Every time I do one of these lists and it appears on Hacker News, folks go nuts because the obscurity is not what _they_ think of as obscurity. With that in mind, I’m trying to tweak the model as I go along. In this case, I tried rephrasing the title in this case to make it clear that I’m generally talking about things that aren’t in common use today. (I went with “10 Networking Technologies That You Probably Aren’t Using”) OSI is actually a good example. There is a lot of specificity within the spec where technologies that were borne of standard found use, specifically with networking. But for those who aren’t networking pros, some (not all) of the more detailed standards are simply not very common today, even if they did see a degree of success. Broadly, the model itself proved more influential than some of the protocols that were borne from it, which (beyond the point that OSI’s original intended use case was largely usurped by TCP/IP) is the point I was trying to make in all of three paragraphs. Kermit is another example—it was very common in the 1980s if you were a modem user. But over time, while still being maintained, it fell out of sync with the ways many people use computers. It’s still good technology; it’s just not necessarily something the layperson is aware of. I think the challenge here is that my newsletter’s audience has a lot of overlap with the HN crowd but it generally hits slightly broader—as in, they know some of the lingo but aren’t necessarily experts in it. It’s a balance I’m trying to strike with these, but it’s not always perfect. Hope that makes sense, thanks.