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Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

• BerislavLopac 1y ago
  HyperCard
• Gud 1y ago
  XMMS
  • Aldipower 1y ago
    I miss it so much.
• bitwize 1y ago
  The Amiga. Just... the Amiga.
  • archargelod 1y ago
    RIP the concept of owning your computer and user-written programs
• jcastro 1y ago
  OS/2 my beloved.
  • hagbard_c 1y ago
    Nah, that time has passed and there's not much to miss from the base OS. What would be interesting is for IBM to publish the source to the Workplace Shell and the underlying SOM code so it might get a new life running on one of the free *nixes.
    • walterbell 1y ago
      It ran lots of banking ATMs that were not hacked.
  • nickthegreek 1y ago
    I was super excited for BeOS myself.
    • walterbell 1y ago
      BeOS-lineage Binder IPC continues in Android.
    • Froedlich 1y ago
      I'm booting and running Haiku on my Thinkpad. It's a from-scratch workalike of BeOS, and able to run Be software. Though, frankly, Be software is totally 1990s, so a lot of Linux software written for Qt has been ported to Haiku. In the end I wound up with basically the same application software as on my Debian desktop, except running on Haiku instead of Linux. Haiku is noticeably snappier and more responsive than Linux+X+Qt+KDE, though.
    • antod 1y ago
      I was a little surprised to have to scroll this far down to see BeOS come up. The first Amiga mention wasn't far above it either.
  • walterbell 1y ago
    OS/2 ISV Stardock gave us Win8 start button.
  • BirAdam 1y ago
    Did an install of OS/2 3.0 recently, and it was just as wonderful as the first time I used it. That team got so much so right.
  • burnt-resistor 1y ago
    In late September or early October 1996, Fry's Electronics places a full page promo ad on the back of the business section of the San Jose Mercury News for OS/2 4.0 "WRAP [sic]" in 256 pt font in multiple places. Oops!
  • Blackstrat 1y ago
    OS/2 had the best API that I’ve worked with. We did major banking apps in the early 90s. OS/2 was vastly superior to Windows NT and Windows.
  • phendrenad2 1y ago
    Still around, kinda: https://www.arcanoae.com/ https://www.arcanoae.com/ Runs on modern Intel/AMD CPUs, but limited to 32-bit and low RAM limits. The OS/2 source is owned by IBM and IBM won't talk to you unless a number with 8 zeroes is involved.
• snovymgodym 1y ago
  ReactOS, the effort to create a free and open source Windows NT reimplementation. It has been in existence in some form or another for nearly 30 years, but did not gain the traction it needed and as of writing it's still not in a usable state on real hardware. It's not abandoned, but progress on it is moving so slow that I doubt we'll ever see it be released in a state that's useful for real users. It's too bad, because a drop in Windows replacement would be nice for all the people losing Windows 10 support right now. On the other hand, I think people underestimate the difficulty involved in the project and compare it unfavorably to Linux, BSD, etc. Unix and its source code was pretty well publicly documented and understood for decades before those projects started, nothing like that ever really existed for Windows.
  • Analemma_ 1y ago
    Wine, Proton and virtualization all got good enough that there's no need for a half-baked binary-compatible Windows reimplementation, and I think that took a lot of the oxygen out of what could have been energy towards ReactOS. It's a cool concept but not really a thing anybody requires.
  • ghssds 1y ago
    They had no chance. Look how long it tooks for Wine to get where they are. Their project is Wine + a kernel + device drivers compatibility, and a moving target.
    • 6SixTy 1y ago
      ReactOS right now focuses on Windows XP era hardware and compatibility, also not guaranteed to work outside a VM.
  • bitwize 1y ago
    > ReactOS, the effort to create a free and open source Windows NT reimplementation. Some projects creep along slowly until something triggers an interest and suddenly they leap ahead. MAME's Tandy 2000 implementation was unusable, until someone found a copy of Windows 1.0 for the Tandy 2000, then the emulation caught up until Windows ran. Maybe ReactOS will get a big influx of activity after Windows 10 support goes offline in a couple days, or even shortly after when you can't turn AI spying off, not even three times a year.
• gmuslera 1y ago
  Maemo/Meego. I know there is Sailfish still around, but things would had been very different today if Nokia had put all its weight on it back then.
  • ajot 1y ago
    They should have partnered not only with Intel, but with Palm, RIM or whatever other then-giant to rival Android. Those two went their own ways with WebOS and buying QNX, so maybe they could have agreed to form a consortium for an open and interoperable mobile OS
    • estebarb 1y ago
      WebOS died in HP, after they bought Palm. I'm genuinely impressed at HP: somehow they always have the future in their hands... and kill it.
  • JoshTriplett 1y ago
    I loved my N900, and my N800 before that, and I would have loved to have seen successors. Ultimately, I ended up switching to Android because I was tired of things only available as apps. Since then, web technologies have gotten better, and it's become much more feasible to use almost exclusively websites.
    • bitwize 1y ago
      > it's become much more feasible to use almost exclusively websites. And that's precisely why companies nerf their web sites and put a little popup that says "<service> works better on the app".
  • heavyset_go 1y ago
    In my ideal world, Maemo/Meego and Palm's WebOS (not LG's bastardization of it) would be today's Android and iOS. Apple would have inevitably done their own thing, but it would have been really nice to have two widely used, mature and open mobile Linux platforms.
  • 1y ago
• bad_haircut72 1y ago
  Riak
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• fennecbutt 1y ago
  Google Glass. Thanks society. People always fail to see something that is an inevitability. Humans lack foresight because they don't like change.
  • nickthegreek 1y ago
    Wild that people would downvote your low stake personal opinion given as a direct ask from OP. I am 100% with you.
    • bdangubic 1y ago
      yea, crazy, I upvoted just now. google glass sucks though and glasses will never be a thing. google and meta and … can spend $8T and come up with the most insane tech etc but no one will be wearing f’ing glasses :)
      • deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
    • shikon7 1y ago
      Google Glass was so much before its time, it might be reinvented a few more times and abandoned again before finally becoming a success.
    • latexr 1y ago
      I don’t think people are downvoting for the mention of Google Glass, but due to the rest of the comment making a value judgement many are sure to disagree with.
  • toast0 1y ago
    Google Wear is pretty much Google Glass on your wrist, so you don't burn out your eyes looking up and to the side.
  • JMiao 1y ago
    nah, glass was impressive for a such a big org like google, but smartphones are popular because people use them like portable televisions. glanceable info and walking directions are more like an apple watch sized market, without the fashion element. meta is about to find out.
• cr125rider 1y ago
  Macromedia Flash. Its scope and security profile was too big. It gave way to HTML’s canvas. But man, the tooling is still no where near as good. Movieclips, my beloved. I loved it all.
  • dpcan 1y ago
    Adobe Animate is still just Flash from a tool-standoint. Are you referring to the SWF file format?
    • billrobertson42 1y ago
      I took it as sarcasm.
  • netsharc 1y ago
    The iPhone killed Flash, probably because it would've been a way to create apps for it, more probably because it would've been laggy in the 2007 hardware, and people would've considered the iPhone "a piece of junk". Interesting how Flash became the almost universal way to play videos in the browser, in the latter half of the 2000's (damn I'm old...).
  • Froedlich 1y ago
    As a Linux user, I hated Flash with a passion. It mostly didn't work despite several Linux implementations. About the time they sorted all the bugs out, it went away. Good riddance.
  • iambateman 1y ago
    I agree that the tooling was unbelievable…better for interactive web than anything that exists today AFAIK. I wonder why one one has managed to build something comparable that does work on a phone.
  • socalgal2 1y ago
    I agree the tooling was great, .... for making apps/games for desktops with a mouse and keyboard and a landscape screen of at least a certain size. Maybe they could have fixed all that for touch screens, small portrait screens, and more but they never did make it responsive AFAIK.
• haunter 1y ago
  Vine. It was already pretty big back in 2013 but Twitter had no idea what to do with it. TikTok actually launched just a few months before Vine was shut down and erased from the internet.
  • joshdavham 1y ago
    I've thought about this too. Imagine all the drama the US government could've avoided if Vine had won over TikTok!
    • lazyasciiart 1y ago
      With Elon running it? He probably would have actively sold it to china.
      • geoffpado 1y ago
        In a world where Vine is as successful as TikTok ended up being, who’s to say they get to a point where selling to Musk even happens?
        • quinndexter 1y ago
          guys when you invent fictional alternate realities, you're allowed to leave people out of them completely. Anyone you like.
  • geor9e 1y ago
    I will never forgive twitter for this catch and kill of a platform so full of life
    • burnt-resistor 1y ago
      Perhaps because they already had Periscope that no one used. It was a "buy competitor to kill it" play that didn't have the desired effect.
• dpcan 1y ago
  Adobe Fireworks - easiest vector / photo editor crossover app there ever was.
  • MontyCarloHall 1y ago
    It's a real shame its raster functionality wasn't integrated into Illustrator. Adobe really butchered the whole Macromedia portfolio, didn't they? (For those unfamiliar, Illustrator is a pure vector graphics editor; once you rasterize its shapes, they become uneditable fixed bitmaps. Fireworks was a vector graphics editor that rendered at a constant DPI, so it basically let you edit raster bitmaps like they were vectors. It was invaluable for pixel-perfect graphic design. Nothing since lets you do that, though with high-DPI screens and resolution-independent UIs being the norm these days, this functionality is less relevant than it used to be.)
  • vyrotek 1y ago
    Did not expect to see FW mentioned here. Absolutely loved it. Just barely stopped using my CS6 copy. Still haven't found anything as intuitive.
  • bapak 1y ago
    Gah. Fireworks and Dreamweaver were my "web designer" jumpstart. Ps and Ai had nothing on Fireworks
  • donatj 1y ago
    At my last job m our designer was a Fireworks holdout. It was very pleasant. As someone who has to implement UIs, I greatly preferred it to Figma, though with today's flat boring designs there's a lot less slicing.
• ofalkaed 1y ago
  Non Daw. Its breaking up each function of the DAW into its own application gave a better experience in each of those functions, especially when you only needed that aspect, you were not working around everything else that the DAW offers. The integration between the various parts was not all that it could be but I think the idea has some real potential. https://non.tuxfamily.org https://non.tuxfamily.org
  • marttt 1y ago
    Thought about Non immediately, but I figured it must have (had) about 2 other users amongst HNers, though. :) Nice to see it mentioned. I used it quite a bit to produce radio shows for my country's public broadcasting. Because Non's line-oriented session format was so easy to parse with classic Unix tools, I wrote a bunch of scripts for it with Awk etc. (E.g. calculating the total length of clips highlighted with brown color in the DAW -- which was stuff meant for editing out; or creating a poor man's "ripple editing" feature by moving loosely-placed clips precisely side by side; or, eventually, converting the sessions to Samplitude EDL format, and, from there, to Pro Tools via AATranslator [1] (because our studio was using PT), etc. Really fun times!) 1: https://aatranslator.com.au/ https://aatranslator.com.au/
  • dizhn 1y ago
    I've never heard of this software before. Any idea why it's discontinued? There are a bunch of weird messages that point to sort of a hostile take over of the project by forking, but it doesn't say anything about why or how it was discontinued.
    • ofalkaed 1y ago
      From what I remember; it was mostly a one man project and he was writing it for himself, this upset some people and they felt his personal project should be democratic. It created a great deal of drama and he found himself having to deal with the drama every time he tried to engage with the community. Eventually he just walked away from it all. The fork died shortly after since the people who forked it were still dependent on him for development, all they really offered was a fork that was free of his supposed tyranny.
• dannyobrien 1y ago
  Midori, Microsoft's capability-based security OS[1]. Rumor has it that it was getting to the point where it was able to run Windows code, so it was killed through internal politics, but who knows! It was the Fuchsia of its time... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midori_%28operating_system%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midori_%28operating_system%29
  • drnick1 1y ago
    The technical foundation seems interesting, but knowing Microsoft this would have just become yet another bloated mess with it's own new set of problems. And by now it would have equally become filled with spyware and AI "features" users don't want.
  • ripley12 1y ago
    Midori was fascinating. Joe Duffy's writing on it is the most comprehensive I've seen: https://joeduffyblog.com/2015/11/03/blogging-about-midori/ https://joeduffyblog.com/2015/11/03/blogging-about-midori/ I've heard someone at Microsoft describe it as a moonshot but also a retention project; IIRC it had a hundred plus engineers on it at one time, including a lot of very senior people. Apparently a bunch of research from Midori made it into .NET so it wasn't all lost, but still...
    • sauercrowd 1y ago
      > retention project Never heard this phrase before, but I can definitely see this happening at companies of that size
  • justinclift 1y ago
    Have you come across Genode (https://genode.org https://genode.org)? It's kind of in that space, and is still actively developed.
  • mike_hearn 1y ago
    Where did you hear it could run Windows code? Everything known about Midori publicly says the opposite, it was specifically designed at every point to be totally incompatible with all existing code. Maybe a few people on the Midori team fantasized about a migration path but it was never going to happen. Midori was designed from the start without migration in mind.
• exp1orer 1y ago
  It might be too soon to call it abandoned, but I was very intrigued by the Austral [1] language. The spec [2] is worth reading, it has an unusual clarity of thought and originality, and I was hoping that it would find some traction. Unfortunately it seems that the author is no longer actively working on it. [1] https://austral-lang.org/ https://austral-lang.org/ [2] https://austral-lang.org/spec/spec.html https://austral-lang.org/spec/spec.html
  • khaledh 1y ago
    Same with Vale: https://vale.dev https://vale.dev
    • alexeldeib 1y ago
      ouch, last “recent update” in 2023. Any idea what happened?
      • valorzard 1y ago
        The author got hired by Modular, the AI startup founded by the creators of LLVM and Swift, and is now working on the new language Mojo. He’s been bringing a bunch of ideas from Vale to Mojo
        • alexeldeib 1y ago
          Oh nice! I just had an excuse to try mojo via max inference, it was pretty impressive. Basically on par with vllm for some small benchmarks, bit of variance in ttft and tpot. Very cool!
  • ofalkaed 1y ago
    I played with Austral about a year ago and really wanted to use it for my projects, but as a hobbyist and mostly inept programmer it lacked the community and ecosystem I require. I found it almost intuitive and the spec does an amazing job of explaining the language. Would love to see it get a foothold.
• countrymile 1y ago
  The IBM school's computer. Developed by IBM Hursley in 1967, it was years ahead in its design, display out to a television and storage on normal audio tape. Would have kick started an educational revolution if it had been launched beyond the 10 prototype machines. Died due to legal wranglings about patents, iirc. More here:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45061680 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45061680
• mwpmaybe 1y ago
  I thought Google Wave was going to kill email and chat and a whole bunch of other stuff.
  • stavros 1y ago
    Worse is better.
• walterbell 1y ago
  SMIL. Nothing comparable for seamless media stream composition, 20 years later.
• Lerc 1y ago
  Boot2Gecko or whatever the browser as Operating system was called. This was a project that should have focused on providing whatever its current users needed expanding and evolving to do whatever those users wanted it to do better. Instead it went chasing markets, abandoning existing users as it did so, in favour of potential larger pools of users elsewhere. In the end it failed to find a niche going forward while leaving a trail of abandoned niches behind it.
  • hamdingers 1y ago
    I adored my Firefox Phones. Writing apps was so easy I built myself dozens of little one-offs. Imagine if it had survived to today, its trivial html/css/js apps could be vibe coded on-device and be the ultimate personalized phone. Luckily it wasn't long after Mozilla abandoned it that PWAs were introduced and I could port the apps I cared about.
    • znpy 1y ago
      > Imagine if it had survived to today, its trivial html/css/js apps could be vibe coded on-device and be the ultimate personalized phone. That’s actually an incredibly cool concept.
  • toast0 1y ago
    It lives on as KaiOS. Has limited success as a low end phone platform now.
    • GeneralMaximus 1y ago
      For a few short months circa 2016 or 2017, KaiOS was the number one mobile OS in India. This was probably because of all the ultra-cheap KaiOS-powered Reliance Jio phones flooding the Indian market at the time. I noticed the trend when I was working on a major web property for the Aditya Birla conglomerate. My whole team was pleasantly surprised, and we made sure to test everything in Firefox for that project. But everyone switched to Android + Chrome over the next few years, which was a shame. Today, India is 90% Chrome :(
• holysantamaria 1y ago
  Opa language 2012, it was a typed nextjs before its time. http://opalang.org/ http://opalang.org/ I think the market was still skeptical about nodejs on the server at the time but other than that I don’t really know why it didn’t take off
  • daxfohl 1y ago
    I came to say Opa too. I liked the language but the meteor-like framework it was bundled with, while nice for prototyping, was a pain to work around when it didn't do what you needed. That said, frameworks were all the buzz back in the day, so the language alone probably wouldn't have gone anywhere without it.
  • themerone 1y ago
    Launching under AGPL was the kiss of death. They eventually went MIT, but the developers it steered away, probably never gave it a second chance
• walterbell 1y ago
  Lotus Agenda, Ecco Pro and Chandler. 1980s AI-like human organization.
• kristianc 1y ago
  Nokia Maps. There was a brief period in the early 2010s where Nokia had the best mapping product on the planet, and it was given away for free on Lumia phones at a time when TomTom and Garmin were still charging $60+ for navigation apps.
  • walterbell 1y ago
    Still around as "Here Maps"
    • ahartmetz 1y ago
      Started to suck pretty badly not long after getting acquired by German car companies. It used to be good.
  • padolsey 1y ago
    I worked on Maps when the re-brand to Ovi was happening. I remember piles of nokia models for us to test it on. Supporting that diversity of devices was kind of a tall order and pretty unprecedented. It was a different era.
• rhodey 1y ago
  choojs All of the upside and none of the downside of react No JSX and no compiler, all native js The main dev is paid by microsoft to do oss rust nowadays I use choo for my personal projects and have used it twice professionally https://github.com/choojs/choo#example https://github.com/choojs/choo#example The example is like 25 lines and introduces all the concepts Less moving parts than svelte
  • zdragnar 1y ago
    You can get the same thing with lit-html and any of the add on libraries that flesh it out. For example, Haunted is a react hooks implementation for lit: https://github.com/matthewp/haunted https://github.com/matthewp/haunted Choo suffered from not having an ecosystem, same with mithtil and other "like react but not" also-rans.
• pzo 1y ago
  Humane AI Pin. I think they launched 2 years too early and were too greedy with device pricing and subscription. Also if they focused as accessory for Android/iPhone they could reduce power usage and cost as well. Their execution was of course bad but I think today current LLM models are better and faster and there is much more OSS models to reduce costs. Hardware though looked nice and pico projector interesting concept even though not the best executed.
  • Froedlich 1y ago
    Wine predates ReactOS. It was basically a FOSS duplicate of Sun's WABI. I wrote a bunch of software in Borland Delphi, which ran in Windows, Wine, and ReactOS with no problems. Well, except for ReactOS' lack of printing support. As long as you stay within the ECMA or published Windows APIs, everything runs fine in Wine and ReactOS. But Microsoft products are full of undocumented functions, as well as checks to see if they're running on real Windows. That goes back to the Windows 3.1 days, when 3.1 developers regularly used OS/2 instead of DOS, and Microsoft started adding patches to fail under OS/2 and DR-DOS. So all that has to be accounted for by Wine and ReactOS. A lot of third-party software uses undocumented functions as well, especially stuff written back during the days when computer magazines were a thing, and regularly published that kind of information. A lot of programmers found the lure of undocumented calls to be irresistible, and they wound up in all kinds of commercial applications where they really shouldn't have been. In my experience anything that will load under Wine will run with no problems. ReactOS has some stability problems, but then the developers specifically call it "alpha" software. Despite that, I've put customers on ReactOS systems after verifying all their software ran on it. It gets them off the Microsoft upgrade treadmill. Sometimes there are compatibility problems and I fall back to Wine on Linux. Occasionally nothing will do but real Windows.
  • dheera 1y ago
    Hard disagree. The Humane AI Pin ad was a classic silicon valley ad that screamed B2VC and demonstrated nothing actually useful that couldn't be done with an all-in-one phone app (or even the ChatGPT app) and bluetooth earbuds that you already have. Which reduces its innovation level to nothing more than a chest-mounted camera. You want real B2C products that people would actually buy? Look at the Superbowl ads instead. Then watch the Humane ad again. It's laughable.
• evbogue 1y ago
  Secure-Scuttlebot (the gossiped social network) died circa 2019 or 2024 depending who we ask. It died before it's time for various reasons including: 1. competing visions for how the entire system should work 2. dependence on early/experimental npm libraries 3. devs breaking existing features due to "innovation" 4. a lot of interpersonal drama because it was not just open source but also a social network the ideas are really good, someone should make the project again and run with it
  • v3ss0n 1y ago
    So much drama there too, but it's designed to attract drmas
    • znpy 1y ago
      Drama has killed the technological progress in open source, if you ask me. Having seen what goes on in the foss world and what goes on in the large faang-size corporate world, no wonder the corporate world is light-years ahead.
      • lifty 1y ago
        It is a fundamental constraint of consensus based organizations. You need hierarchy to move faster but that has other disadvantages.
        • pessimizer 1y ago
          You don't need hierarchy, but you need some sort of process. "Consensus-based" just means that the loudest and most enduring shouters get their way, and when their way fails spectacularly, they leave in a huff (taking their work with them, badmouthing the project, and likely starting a fork that will pull more people out of the project and confuse potential users who just bail on trying either.) Those people need to be pushed out early and often. That's what voting is for. You need a supermajority to force an end to discussion, and a majority to make a decision. If you hold up the discussion too long with too slim a minority, the majority can fork your faction out of the group. If the end of debate has been forced, and you can't work with the majority, you should leave yourself. None of this letting the bullies get their way until everything is a disaster, then splitting up anyway stuff.
• jzellis 1y ago
  Google Reader. We could have had a great society, man.
  • uzername 1y ago
    The loss of Google Reader really does feel like the beginning of the end in retrospect.
  • stavros 1y ago
    There are plenty of clones, though. I use CommaFeed and it's pretty good, feels a lot like Google Reader.
  • gorfian_robot 1y ago
    been using The Old Reader for years now
• bxparks 1y ago
  A lot of things on https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/ . I used to use 30-40 Google products and services. I'm down to 3-4. Google Picasa: Everything local, so fast, so good. I'm never going to give my photos to G Photos. Google Hangouts: Can't keep track of all the Google chat apps. I use Signal now. Google G Suite Legacy: It was supposed to be free forever. They killed it, tried to make me pay. I migrated out of Google. Google Play Music: I had uploaded thousands of MP3 files there. They killed it. I won't waste my time uploading again. Google Finance: Tracked my stocks and funds there. Then they killed it. Won't trust them with my data again. Google NFC Wallet: They killed it. Then Apple launched the same thing, and took over. Google Chromecast Audio: It did one thing, which is all I needed. Sold mine as soon as they announced they were killing it. Google Chromecast: Wait, they killed Chromecast? I did not know that until I started writing this..
  • brandonb927 1y ago
    Google Reader: I will forever be salty about how Google killed something that likely required very little maintenance in the long run. It could have stayed exactly the same for a decade and I wouldn't have cared because I use an RSS reader exactly the same way I do that I did back in 2015.
    • nine_k 1y ago
      Yes. That was the single worst business decision in Google history, as somebody correctly noted. It burned an enormous amount of goodwill for no gain whatsoever. Killing Google Reader affected a relatively small number of users, but these users disporportionately happened to be founders, CTOs, VPs of engineering, social media luminaries, and people who eventually became founders, CTOs, etc. They had been painfully taught to not trust Google, and, since that time, they didn't. And still don't.
      • perardi 1y ago
        Just think of the data mining they could have had there. They had a core set of ultra-connected users who touched key aspects of the entire tech industry. The knowledge graph you could have built out of what those people read and shared… They could have just kept the entire service running with, what, 2 software engineers? Such a waste.
• daxfohl 1y ago
  Heroku? I know it's still around, though IDK who uses it, but I miss those days when it was thriving. One language, one deployment platform, one database, a couple plugins to choose from, everything simple and straightforward, no decision fatigue. I often wonder, if AI had come 15 years earlier, would it have been a ton better because there weren't a billion different ways to do things? Would we have ever bothered to come up with all the different tech, if AI was just chugging through features efficiently, with consistent training data etc.?
  • robertakarobin 1y ago
    My company still uses Heroku in production actually. Every time I see the Salesforce logo show up I wince, but we haven't had any issues at all. It continues to make deployment very easy.
  • samrolken 1y ago
    As soon as they put a persistent Salesforce brand banner across the top which did nothing but waste space and put that ugly logo in our face every day, my team started our transition off Heroku pretty much right away.
  • esperent 1y ago
    > One language, one deployment platform, one database, a couple plugins to choose from, everything simple and straightforward, no decision fatigue. Sounds not that different from containers, if you just choose the most popular tooling. Small projects: docker compose, posgres, redis, nginx Big projects: kubernetes, posgres, redis, nginx This is why Heroku lost popularity.
    • edanm 1y ago
      Yes. And fittingly, Docker was born out of a Heroku competitor.
  • SeanAnderson 1y ago
    Didn't they offer free compute? IIRC all free compute on the Internet went away with the advent of cryptocurrencies as it became practical to abuse the compute and translate it directly into money.
• xnx 1y ago
  OpenSocial: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSocial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSocial
• kurtis_reed 1y ago
  Meteor
  • vlasky 1y ago
    It's alive and well!
• kurtis_reed 1y ago
  Windows Phone
  • Froedlich 1y ago
    Windows Phone's UI is still with us, from Windows 8 onwards. Everything on 8, 10, and 11 is optimized for a touch interface on a small screen, which is ridiculous on a modern desktop with a 32" or so monitor and a trackball or mouse.
    • Findecanor 1y ago
      From Windows 10, there is a switch between desktop and touch mode. They stopped supporting small tablets some years ago though, and made it worse with every Windows update. I can only surmise that it was to make people stop using them. Slow GUI, low contrast, killed apps.
    • fodkodrasz 1y ago
      False. The Metro design was abandoned long ago. No live tiles, no typography-first minimal UIs in windows 10/11. I pin an email app to taskbar/start, I don't see the unread count.
• jmclnx 1y ago
  Fro me, DESQview. Microsoft tried to buy it in order to use its tech in their windows system. I wonder how things would be today if they were able to purchase it. But DESQview said "no". Instead it went into a slow death spiral due to Windows 95.
  • Froedlich 1y ago
    DESQview/X sucked the wind out of DESQview's sails. It was, on paper, a massive upgrade. I had been running DESQview for years, with a dial-up BBS in the background. But you couldn't actually buy /X. After trying to buy a copy, my publisher even contacted DESQ's marketing people to get a copy for me, and they wouldn't turn one over. Supposedly there were some copies actually sold, but too few, too late, and then /X was dropped. There was at least one more release of plain DESQview after that, but by then Windows was eating its lunch.
  • chipx86 1y ago
    Love seeing this one. My uncle was co-founder of Quarterdeck, and I grew up in a world of DESQview and QEMM. It was a big influence on me as a child. Got a good family story about that whole acquisition attempt, but I don't want to speak publicly on behalf of my uncle. I know we've talked at length about the what-ifs of that moment. I do have a scattering of some neat Quarterdeck memorabilia I can share, though: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/0ca1omn2kwda9op5go34e/ACpO6bz7nNFM8b9yzn4mS_o?rlkey=kyeiljpm7d2l7q5nvvuzbi6wc&dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/0ca1omn2kwda9op5go34e/ACpO6bz...
    • abdulhaq 1y ago
      I loved the Quarterdeck stuff especially Desqview
• mikewarot 1y ago
  Memex, it was a solution to the biggest problem facing the scientific community just after WW2 and it still hasn't been implemented, 80 years later!
  • LargoLasskhyfv 1y ago
    Try the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynabook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynabook instead...
• mbirth 1y ago
  wua.la … the original version. You share part of your storage to get the same amount back as resilient cloud storage from others. Was bought and killed by LaCie (now Seagate). They later provided paid-for cloud storage under the same name but it didn’t take off. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuala https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuala
  • ValdikSS 1y ago
    I used that! Nowadays we have cryptocurrency-based Sia, Storj, which are kind of similar.
• ggm 1y ago
  X.400 we're approaching it by stepwise refinement. It had X.500 which lives on as X.509 certificates and LDAP. ISO/OSI had session layer. ie much of what QUIC does regarding underlying multiple transports. Speaking of X.509 the s-expressions certificate format was more interesting in many ways.
  • thequux 1y ago
    OSI's session layer did very little more than TCP/UDP port numbers; in the OSI model you would open a connection to a machine, then use that connection to open a session to a particular application. X.400 was a nice idea, but the ideal of having a single global directory predates security. I can understand why it never happened On X.509, the spec spends two chapters on attribute certificates, which I've never seen used in the wild. It's a shame; identity certificates do a terrible job at authentication
• BirAdam 1y ago
  Google Wave. Edit: you asked why. I first saw it at SELF where Chris DiBona showed it to me and a close friend. It was awesome. Real time translation, integration of various types of messaging, tons of cool capabilities, and it was fully open source. What made it out of Google was a stripped down version of what I was shown, the market rejected it, and it was a sad day. Now, I am left with JIRA, Slack, and email. It sucks.
  • bdangubic 1y ago
    wave was fucking amazing. buggy but amazing
    • burnt-resistor 1y ago
      Google sucked/s at executive function because they completely lack appreciation for proper R&D and long-term investment and also kill things people use and love.
      • smrtinsert 1y ago
        Honestly a lot of the time they seem to be be in "what do humans want?" mode.
        • burnt-resistor 1y ago
          Yep. And rather than ask people, focus group, or look at the evidence, they just guess or do whatever they want. Not much leadership or community engagement appears to be involved.
          • DrewADesign 1y ago
            I don’t think that’s an entirely fair characterization. They obviously spend a great deal of time focusing on what their (human) shareholders want.
            • 1y ago
• coreyhn 1y ago
  Yahoo pipes. It was so great at creating rss feeds and custom workflows. There are replacements now like Zapier and n8n but loved that. Also google reader which is mentioned multiple times already.
  • benrutter 1y ago
    I never used it, but Yahoo pipes sounds like it was awesome whenever I hear people talk about it. I don't know if it was Yahoo Pipes that died, or a mainstream internet based on open protocols and standards.
    • Havoc 1y ago
      It died because it was basically a cool hobby tech demo that happened to be on yahoo domain. There was never any real tie in to yahoo the company
  • bapak 1y ago
    Yahoo Pipes was what internet should have been. We're so many decades into computing and that kind of inter-tool linking has only barely been matched by unix pipes.
    • _kidlike 1y ago
      hey, but we got MCP...
    • viraptor 1y ago
      Many companies are working very hard to make that impossible unfortunately. For example you can't get posts from public Facebook groups automatically, although that would be a really good source candidate. They used to allow it, but... not anymore.
  • Towaway69 1y ago
    If anyone with time, money and resources wants to revive the ideas of Yahoo! Pipes then I would suggest using Node-RED[^1] as a good starting point. It has the advantage of being open source, has well defined and stable APIs and a solid backend. Plus 10+ years of constant development with many learnings around how to implement flow based programming visually. I used the Node-RED frontend to create Browser-Red[^2] which is a Node-RED that solely executes in the browser, no server required. It does not support all Node-RED functionality but gives a good feel for using Node-RED and flow based programming. The second project with which I am using Node-RED frontend is Erlang-Red[^3] which is Node-RED with an Erlang backend. Erlang is better suited to flow based programming than NodeJS, hence this attempt to demonstrate that! Node-RED makes slightly different assumptions than Yahoo! Pipes - input ports being the biggest: all nodes in Node-RED have either zero or one input wires, nodes in Yahoo! Pipes had multiple input wires. A good knowledge of jQuery is required but that makes it simpler to get into the frontend code - would be my argument ;) I am happy to answer questions related to Node-RED, email in bio. [^1]: https://nodered.org https://nodered.org [^2]: https://cdn.flowhub.org https://cdn.flowhub.org [^3]: https://github.com/gorenje/erlang-red https://github.com/gorenje/erlang-red
• dunham 1y ago
  The "Eve" programming language / IDE - https://witheve.com https://witheve.com It was a series of experiments with new approaches to programming. Kind of reminded me of the research that gave us Smalltalk. It would have been interesting to see where they went with it, but they wound down the project.
  • cobertos 1y ago
    Why did they not pursue this? Were there any applications using this in the wild? It was not immediately obvious from their github repository.
    • KingMob 1y ago
      I don't personally know, but I used to use the creator (Granger)'s previous work, the Clojure live-running editor LightTable. LT was cool, but they abandoned it with insufficient hand-off when it was 80-90% done to work on Eve. I know a bunch of people were unhappy that LightTable wasn't finished, especially because they raised money via Kickstarter for it. Maybe Eve was too ambitious. Maybe funding never materialized. Maybe they just got bored and couldn't finish. Maybe they pissed off their audience.
    • cmontella 1y ago
      I worked on this project so I can give some insight. The main reason we didn't keep working on it was it was VC funded and we didn't have a model for making money in the short term. At the end we were pursuing research related to natural language programming and reinforcement learning in that area (I recently blogged about it here: https://mech-lang.org/post/2025-01-09-programming-chatgpt https://mech-lang.org/post/2025-01-09-programming-chatgpt), and were considering folding our small team into OpenAI or Microsoft or something. But we wanted to work as a team and no one wanted to take us as a team, so we called it. It didn't get far enough to be "used" in a production sense. There was enough interest and people were playing around with it, but no real traction to speak of. Frankly, language projects are difficult because these days they have to be bootstrapped to a certain size before there's any appreciable use, and VCs are not patient enough for that kind of timetable. Here's a postmortem Chris gave about all that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WT2CMS0MxJ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WT2CMS0MxJ0 / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThjFFDwOXok https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThjFFDwOXok
• commandersaki 1y ago
  Anyone remember Openmoko, the first commercialised open source smart phone. Was heaps buggy though, not really polished, etc. It’s only redeeming feature was the open source software and hardware (specs?).
  • LargoLasskhyfv 1y ago
    There was the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PinePhone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PinePhone and it's successor PinePhonePro. Bugginess and general impracticalities brought up to more recent standards. Inflation-adjusted, of course!
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    • megous 1y ago
      Pinephone still is, and is set to be produced for next 3 years, as promissed in 2018.
• burnt-resistor 1y ago
  Fortress language. It suffered from being too Haskell-like in terms of too many, non-orthogonal features. Rust and Go applied lessons from it perhaps indirectly.
  • cmrdporcupine 1y ago
    Fortress had great ideas, but I'd say the closest thing to in the real world now might be Julia.
  • zem 1y ago
    their operator precedence system was one of my favourite pieces of language design. the tl;dr was that you could group operators into precedence sets, and an expression involving operators that all came from the same set would have that set's precedence rules applied, but if you had an expression involving mixed sets you needed to add the parentheses. crucially, they also supported operator overloading, and the same operator could be used in a different set as long as everything could be parsed unambiguously. (caveat, I never used the language, I just read about the operator design in the docs and it was very eye opening in the sense that every other language's operator precedence system suddenly felt crude and haphazard)
• JimDabell 1y ago
  Apple’s scanning system for CSAM. The vast majority of the debate was dominated by how people imagined it worked, which was very different to how it actually worked. It was an extremely interesting effort where you could tell a huge amount of thought and effort went into making it as privacy-preserving as possible. I’m not convinced it’s a great idea, but it was a substantial improvement over what is in widespread use today and I wanted there to be a reasonable debate on it instead of knee-jerk outrage. But congrats, I guess. All the cloud hosting systems scan what they want anyway, and the one that was actually designed with privacy in mind got screamed out of existence by people who didn’t care to learn the first thing about it.
  • JoshTriplett 1y ago
    Good riddance to a system that would have provided precedent for client-side scanning for arbitrary other things, as well as likely false positives. > I wanted there to be a reasonable debate on it I'm reminded of a recent hit-piece about Chat Control, in which one of the proponent politicians was quoted as complaining about not having a debate. They didn't actually want a debate, they wanted to not get backlash. They would never have changed their minds, so there's no grounds for a debate. We need to just keep making it clear the answer is "no", and hopefully strengthen that to "no, and perhaps the massive smoking crater that used to be your political career will serve as a warning to the next person who tries".
    • JimDabell 1y ago
      I don’t think you can accurately describe it as client-side scanning and false positives were not likely. Depending upon how you view it, false positives were either extremely unlikely, or 100% guaranteed for practically everybody. And if you think the latter part is a problem, please read up on it! > I'm reminded of a recent hit-piece about Chat Control, in which one of the proponent politicians was quoted as complaining about not having a debate. They didn't actually want a debate, they wanted to not get backlash. They would never have changed their minds, so there's no grounds for a debate. Right, well I wanted a debate. And Apple changed their minds. So how is it reminding you of that? Neither of those things apply here.
• friendofafriend 1y ago
  Was recently reading about Project Ara, the modular smartphone project by Google/Motorola [1]. Would have liked to see a few more iterations of the idea. Something more customizable than what we have today without having to take the phone apart. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Ara https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Ara
  • stavros 1y ago
    It would have been very thick, too thick to compete.
  • hulitu 1y ago
    > Was recently reading about Project Ara, the modular smartphone project by Google/Motorola This was a huge idea. A lot of companies tried to develop modules for it. This could have been the modern equivalent of the PC. But Google killed the child, before it could say "mama".
• harel 1y ago
  In the late 90s there was a website called fuckedcompany which was a place where people could spill the beans about startups (mainly in silicon valley). It was anonymous and a pretty good view into the real state of tech. Now there is twitter/x but it's not as focused on this niche.
  • cmrdporcupine 1y ago
    fuckedcompany was awesome but very much a product of the early stages of the .com bubble poppage I kind of expect we might see something similar if the AI bubble pops I wonder who owns the domain now
  • JMiao 1y ago
    creator now makes wild, bespoke headphones https://www.reddit.com/user/pudjam667/submitted/ https://www.reddit.com/user/pudjam667/submitted/
    • littlestymaar 1y ago
      This is hilarious, thanks for sharing.
    • stavros 1y ago
      That is just fantastic.
  • alisonatwork 1y ago
    The closest sites I've found are Web3 is Going Just Great and Pivot to AI, which are newsfeeds of various car crashes in their respective hype arenas, although without any insider scoops/gossip.
• piskov 1y ago
  Microsoft Silverlight. Full C# instead of god forbidden js. Full vector dpi aware UI, with grid, complex animation, and all other stuff that html5/css didn’t have in 2018 but silverlight had even in 2010 (probable even earlier). MVVM pattern, two-way bindings. Expression Blend (basically figma) that allowed designers create UI that was XAML, had sample data, and could be used be devs as is with maybe some cleanup. Excellent tooling, static analysis, debugging, what have you. Rendered and worked completely the same in any browser (safari, ie, chrome, opera, firefox) on mac and windows If that thing still worked, boy would we be in a better place regarding web apps. Unfortunately, iPhone killed adobe flash and Silverlight as an aftermath. Too slow processor, too much energy consumption.
  • drnick1 1y ago
    I am happy this one died. It was just another attempt by Microsoft to sidestep open web standards in favor of a proprietary platform. The other notorious example is Flash, and both should be considered malware.
    • ugh123 1y ago
      Did Silverlight have the same security issues as Flash?
      • cube00 1y ago
        Yes, even using C# couldn't save them. > A remote code execution vulnerability exists when Microsoft Silverlight decodes strings using a malicious decoder that can return negative offsets that cause Silverlight to replace unsafe object headers with contents provided by an attacker. In a web-browsing scenario, an attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could obtain the same permissions as the currently logged-on user. If a user is logged on with administrative user rights, an attacker could take complete control of the affected system. An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/security-updates/securitybulletins/2016/ms16-006 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/security-updates/securityb...
• catskull 1y ago
  Google Inbox
• Towaway69 1y ago
  The information superhighway The internet before advertising, artificial intelligence, social media and bots. When folks created startups in their bedrooms or garages. The days when google slogan was “don’t be evil”.
  • PartiallyTyped 1y ago
    That’s the internet before commercialisation and silos.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • username223 1y ago
    AKA "back when Marc Andreessen had hair and not enough money to build an apocalypse bunker on a personal island."
    • Towaway69 1y ago
      And when no one knew you were a dog and neither did they care. Animated gifs of cat, banner bars and pixels cost one dollar, until a one million were sold. And it all ran on Chuck Norris' personal computer.
  • feketegy 1y ago
    That part of the Internet still exists, it's just nobody visits those sites anymore. Communities are moving back to early Internet-like chatrooms like IRC, but now it is Slack, Discord, and the like. Everything private.
    • dannersy 1y ago
      I mean, they're intentionally buried in the name of capital. If you need more than a Google search to find them, of course no one will go to them. I don't like the siloing our information to Discord being a comparison to old internet. We had indexable information in forums that is "lost", not in the literal sense, but because you wouldn't be able to find it without obsessive digging to find it again. Conversations in Discord communities are very surface level and cyclical because it's far less straight forward to keep track of and link to answers from last week let alone two years ago. It is profoundly sad, to be honest.
• satisfice 1y ago
  Betamax. Because I bought a player and it gave better quality video.
  • latexr 1y ago
    Technology Connections would like a word. https://youtu.be/hGVVAQVdEOs?t=693 https://youtu.be/hGVVAQVdEOs?t=693
    • satisfice 1y ago
      I bought my Betamax in the store having compared VHS to Beta side by side. When I say that Beta was better the main thing I'm referring to is the clarity during fast forwarding or reversing. When scanning through a video VHS was full of staticky noise, but Beta was clean. I don't recall that the quality during regular playback was particularly different, but I like to be able to see what's happening when I move around a video. It seems like a clear winner. Of course, this was comparing one particular beta machine to one particular VHS machine.
• rasengan0 1y ago
  https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IGoogle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IGoogle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Desktop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Desktop and why? = UI/UX
  • viraptor 1y ago
    I feel like Zen (Firefox based) captures a few good things from Ubiquity. It could do more though. Zen + Kagi gets even more with the bang commands.
• patapong 1y ago
  Visual Basic 6 - arguably the most accessible way of creating GUI apps.
  • homarp 1y ago
    you still have Lazarus, "a Delphi compatible cross-platform IDE for Rapid Application Development."
    • stavros 1y ago
      Lazarus seems like a fantastic GUI builder, but the problem with it (and VB6) is that I have to use a language with 0.01% the ecosystem of Python.
    • jamesu 1y ago
      Lazarus is nice but both its apis and the ui feel like they're still stuck in the early 00's. It's not enough to look like VB6 / Delphi these days; you've got to keep up with what kinds of conventions we expect now.
      • hulitu 1y ago
        > the ui feel like they're still stuck in the early 00's. As a masochistic user of Windows (Work), Android (phone) and iOS (work phone), i consider this a feature. Window management in Windows, can be the subject of a Nobel prize winning novel.
  • paride5745 1y ago
    Gambas is a modern, open source Visual Basic dialect in the style of VB Classic.
  • zweifuss 1y ago
    twinBASIC tries hard to be a bug compatible successor.
    • VB6-Programming 1y ago
• Jordan-117 1y ago
  Developer Ryan Flaherty's "Via" project, a novel approach to streaming large games in real time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5wAn-4e5hQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5wAn-4e5hQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWsNFVvblLw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWsNFVvblLw Summary: >This presentation introduces Via, a virtual file system designed to address the challenges of large game downloads and storage. Unlike cloud gaming, which suffers from poor image quality, input latency, and high hosting costs, Via allows games to run locally while only downloading game data on demand. The setup process is demonstrated with Halo Infinite, showing a simple installation that involves signing into Steam and allocating storage space for Via's cache. >Via creates a virtual Steam library, presenting all owned games as installed, even though their data is not fully downloaded. When a game is launched, Via's virtual file system intercepts requests and downloads only the necessary game content as it's needed. This on-demand downloading is integrated with the game's existing streaming capabilities, leveraging features like level-of-detail and asset streaming. Performance metrics are displayed, showing download rates, server ping, and disk commit rates, illustrating how Via fetches data in real-time. >The system prioritizes caching frequently accessed data. After an initial download, subsequent play sessions benefit from the on-disk cache, significantly reducing or eliminating the need for network downloads. This means the actual size of a game becomes less relevant, as only a portion of it needs to be stored locally. While server locations are currently limited, the goal is to establish a global network to ensure low ping. The presentation concludes by highlighting Via's frictionless user experience, aiming for a setup so seamless that users are unaware of its presence. Via is currently in early access and free to use, with hopes of future distribution partnerships. I'm amazed the video still has under 4,000 views. Sadly, Flaherty got hired by XAI and gave up promoting the project. https://x.com/rflaherty71/status/1818668595779412141 https://x.com/rflaherty71/status/1818668595779412141 But I could see the technology behind it working wonders for Steam, Game Pass, etc.
  • Rohansi 1y ago
    Wait until you hear that almost all Unity games don't really have asset streaming because the engine loads things eagerly by default. I don't see how this could take off. Internet speeds are getting quicker, disk space is getting cheaper, and this will slow down load times. And what's worse is the more you need this tech the worse experience you have.
• j45 1y ago
  WebOS. Javascript/HTML based smartphone / app interface.
  • docandrew 1y ago
    I had a Palm Pre and really enjoyed this, shame it didn’t make it.
  • zerr 1y ago
    LG smart TVs have it. They also license it to other smaller Chinese brands.
• smileson2 1y ago
  [flagged]
• linguae 1y ago
  I could think of many examples, but I'll talk about the top four that I have in mind, that I'd like to see re-evaluated for today's times. 1. When Windows Vista was being developed, there were plans to replace the file system with a database, allowing users to organize and search for files using database queries. This was known as WinFS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS). I was looking forward to this in the mid-2000s. Unfortunately Vista was famously delayed, and in an attempt to get Vista released, Microsoft pared back features, and one of these features was WinFS. Instead of WinFS, we ended up getting improved file search capabilities. It's unfortunate that there's been no proposals for database file systems for desktop operating systems since. 2. OpenDoc (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc) was an Apple technology from the mid-1990s that promoted component-based software. Instead of large, monolithic applications such as Microsoft Excel and Adobe Photoshop, functionality would be offered in the form of components, and users and developers can combine these components to form larger solutions. For example, as an alternative to Adobe Photoshop, there would be a component for the drawing canvas, and there would be separate components for each editing feature. Components can be bought and sold on an open marketplace. It reminds me of Unix pipes, but for GUIs. There's a nice promotional video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFJdjk2rq4E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFJdjk2rq4E. OpenDoc was a radically different paradigm for software development and distribution, and I think this was could have been an interesting contender against the dominance that Microsoft and Adobe enjoys in their markets. OpenDoc actually did ship, and there were some products made using OpenDoc, most notably Apple's Cyberdog browser (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberdog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberdog). Unfortunately, Apple was in dire straits in the mid-1990s. Windows 95 was a formidable challenger to Mac OS, and cheaper x86 PCs were viable alternatives to Macintosh hardware. Apple was an acquisition target; IBM and Apple almost merged, and there was also an attempt to merge Apple with Sun. Additionally, the Macintosh platform depended on the availability of software products like Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop, the very types of products that OpenDoc directly challenged. When Apple purchased NeXT in December 1996, Steve Jobs returned to Apple, and all work on OpenDoc ended not too long afterward, leading to this now-famous exchange during WWDC 1997 between Steve Jobs and an upset developer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o). I don't believe that OpenDoc fits in with Apple's business strategy, even today, and while Microsoft offers component-based technologies that are similar to OpenDoc (OLE, COM, DCOM, ActiveX, .NET), the Windows ecosystem is still dominated by monolithic applications. I think it would have been cool had the FOSS community pursued component-based software. It would have been really cool to apt-get components from remote repositories and link them together, either using GUI tools, command-line tools, or programmatically to build custom solutions. Instead, we ended up with large, monolithic applications like LibreOffice, Firefox, GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus, etc. 3. I am particularly intrigued by Symbolics Genera (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genera_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genera_(operating_system)), an operating system designed for Symbolics Lisp machines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolics). In Genera, everything is a Lisp object. The interface is an interesting hybrid of early GUIs and the command line. To me, Genera could have been a very interesting substrate for building component-based software; in fact, it would have been far easier building OpenDoc on top of Common Lisp than on top of C or C++. Sadly, Symbolics' fortunes soured after the AI winter of the late 1980s/early 1990s, and while Genera was ported to other platforms such as the DEC Alpha and later the x86-64 via the creation of a Lisp machine emulator, it's extremely difficult for people to obtain a legal copy, and it was never made open source. The closest things to Genera we have are Xerox Interlisp, a competing operating system that was recently made open source, and open-source descendants of Smalltalk-80: Squeak, Pharo, and Cuis-Smalltalk. 4. Apple's "interregnum" years between 1985 and 1996 were filled with many intriguing projects that were either never commercialized, were cancelled before release, or did not make a splash in the marketplace. One of the most interesting projects during the era was Bauhaus, a Lisp operating system developed for the Newton platform. Mikel Evins, a regular poster here, describes it here (https://mikelevins.github.io/posts/2021-07-12-reimagining-bauhaus/ https://mikelevins.github.io/posts/2021-07-12-reimagining-ba...). It would have been really cool to have a mass-market Lisp operating system, especially if it had the same support for ubiquitous dynamic objects like Symbolic Genera.
• rickette 1y ago
  Adobe Flex with Adobe Catalyst. Design a GUI in Photoshop, export it to Flex/Flash to add interactivity. Looked cool during demos. Got killed when Flash died.
• zyklonix 1y ago
  I always thought Microsoft Popfly had huge potential and was way ahead of its time. It made building web mashups feel like playing with Lego blocks, drag, drop, connect APIs, and instantly see the result. If something like that existed today, powered by modern APIs and AI, it could become the ultimate no-code creativity playground.
• kumavis 1y ago
  Keybase <3
  • cymor 1y ago
    Take a look at FOKS. Made by the people who made Keybase. https://foks.pub/ https://foks.pub/
    • Avamander 1y ago
      Very interesting, unfortunately their blog has no RSS feed :D
      • francou 1y ago
        https://blog.foks.pub/index.xml https://blog.foks.pub/index.xml
  • Avamander 1y ago
    Funny thing is, I still use it. It might be _the_ fastest chat platform right now. Other things like Whatsapp, Messenger, Telegram, Signal, Matrix/Element, Discord, Slack, Rocket Chat, Mattermost (and all the platforms that implement some kind of a chat by now), are all significantly slower. Sending messages takes longer, UI is slower, everything is slower somehow. The only exception that I know of being IRC. It also allowed tree-shaped groups, you can nest as many as you like depending on your needs. It's so handy compared to the limited server/channel/thread logic elsewhere. I will miss it dearly once they shut it down.
• LVB 1y ago
  HP TouchPad Just on principle, I'd have liked to see it on the market for more than 49 days! It pains me as an engineer to think of the effort to bring a hardware device to market for such a minuscule run.
  • ebbi 1y ago
    webOS was so ahead of its time, and seemed like it would have been a really strong contender to iPad OS.
  • Hobadee 1y ago
    My dad had one. He was an HP employee and they opened them up to internal purchases when they took them off the market.
• zyklonix 1y ago
  Microsoft Songsmith is another one that deserved a second life. It let you hum or sing a melody and would auto-generate full backing tracks, guitar, bass, drums, chords, in any style you chose. It looked a bit goofy in the promo videos, but under the hood it was doing real-time chord detection and accompaniment generation. Basically a prototype of what AI music tools like Suno, Udio, or Mubert are doing today, fifteen years too early. If Microsoft had kept iterating on it with modern ML models, it could’ve become the "GarageBand for ideas that start as a hum."
  • dlcarrier 1y ago
    It also had one of the best campy promotional videos ever produced: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8GIwFkIuP8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8GIwFkIuP8
  • rzzzt 1y ago
    I will just leave this here: https://youtu.be/mg0l7f25bhU https://youtu.be/mg0l7f25bhU
    • senderista 1y ago
      This was my personal favorite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWYwY8GpuO0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWYwY8GpuO0
      • Wistar 1y ago
        Oh, that is simply fantastic.
• w10-1 1y ago
  Optane persistent memory had a fascinating value proposition: stop converting data structures for database storage and just persist the data directly. No more booting or application launch or data load: just pick up where you left off. Died because it was too expensive, but probably long after it should have. VM's persist memory snapshots (as do Apple's containers, for macOS at least), so there's still room for something like that workflow.
  • veqq 1y ago
    I have an optane drive with the kernel on it, instant boot!
    • stanac 1y ago
      How does that work? It loads kernel from drive to ram? Isn't windows fast boot something like that (only slower, depending on ssd)? It semi-hibernates, stores kernel part of memory on disk for faster startup.
      • goku12 1y ago
        This one would have behaved more like suspend to RAM. In suspend to RAM, the RAM is kept powered, while everything else is shut down. The recovery would be near instant, since all the execution contexts are preserved on the RAM. Optane was nearly as fast as RAM, but also persistent like a storage device. So you do a suspend to RAM, without the requirement to keep it powered like a RAM.
  • Gud 1y ago
    1+ for 3dxpoint. The technology took decades to mature, but the business people didn’t have the patience to let the world catch up to this revolutionary technology.
    • dlcarrier 1y ago
      The world had already caught up. By the time it was released, flash memory was already nearing it's speed and latency, to the point that the difference want with the cost.
• AnonC 1y ago
  Sandstorm: it seemed quite nice with a lot of possibilities when it launched in 2014, but it didn’t really take off and then it moved to sandstorm.org. The creator, kentonv (on HN), commented about it recently here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44848099 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44848099
  • goku12 1y ago
    The actual problem with Sandstorm wasn't the era in which it was released. It will probably have the same problems even if released today. The problem was its application isolation mechanism - especially the data isolation (I think they were called grains). The mechanism is technically brilliant. But it's a big departure from how apps are developed today. It means that you have to do non-trivial modifications to web applications before they can run on the platform. The platform is better for applications designed to run on it in the start. It should have been marketed as a platform for building web applications, rather than as one for just deploying them.
    • kentonv 1y ago
      Agreed. The best apps turned out to be the ones written for the platform. And many of those took people an afternoon to write, since the platform handled so much for you. Porting "normal" apps into Sandstorm felt like it defeated the purpose. If I did it again I wouldn't focus on portability of existing apps. Especially today given you could probably vibe code most things (and trust the sandbox to protect you from AI slop security bugs).
      • goku12 1y ago
        +1. Thank you for that fantastic effort! I followed the project since its earliest public announcement. I had high hopes for it, until it became clear that the porting was going to prove troublesome. I'm not a big fan of the contemporary app hosting architecture, as it feels needlessly complicated. But if this entire discussion thread is any proof, it's that people rarely choose the most elegant ideas around. Instead, decisions are very often based on marketing clout. Still, I hope that your concept finds its rightful purpose and mindshare in the future. It's encouraging to hear that it's a fantastic app framework. It would be such a shame to squander such a big advantage. Perhaps, that's the reason why your collaborators are so adamant about keeping it alive.
• hshdhdhehd 1y ago
  Elm programming language. Arguably not dead but somewhat incomplete and not actively worked on.
  • zem 1y ago
    opa, along the same lines - really nice ML based language for isomorphic full stack web development.
    • PufPufPuf 1y ago
      Yeah, Opa was wildly ahead of its time, I actually just wrote a top level comment about it. Basically Next.js+TypeScript+modern ECMAScript features, but in 2011.
  • spooky_deep 1y ago
    A few commits recently. There are lots of competing MLs you can use instead: - F# (Fable) - ReasonML - OCaml (Bucklescript) - Haskell - PureScript IMO the problem with Elm was actually The Elm Architecture.
    • sauercrowd 1y ago
      What's "the Elm architecture"?
      • fodkodrasz 1y ago
        A simple UI programming pattern, with a circular, unidirectional data flow. It is very rigid by design, to be side-effect free, functional, unidirectional: https://guide.elm-lang.org/architecture/ https://guide.elm-lang.org/architecture/ I'm no frontend guy, but I think it did/was inspire(d) react (redux?) maybe. Corrections on this very welcome
        • acemarke 1y ago
          Correct - Elm was one of several inspirations for Redux: - https://redux.js.org/understanding/history-and-design/prior-art https://redux.js.org/understanding/history-and-design/prior-...
• protocolture 1y ago
  Microsoft Courier. Dual screen iPad killer, productivity optimised. IIRC Microsoft OneNote is its only legacy. Killed because both the Windows team and the Office team thought it was stepping on their toes.
• hyperific 1y ago
  RAM Disks. Basically extremely fast storage using RAM sticks slotted into a specially made board that fit in a PCIe slot. Not sure what happened to the project exactly but the website disappeared sometime in 2023. The idea that you could read and write data at RAM speeds was really exciting to me. At work it's very common to see microscope image sets anywhere from 20 to 200 GB and file transfer rates can be a big bottleneck. Archive capture circa 2023: https://web.archive.org/web/20230329173623/https://ddramdisk.store/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230329173623/https://ddramdisk... HN post from 2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35195029 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35195029
  • robotswantdata 1y ago
    soon will be able to buy a gigabyte AI Top CXL R5X4. PCI expansion card with up to 512gb RAM over four DIMMs.
  • dlcarrier 1y ago
    There's now a standard for memory over a physical PCIe interface (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compute_Express_Link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compute_Express_Link) and off-the-shelf products (https://www.micron.com/products/memory/cxl-memory https://www.micron.com/products/memory/cxl-memory).
  • carstenhag 1y ago
    You can do this in software, I tried it a few times with games and just other stuff ~10 years ago. Why would it have to be a hardware solution?
  • arjvik 1y ago
    I’m confused why this can’t be done in software? mount -t tmpfs ram /mnt/ramdisk
    • dlcarrier 1y ago
      Products to attach RAM to expansion slots have long existed and continue to be developed. It's a matter of adding more memory once all of the DIMMs are full. What to do with it, once it's there, is a concern of software, but specialized hardware is needed to get it there.
• chanux 1y ago
  Everpix: Looked like good execution but they were probably ahead of time. Also this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6676494 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6676494 Redmart (Singapore): Best web based online store to this date (obviously personal view). No one even tries now that mobile apps have won. https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/01/alibaba-lazada-redmart-confirmed/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/01/alibaba-lazada-redmart-con...
• Jean-Philipe 1y ago
  ello.co - what a fun and pretty social media website that was.
• bdcravens 1y ago
  RethinkDB. Technically it still exists (under The Linux Foundation), but (IMO) the original company's widening scope (the Horizon BaaS) that eventually led to its demise killed its momentum.
  • alex7o 1y ago
    Man I loves the original concept for demos but never build anything real with it. Curious if anyone did?
    • withinboredom 1y ago
      Still running it today with millions of documents. Runs fine. I still maintain an active php fork of the driver (with actual types) and add new features as they get added to the database. Yes, it still gets new features every few years.
• tmtvl 1y ago
  CLPM, the Common Lisp Package Manager. The Quicklisp client doesn't do HTTPS, ql-https doesn't do Ultralisp, and OCICL (which I'm currently using) doesn't do system-wide packages. CLPM is a great project, but it's gone neglected long enough that it's bitrotted and needs some thorough patching to be made usable. Fortunately Common Lisp is still as stable as it has been for 31 years, so it's just the code which interacts with 3rd-party libraries that needs updating.
  • silcoon 1y ago
    Yeah I felt that Quicklisp doesn't have the same features as package managers in other languages, and https is one of them. Also it's run by a single person which doesn't have too much time to constantly update the libraries. In comparison I found Clojars^[0] for Clojure better and community driven like NPM. But obv Clojure has more business adoption than CL. Do you use CL for work? [0]: https://clojars.org/ https://clojars.org/
    • tmtvl 1y ago
      It's funny, on one hand I wouldn't want to use CL for work because when money gets involved in something you enjoy you stop enjoying it. On the other hand, however, I would really hate doing any serious work with a language I can't stand, like Python or Clojure.
  • atgreen 1y ago
    ocicl does do system-wide packages!
    • tmtvl 1y ago
      I'm going to have to re-read the documentation, then. Thanks for the heads up!
• nurettin 1y ago
  Nokia smartphone line killed by Microshaft.
• iancmceachern 1y ago
  Yahoo Pipes
• heavyset_go 1y ago
  Windows Longhorn. It looked cool and had some promising features that never made it into Vista, like WinFS.
• diffeomorphism 1y ago
  https://maruos.com/ https://maruos.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Edge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Edge Connect your phone to a display, mouse, keyboard and get a full desktop experience. At the time smartphones were not powerful enough, cables were fiddly (adapters, HDMI, USB A instead of a single USB c cable) and virtualization and containers not quite there. Today, going via pkvm seems like promising approach. Seamless sharing of data, apps etc. will take some work, though.
• zem 1y ago
  VPRI, I was really hoping it would profoundly revolutionise desktop application development and maybe even lead to a new desktop model, and instead they wound up the project without having achieved the kind of impact I was dreaming of.
• Animats 1y ago
  - Photon, the graphical interface for QNX. Oriented more towards real time (widgets included gauges) but good enough to support two different web browsers. No delays. This was a real time operating system. - MacOS 8. Not the Linux thing, but Copeland. This was a modernized version of the original MacOS, continuing the tradition of no command line. Not having a command line forces everyone to get their act together about how to install and configure things. Probably would have eased the tradition to mobile. A version was actually shipped to developers, but it had to be covered up to justify the bailout of Next by Apple to get Steve Jobs. - Transaction processing operating systems. The first one was IBM's Customer Information Control System. A transaction processor is a kind of OS where everything is like a CGI program - load program, do something, exit program. Unix and Linux are, underneath, terminal oriented time sharing systems. - IBM MicroChannel. Early minicomputer and microcomputer designers thought "bus", where peripherals can talk to memory and peripherals look like memory to the CPU. Mainframes, though, had "channels", simple processors which connected peripherals to the CPU. Channels could run simple channel programs, and managed device access to memory. IBM tried to introduce that with the PS2, but they made it proprietary and that failed in the marketplace. Today, everything has something like channels, but they're not a unified interface concept that simplifies the OS. - CPUs that really hypervise properly. That is, virtual execution environments look just like real ones. IBM did that in VM, and it worked well because channels are a good abstraction for both a real machine and a VM. Storing into device registers to make things happen is not. x86 has added several layers below the "real machine" layer, and they're all hacks. - The Motorola 680x0 series. Should have been the foundation of the microcomputer era, but it took way too long to get the MMU out the door. The original 68000 came out in 1978, but then Motorola fell behind. - Modula. Modula 2 and 3 were reasonably good languages. Oberon was a flop. DEC was into Modula, but Modula went down with DEC. - XHTML. Have you ever read the parsing rules for HTML 5, where the semantics for bad HTML were formalized? Browsers should just punt at the first error, display an error message, and render the rest of the page in Times Roman. Would it kill people to have to close their tags properly? - Word Lens. Look at the world through your phone, and text is translated, standalone, on the device. No Internet connection required. Killed by Google in favor of hosted Google Translate.
  • JimDabell 1y ago
• suck-my-spez 1y ago
  FireChat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FireChat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FireChat
• addaon 1y ago
  The Lockheed D-21 drone. Supersonic ramjet without the complexity of scramjet or the cost of turbojet, hamstrung by the need for a manned launch platform (making operations safety-critical… with predictable results) and recovery to get data off it. Twenty or forty years later it would have been paired by a small number of high-cost launcher UAVs and had its cost driven down to disposable, with data recovery over radio comms… but twenty to forty years later there’s nothing like it, and the maturation of satellites means there almost certainly never will be.
  • Hobadee 1y ago
    It's highly probable that a successor of this is in active use, we just don't know anything about it. :-/
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
• KnuthIsGod 1y ago
  Gentoo file manager. (Not the Linux distribution with the same name) I have used it for years. A two pane manager, it makes defining file associations, applications invoked by extensions and short cut buttons easy convenient. Sadly it is abandonware now. Slowly migrating to Double Commander now...
• speed_spread 1y ago
  Ceylon, JVM language, developed by Red Hat, now abandoned at Eclipse. Lost the race with Kotlin but proposed more than just syntax sugar over Java. Anonymous union types, comprehensions, proper module system...
  • jfadfwddas 1y ago
    I really liked Ceylon. It was competing against Groovy, Kotlin, and Scala which all seemed to come out around the same time.
• PufPufPuf 1y ago
  Definitely Opa: http://opalang.org/ http://opalang.org/ In 2011, before TypeScript, Next.js or even React, they had seamless server-client code, in a strongly typed functional language with support for features like JSX-like inline HTML, async/await, string interpolation, built-in MongoDB ORM, CSS-in-JS, and many syntax features that were added to ECMAScript since then. I find it wild how this project was 90%+ correct on how we will build web apps 14 years later.
  • hshdhdhehd 1y ago
    Wow, why didnt this take off?
    • PufPufPuf 1y ago
      My best guess is: - not backed by a huge corporation (React = FB, TypeScript = Microsoft, Next.js = Vercel, ...) - many of the ideas I listed above were controversial at the time of introduction, I can imagine that Opa must have felt overwhelming - Opa didn't actually have components or state management, which was a pain point on which React originally took off
  • chakrihacker 1y ago
    This is so cool
• silisili 1y ago
  I've argued this for years on this site...but AOL. At its best, having IM, email, browser, games, keywords, chats, etc. was a beautiful idea IMO. That they were an ISP seemed secondary or even unrelated to the idea. But they chose to charge for access even in the age of broadband, and adopt gym level subscription tactics to boot, and people decided they'd rather not pay it which is to be expected. I often wonder if they'd have survived as a software company otherwise. They were basically a better thought out Facebook before Facebook, in my opinion.
  • spike021 1y ago
    I miss AIM, and that type of messenger in general, a lot. You could purposely choose to be online or offline. Much easier to draw a line back then about how often you were online.
• ValdikSS 1y ago
  ZeroNet decentralized web platform: - Based on BitTorrent ideas - Completely decentralized websites' code and data - Either completely decentralized or controllable-decentralized authentication - Could be integrated into existing websites (!) It's not kind of dead, there's a supported fork, but it still feels like a revolution that did not happen. It works really well.
  • rzzzt 1y ago
    Same with Beaker Browser and Dat/Hyperdrive as its backend.
  • immibis 1y ago
    Sounds like Freenet (the new one, a.k.a. Locutus)
• Borg3 1y ago
  XenClient. I would really love to have some minimal OS HyperVisor running, and then you slap multiple OSes on top of that w/ easy full GUI switching via some hotkeys like Ctrl+Shift+F1. Additionaly, special drivers to virtualize Gfx and Sfx devices so every VM have full desktop capabilities and low latency. Unfortunately, it died because its very niche and also they couldnt keep up with development of drivers for desktops.. This is even worse today...
• thinkingemote 1y ago
  Positron - Firefox version of Electron. "Electron-compatible runtime on top of Gecko" https://github.com/mozilla/positron https://github.com/mozilla/positron This would have changed so much. Desktop apps powered by the engine of Firefox not Chrome. Why? Not enough company buy in, not enough devs worked on it. Maybe developed before a major Firefox re-write?
  • cube00 1y ago
    With more of Firefox's rendering migrating to Rust, there's got to be a market for a memory safe alternative to Electron now.
    • znpy 1y ago
      Looking at firefox memory usage, i’m afraid the issue there is not memory safety but rather the average javascript developer being completely and blissfully unaware of and careless about memory memory usage of the software they write
      • cube00 1y ago
        It'd be interesting to understand how much of that memory pressure is down to the devs compared with the frameworks now trying to cache everything in sight. React Compiler automatically memoizes values and functions, reducing the need for manual useMemo calls. You can use the compiler to handle memoization automatically. https://react.dev/reference/react/useMemo https://react.dev/reference/react/useMemo
    • ivanjermakov 1y ago
      https://v2.tauri.app/start/ https://v2.tauri.app/start/
      • cube00 1y ago
        I referred to secure rendering. Tauri apps take advantage of the web view already available on every user’s system. A Tauri app only contains the code and assets specific for that app and doesn’t need to bundle a browser engine with every app. Rendering will still use Edge/Chromium on a generic Windows machine.
• Fuzzwah 1y ago
  Kuro5hin https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuro5hin https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuro5hin I was a hold out on smartphones for a while and I used to print out k5 articles to read while afk... Just such an amazing collection of people sharing ideas and communal moderation, editing and up voting. I learned about so many wierd and wonderful things from that site.
  • MilanTodorovic 1y ago
    Are there any spiritual successors?
    • jlokier 1y ago
      For me the progression was Slashdot -> Kuro5hin -> HN.
      • senderista 1y ago
        -> lobste.rs
    • Fuzzwah 1y ago
      Similar to jlokier's response, I ended up here after k5 went away. HN fills my geek interests pretty well, and over the last few years I've found that "long form video essays" on YT, audiobooks / podcasts fill my desire for learning about other random topics.
    • ksherlock 1y ago
      --> husi
  • habosa 1y ago
    Rusty Foster (creator of Kuro5hin) is still writing! https://www.todayintabs.com/ https://www.todayintabs.com/
  • amanwithnoplan 1y ago
    The candle that burned twice as bright was really adequacy.org, which sourced their trolls from Kuro5hin. (Archive here: https://www.inadequacy.org/ https://www.inadequacy.org/)
• ssss11 1y ago
  Flickr - that was the future of photo storage, sharing, discovery. What was the bookmarks social tool called from 00’s? I loved it and it fell off the earth. You could save your bookmarks, “publish” them to the community, share etc.. What ever happened to those build your own homepage apps like startpage (I think)? I always thought those would take off
  • lentil_soup 1y ago
    >> What was the bookmarks social tool called from 00’s? del.icio.us! Funnily, also killed by yahoo like flickr
  • gorfian_robot 1y ago
    wait, I am still using (and paying) Flickr ...
    • Wistar 1y ago
      Except it is now owned and run by the father and son who founded SmugMug. It probably has a chance of surviving under their leadership.
      • al_borland 1y ago
        I think the market narrowed a lot. I haven't been to Flickr in years, but I get the impression it's for more serious photographers now, like SmugMug. It was the Instagram of its day, with mass market appeal. I think that's what people miss. Not the site, but the community around it. In this same vein, I always thought Tumblr had a great design for a blog. It hits the perfect balance between a microblog like Twitter, and a fat blog like Wordpress. It had various stigma's around the type of people who posted there, which seems to have only gotten worse over the years. It is a shell of its former self and yet anther site that fell on hard times after Yahoo ownership. Yahoo really is where Web 2.0 went to die.
  • fandorin 1y ago
    I do miss Flickr good times... I still cannot find anything like this.
• zaptheimpaler 1y ago
  Adobe Flash / Shockwave. After all these decades, I've yet to see a tool that makes it as easy to make games or multimedia as Flash did. One of many reminders recently (many others in politics) that humanity doesn't just inevitably or linearly move forward in any domain, or even 2 steps forward 1 step back. Some things are just lost to time - maybe rediscovered in a century, maybe never.
  • Y-bar 1y ago
    Those tools were awesome. But as formats go, they were awful due to bad performance and more security holes than anything else. I still miss Macromedia Fireworks.
    • Sankozi 1y ago
      Flash performance is still better than current web stack's. Probably will always be - you could write non trivial games that would work on 128MB memory machine. Currently single browser tab with simple page can take more than that.
    • OtherShrezzing 1y ago
      Macromedia Fireworks was an outstanding piece of software. The 20 most common things you’d do with the tool were there for you in obvious toolbars. It had a lot of advanced features for image editing. It had a scripting language, so you could do bulk editing operations. It supported just about every file extension you could think of. Most useful feature of all was that it’d load instantly. You’d click the icon on the desktop, and there’d be the Fireworks UI before you could finish blinking. Compared to 2025 Adobe apps, where you click the desktop icon and make a coffee while it starts, it’s phenomenal performance.
    • GuB-42 1y ago
      Performance was way better than what we have now with modern web stacks, we just have more powerful computers. I agree on security and bugs, but bugs can be fixed. It just shows neglect by Adobe, which was, I think, the real problem. I think that if Adobe seriously wanted to, it could have been a web standard.
• lynx97 1y ago
  LSR, the "Linux Screen Reader", an ambitiousy designed Python implementation of a GUI screen reader developed by IBM starting around 2006 or so. The project was ended 2008 when IBM ended all its Accessibility involvement in FLOSS.
• kesor 1y ago
  Pivotal Tracker ; Users loved it, it had an excellent model for tracking work and limiting work in progress on software projects. There is no real good alternative and the usual suspects for tracking project work are horrible in comparison.
  • kstrauser 1y ago
    I don’t know about that. My employer was all in on Pivotal and we used it for several years. Then one day a dev stumbled across Linear, we all tried it, and switched the whole company within a month or so.
• green-salt 1y ago
  The DEC Alpha processor. DEC as a whole, really.
• hardwarepirate 1y ago
  https://www.kite.com https://www.kite.com for python i first learned about it when i was working in an university group and had the task to transform a windowing algorithm already working on matlab to python. it felt like a modern linter and lsp with additional support through machine learning. i don't quite know why it got comparative small recognition, but perhaps enough to remain an avantgarde pioneering both python and machine learning support for further generations and wider applications.
• hardwarepirate 1y ago
  https://www.kite.com https://www.kite.com for python i first learned about it when i was working in an university group and had the task to transform a windowing algorithm already working on matlab to python. it felt like a modern linter and lsp with additional support through machine learning. i don't quite know why it got comparative small recognition, but perhaps enough to remain an avantgarde pioneering both python and machine learning support for further generations and wider applications.
  • abeyer 1y ago
    Perhaps because their repeated bad behavior as a company outweighed anything good they put out.
    • hardwarepirate 1y ago
      how so?
      • abeyer 1y ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14836653 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14836653
• kesor 1y ago
  Google Wave ; It had a bunch of agents participating in editing the text together with you, making spelling fixes, finding additional information to enrich your content, and so much more.
• b33f 1y ago
  TrueCrypt. free multi-platform open source disk encryption that suddenly disappeared in mysterious circumstances
  • mock-possum 1y ago
    VeraCrypt is very nearly a drop in replacement.
• kesor 1y ago
  Geocities ; It was a "put your html here" Free web hosting back when people barely knew what html was. Today you have to be a rocket scientist to find a way to host a free static "simple" page online.
  • mock-possum 1y ago
    I’ll bet you I could ask any LLM about it and have something launched within an hour. tumblr will practically let you do that for chrissake
    • pessimizer 1y ago
      tumblr is nothing like a webpage. LLMs were just invented 5 minutes ago and are losing money hand over fist until people are dependent, then will be very expensive to use; and you still have to figure out how to host, where to host, and how much it's going to cost you. So, I have no idea what you're getting at. You could have said Wordpress.com or something. It's not quite a website, but it's close. It's also probably going to be Typepad (i.e. defunct) in a few years and Blogger is probably going to be there quicker than that.
      • mock-possum 1y ago
        Ask the LLM about hosting too. I’ve literally gone through this process recently - setting up hosting, a domain, and a static html site from scratch, vibing from start to finish. It is not difficult.
        • pessimizer 1y ago
          It is between one and two orders of magnitude harder than geocities, and infinitely more expensive.
  • gmac 1y ago
    … or just use Cloudflare Pages and upload a folder or zip of your static site via a web UI?
• alance 1y ago
  I liked del.icio.us, it was online bookmark sharing, but with actual people I knew, and it had genuinely useful category tagging. I guess it was basically replaced with https://old.reddit.com https://old.reddit.com and maybe twitter.
  • dewey 1y ago
    Isn’t Pinboard (Who bought delicious) very similar? I also see bookmarks of my friend there, recently switched to Raindrop though as it’s much more maintained.
    • youngtaff 1y ago
      it is but people are switching away due to lack of maintenance and the founders political views
      • starkparker 1y ago
        There's also Readeck, which is a similar self-hosted tool that also captures some text content it can discover (i.e. article text and images, video transcripts, highlighted sections) and can export collections to RSS feeds and epub.
  • noveltyaccount 1y ago
    Self hosted Linkding is a pretty great modern equivalent https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding
  • al_borland 1y ago
    I was always confused my del.icio.us, and bookmark sharing in general. In my head bookmarks are sharing are distinct things. Bookmarks are things I want to save to visit again or a shortcut to easily visit often. Sharing is something I think someone else might find interesting, and thinks others will too, but I probably won't ever visit again. I will bookmark the site to pay my utility bill, but it's not something I'd ever share. I might share a link to funny YouTube video, but wouldn't bookmark it. I think social bookmarking didn't really know what it was, which is why the modern versions are more about sharing links than bookmarking. I don't post my bookmarks to Reddit, where people follow me as a person. I would post links I think are worth sharing to a topic people are interested in following.
• kesor 1y ago
  ICQ ; It was the first instant messenger, the technology could have adopted voice (and not get disrupted by Skype) and mobile (and not get disrupted by whatsapp) and group chat (and not get disrupted by slack/discord). But they didn't even try and put up a fight.
  • rkomorn 1y ago
    They got bought by AOL in 98, long before most/all of this innovation happened? Edit: in fact I'd say they were irrelevant before pretty much all of those innovations. By the time AIM or MSN Messenger really became popular, ICQ didn't matter anymore.
  • eszed 1y ago
    The last time ICQ was mentioned on HN I could still remember my ICQ number. It's a benchmark for how much my memory has deteriorated in the last five years. I do still remember it fondly, though.
    • castillar76 1y ago
      Side note that not remembering it has nothing to do with memory deterioration. Neurons that fire together wire together: if you haven’t used that particular piece of information in a while, your brain gradually clears out links to it to make room for stuff you are currently referencing. So not remembering it is really more a demonstration of how much ICQ use has deteriorated. :)
      • eszed 1y ago
        I know. I probably hadn't thought of that number even once in the preceeding fifteen years, and yet it was still there. I had a stroke in 2020, prior to which random detritus like my ICQ number stuck around, along with genuinely useful things like a dozen or two poems that I love. Some of those I've tried to re-learn, and they no longer stick for very long. It is what it is, and I'm not objectively badly off - I'm still able to do a cognitively-demanding job, for instance - but I miss those little things.
• kesor 1y ago
  Skype ; Because my R.I.P. grandma was using it to talk to her relatives overseas just like she would use a phone, but it didn't cost an arm and a leg (unlike phone calls).
  • silcoon 1y ago
    One of the best P2P software at the time. It was so simple and effective and allowed people to call real phones with Skype credit. A genius product ripped my Microsoft. Have you used Microsoft Teams recently? Bad UI, hard to configure external hardware and good level of incompatibility, missing the good old "Echo / Sound Test Service". At a point I even installed Skype of my old Android but was sucking up too much battery.
    • Marsymars 1y ago
      Not just "of the time" - if you need to call international numbers as of 2025, there's no good replacement for Skype from earlier this year.
    • hulitu 1y ago
      > One of the best P2P software at the time. and, after it was bought by Microsoft, the best spyware at the time. When it was running, the harddrive LED will be always on, just like network activity.
  • stn8188 1y ago
    I had a similar pleasant experience with Skype. Back in 2009, I was deployed to the Persian Gulf. This was before ubiquitous cell phones (at least, I left my cell phone back in the US). Phone cards worked to call home, but my cheap solution was to use Skype from my handheld PSP using Wi-Fi from a cafe. It worked out great for me at least, and I'll always appreciate that.
  • mikewarot 1y ago
    I used skype because Ward Christensen insisted on it... now both are gone. 8( My friends now use Discord, and it's an acceptable substitute, like Skype it's always pushing a ton of features and updates I didn't ask for. ;-)
• klabetron 1y ago
  Gawker.
• kesor 1y ago
  CueCat it was an affordable barcode scanner that anyone could have connected to their computer, and it scanned barcodes. It took almost two decades before we could finally do it again with our mobile phones.
• emigre 1y ago
  The Atom code editor. It was good to have a mainstream alternative to VS Code, it's a pity it reached end-of-life.
  • _bent 1y ago
    iirc Atom was the original Electron project. Eventually VS Code came along and took all the good ideas - the modularity through extensions, and Electron / web based cross platform, but made it really fast and added IDE like language support through LSP. Atom may be dead now, but the idea lives on in VS Code and the new project by the original developers of Atom: Zed
    • latexr 1y ago
      > iirc Atom was the original Electron project. Indeed (and the names are a clue). More specifically, Electron came out of the ideas in Atom, not the other way around.
      • gimenete 1y ago
        Electron was originally named Atom Shell https://www.electronjs.org/blog/electron/ https://www.electronjs.org/blog/electron/ Atom Shell/Electron was from the very beginning something you could use separately from Atom as a framework for creating desktop apps using Chromium/Node.js.
        • latexr 1y ago
          You’re right, I misremembered that. Thank you for the correction.
  • latexr 1y ago
    Atom was by GitHub, and VS Code by Microsoft. As soon as Microsoft bought VS Code, Atom’s fate was sealed.
    • latexr 1y ago
• croisillon 1y ago
  Zenbe, a cute and practical webmail interface. Bought and killed by Facebook way too soon!
• manmal 1y ago
  WebOS, the palm smartphone OS. It was beautiful at the time and predicted many of the swipe gestures iOS and Android adopted much later.
  • youngtaff 1y ago
    Now in LG TVs
    • heavyset_go 1y ago
      What LG did to WebOS is a crime. It's basically a locked down Android TV clone now, but worse. I still pine for features that Palm/HP WebOS had, Android and iOS are still downgrades to this day
  • heavyset_go 1y ago
    WebOS premiered with true multitasking using the card metaphor for apps. It took years for Android to adopt it, and then iOS, and even today, it's a copy of what WebOS did, but somehow worse.
• ghaering 1y ago
  Mozilla heka. As far as data collection and processing goes, we are still stuck with Logstash after all of these years. Heka promised a much more efficient solution, being implemented with Go and Lua plugins.
• can16358p 1y ago
  All those modular smartphones, and also Amazon's Fire phone. Why? Obviously close-to-zero market. It was unbelievable how those people though those projects would even succeed.
• KronisLV 1y ago
  Sourcetrail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sourcetrail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sourcetrail People talk so much about how you need to write code that fits well within the rest of the codebase, but what tools do we have to explore codebases and see what is connected to what? Clicking through files feels kind of stupid because if you have to work with changes that involve 40 files, good luck keeping any of that in your working memory. In my experience, the JetBrains dependency graphs also aren't good enough. Sourcetrail was a code visualization tool that allowed you to visualize those dependencies and click around the codebase that way, see what methods are connected to what and so on, thanks to a lovely UI. I don't think it was enough alone, but I absolutely think we need something like this: https://www.dbvis.com/features/database-management/#explore-visualize https://www.dbvis.com/features/database-management/#explore-... but for your code, especially for codebases with hundreds of thousands or like above a million SLoC. Example: https://github.com/CoatiSoftware/Sourcetrail/blob/master/docs/readme/user_interface.png https://github.com/CoatiSoftware/Sourcetrail/blob/master/doc... Another example: https://github.com/CoatiSoftware/Sourcetrail/blob/master/docs/documentation/graph_view_graph.png https://github.com/CoatiSoftware/Sourcetrail/blob/master/doc... I yearn to some day view entire codebases as graphs with similarly approachable visualization, where all the dependencies are highlighted when I click an element. This could also go so, so much further - you could have a debugger breakpoint set and see the variables at each place, alongside being able to visually see how code is called throughout the codebase, or hell, maybe even visualize every possible route that could be taken.
  • saratogacx 1y ago
    There's a commercial tool that has been available for a long time called Source Insight[1]. It isn't exactly cheap but I've used it in the past for both code splunking and editing and it's was a pretty useful tool. [1] https://www.sourceinsight.com/ https://www.sourceinsight.com/
    • KronisLV 1y ago
      Thanks for the link!
• Havoc 1y ago
  Pascal/Delphi - especially in the educational context. Crazy fast compiler so doesn't frustrate trial & erroring students, decent type system without the wildness of say rust and all the basic programming building blocks you want students to grasp are present without language specific funkiness.
  • le-mark 1y ago
    Iirc Delphi didn’t have threads, sockets, or OS integration (signals, file watching …). So it wasn’t suited to systems programming ie servers and services. It nailed gui applications, and that was a lot. Maybe freepascal has threads and sockets but imo it was too late.
    • detaro 1y ago
      Maybe not in the earliest versions, but by the late 90s, when I learned it, it certainly had those things.
    • Havoc 1y ago
      Not sure earlier versions, but Delphi 5 (~1999) definitely had all those. Plausible that it was added much later than in C/C++ world though
    • chadcmulligan 1y ago
      I have written a number of services in Delphi, some 20 years ago, all works fine.
    • rs186 1y ago
      Eh, sounds like that wouldn't be a problem for education purposes as the parent suggests? You need to be doing some really specific to leverage threads/file watching. And people probably use C to teach threads anyway. Of course, being a good teaching language probably doesn't make the language popular or even survive. Python is so widely used not necessarily because it's simple to learn but because of its ecosystem.
    • badsectoracula 1y ago
• donatj 1y ago
  Quartz Composer - Apple's "patch-based" visual programming environment. Drag out a bunch of nodes, wire them together, build a neat little GUI. 10+ years ago I'd regularly build all sorts of little utilities with it. It was surprisingly easy to use it to tap into things that are otherwise a lot more work. For instance I used it to monitor the data coming from a USB device. Like 3 nodes and 3 patches to make all of that work. Working little GUI app in seconds. Apple hasn't touched it since 2016, I kind of hope it makes a comeback given Blender and more so Unreal Engine giving people a taste of the node based visual programming life. You can still download it from Apple, and it still technically works but a lot of the most powerful nodes are broken in the newer OS's. I'd love to see the whole thing revitalized.
  • mattkevan 1y ago
    I loved quartz composer. It made it really easy to build all sorts of motion graphics. I’d see it used a lot at gigs to create audio-driven visuals. There was even a pretty cool VJ app built on it. I’ve tried things like Touch Designer and Max MSP but they’re too heavy to just pick up and play with. QC was the right balance between simplicity and power.
  • wfn 1y ago
    > Quartz Composer Have you looked at https://vvvv.org/ https://vvvv.org/ ? Maybe it's still comparatively too heavy but imho it's not that heavy (cf. touch designer and the likes). I want to play with it some more myself...
• albertoCaroM 1y ago
  I loved onivim2
• G_o_D 1y ago
  JavaScript Style Sheets (JSS) Introduced by netscape navigator 4, never came into mainstream as people were reluctant to give up CSS
• pflenker 1y ago
  10/GUI did some deep thinking about the limitations and potential of the (then-fairly new) multi touch input method. I wished something more had come out of it, instead it stayed a niche concept art video that is mostly forgotten now. I’m not arguing the solutions it outlined are good, but I think some more discussion around how we interact with touch screens would be needed. Instead, we are still typing on a layout that was invented for mechanical typewriters - in 2025, on our touch screens. https://youtu.be/zWz1KbknIZk?si=LWGsLQjFTWBOvzN- https://youtu.be/zWz1KbknIZk?si=LWGsLQjFTWBOvzN-
• rishabhd 1y ago
  Metasploit Incident Response Vehicle (MIRV). Was super pumped when it was announced, it later died in obscurity.
• smokel 1y ago
  The TUNES [1] operating system and programming language project. The reason for its failure are described perfectly on the archival website: > TUNES started in 1992-95 as an operating system project, but was never clearly defined, and it succumbed to design-by-committee syndrome and gradually failed. Compared to typical OS projects it had very ambitious goals, which you may find interesting. [1] http://tunes.org/ http://tunes.org/
  • zzo38computer 1y ago
    I had seen it before and I did find it interesting, as well as some other ideas from other systems (including Amiga, TRON, capability-based systems, etc), and I had some of my own ideas. (I had also thought of some similar ideas independently, but not all of them.) I do not completely agree with all of the ideas. Also, I think that a new computer hardware design can be made to support the new operating system (although emulation is also possible). (My own operating system idea currently does not have a name, and has some similar ideas from TUNES (and TRON, etc) and many differences.)
• myself248 1y ago
  The Ricochet network. A packet mesh network providing ISDN speeds in the dialup era, wirelessly. They burned through $5B of 1999 dollars, building out a network in 23 cities, and had effectively zero customers. Finally shut down in 2001. All their marketing was focused on "mobile professionals", whoever those were, while ignoring home users who were clamoring for faster internet where other ISPs dragged their feet. Today, 5G femtocells have replicated some of the concept (radically small cell radius to increase geographic frequency reuse), but without the redundancy -- a femtocell that loses its uplink is dead in the water, not serving as a relay node. A Ricochet E-radio that lost its uplink (but still had power) would simply adjust its routing table and continue operating.
  • evgen 1y ago
    I loved my Ricochet modems so damn much. Sitting in a coffeeshop in Palo Alto with an Apple Powerbook and a second generation Ricochet modem rocking web browsing and ssh sessions at 56k when wifi was unknown to the general public. I still have a couple in a box somewhere and I am tempted to see if I can get them into star mode.
    • whalesalad 1y ago
      I can totally see clabretro or cathode ray dude doing a video with you on this
    • myself248 1y ago
      I have a bunch (still not nearly as many as I'd like) and never got starmode working, and they finally dropped it from recent kernels so it'd be a whoooole lot of learning to try again. But simple point-to-point dialup (using my XP box as a RAS/DUN server) served me well back in the day, even after the network went down, because I put my home node as high up as I could, and it would get me roughly a half-mile radius around the house. Loooong before 802.11ah! It was fast enough for VNC.
  • threemux 1y ago
    Ricochet was super cool. Way ahead of its time. There's even a Joel blog post about it: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/12/20/the-ricochet-wireless-modem-a-review/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/12/20/the-ricochet-wirel...
• Simon_O_Rourke 1y ago
  CORBA, it got hopelessly complex but it's full potential was never reached as the greed heads took it over.
• KaiserPro 1y ago
  ADSL in the UK. BT had this grand vision for basically providing rich multi-media through the phone line, but in ~1998. Think a mix of on-demand cable and "teleconferencing" with TV based internet (ceefax/red button on steriods) It would have been revolutionary and kick started the UK's jump into online rich media. However it wouldnt have got past the regulators as both sky and NTL(now virgin) would have protested loudly.
• gjvc 1y ago
  Google Wave
• iseanstevens 1y ago
  Dreamweaver or some other real WYSISYG web page editor that could maybe deal with very basic JavaScript. I just wanna make a mostly static site with links in and out of my domain. Maybe a light bit of interactivity for things like search that autocompletes.
• smashah 1y ago
  Theranos
  • symlinkk 1y ago
    Have to agree. This whole procedure of booking an appointment with a GP who then books you an appointment with a lab who then takes your blood is a huge waste of time. The technology is largely there for people to continuously monitor their health in real time, you see this in smartwatches as feature by feature slowly trickles in.
    • smashah 1y ago
      Their offering is inevitable, at least on a less bombastic scale (e.g a few drops instead of just one).
• gtsnexp 1y ago
  OS/2: the future that never was
• syngrog66 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • DaSHacka 1y ago
    So you think the 'prime time' for American democracy was not in the past, nor the present, but will eventually happen in the future? Or are you claiming that it died a long, long, time ago, and now is when we really need it, but it wasn't needed before? Is American democracy a 'project'?
    • ofalkaed 1y ago
      I am generally not one to engage in online political discussion, especially when it stems from such a glib and self serving post as GP but it is my thread and I am running out of time in the year to hit my quota (1). Project seems a fitting description of American democracy and the project aspect is part of what makes it American. We the people are working towards that more perfect Union even if at times it does not seem it, the system mostly works but there is no straight line between where we started and that more perfect Union and whatever that more perfect union is, is not a constant. We do get lost along the way, take round about paths, sidestep, go backwards, etc, it is a requirement of the shared aim and sometimes a step backwards is actually a step forward. We can't achieve that more perfect Union, all we can do is keep trying and hope we are more or less going in the correct general direction. As long as American democracy keeps evolving it is alive and has held up better than one would expect. For at least a century the country has been run by parties that supposedly want to kill American democracy, strangle it with their ideology and defeat the enemies of American democracy which just happen to be their political rivals; we would live in a utopia if it was not for <political party>. But they keep failing and the project continues on.
• hhh 1y ago
  0x10c, would be an amazing mmo.
• Aldipower 1y ago
  MySpace, Soundcloud, etc.. A place where artists and consumers could freely communicated and socialize without hazzle. Died because of: Stupidity, commercialisation and walled-gardening.
• csomar 1y ago
  Namecoin and Decentralized DNS.
  • lyu07282 1y ago
    Web 3.0 in general is pretty much dead, federal services are not a replacement, we really needed decentralized services right about now
• LargoLasskhyfv 1y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framework_(office_suite) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framework_(office_suite)
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• pards 1y ago
  Tiny Thief [0]. My kids loved that game. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_Thief https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_Thief
• UD_Pickups 1y ago
  Founder perspective: “avoid patents by staying 20 years behind” is the tragedy. I published a 2-page CC0 initiative that splits protection into two layers: • GLOBAL layer — fast, low-friction recognition for non-strategic inventions • LOCAL-STRATEGIC layer — conventional national control for sensitive tech Goal: cut admin drag/time-to-market while keeping sovereignty intact. Brief (CC0): https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17305774 https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17305774 Curious: would this structure have saved any of the projects mentioned here?
• silvaadrian 1y ago
  [dead]
• Qem 1y ago
  FirefoxOS
• renehsz 1y ago
  The Plan 9 operating system. It's the closest thing to a Unix successor we ever got, taking the "everything is a file" philosophy to another level and allowing to easily share those files over the network to build distributed systems. Accessing any remote resources is easy and robust on Plan9, meanwhile on other systems we need to install specialized software with bad interoperability for each individual use case. Plan9 also had some innovative UI features, such as mouse chording to edit text, nested window managers, the Plumber to run user-configurable commands on known text patterns system-wide, etc. Its distributed nature should have meant it's perfect for today's world with mobile, desktop, cloud, and IoT devices all connected to each other. Instead, we're stuck with operating systems that were never designed for that. There are still active forks of Plan9 such as 9front, but the original from Bell Labs is dead. The reasons it died are likely: - Legal challenges (Plan9 license, pointless lawsuits, etc.) meant it wssn't adopted by major players in the industry. - Plan9 was a distributed OS during a time when having a local computer became popular and affordable, while using a terminal to access a centrally managed computer fell out of fashion (though the latter sort of came back in a worse fashion with cloud computing). - Bad marketing and posing itself as merely a research OS meant they couldn't capitalize on the .com boom. - AT&T lost its near endless source of telephone revenue. Bell Labs was sold multiple times over the coming years, a lot of the Unix/Plan9 guys went to other companies like Google.
  • tjchear 1y ago
    What’s stopping other Unix-like systems from adopting the everything is a file philosophy?
    • c0balt 1y ago
      Probably that not everything can be cleanly abstracted as a file. One might want to, e. G., have fine control over a how a network connection is handled. You can abstract that as a file but it becomes increasingly complicated and can make API design painful.
      • Someone 1y ago
        > Probably that not everything can be cleanly abstracted as a file. I would say almost nothing can be cleanly abstracted as a file. That’s why we got ioctl (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ioctl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ioctl), which is a bad API (calls mean “do something with this file descriptor” with only conventions introducing some consistency)
• Corrado 1y ago
  I really liked Google Circles, a feature of Google+ social media. It allowed you to target content to specific groups of users. You could have a "family" circle or a "work" circle and not have to worry about cross posting something accidentally. It was a small thing but it made it really easy to manage your posts.
  • dysoco 1y ago
    Yes, this was the ideal system for a social network imho, but it should've been integrated into an already existing network, G+ was in an odd spot between Twitter and Facebook. Years later they briefly added Circles to Twitter and I thought that was great, not as useful as G+ Circles (since you could only have a single "private" circle to share to) but I very much used it and my mutuals as well... just to have Musk remove the only useful feature they had in years.
• zweifuss 1y ago
  MS Sidewinder Force Feedback Pro (1997) and Sidewinder Force Feedback 2 (USB). You can buy similar today, but nowhere near the pricepoint. Also the out of the box support by Windows has vanished, and therefore the incentive of game developers to include force feedback.
  • Hobadee 1y ago
    I still have my MS Force Feedback 2, and it still works great! I heard that some patent troll got a hold of the patent for force feedback joysticks, and all manufacturers just gave up on them because of the troll. The patent expired recently IIRC, so hopefully people will start making them again soon.
• FranklinMaillot 1y ago
  Firefox panorama: showed a view all your tabs as thumbnails and let you organize them into groups visually.
• Joel_Mckay 1y ago
  Knowing when to say "no" to a project is an important skill. One always must define a one sentence goal or purpose, before teams think about how to build something. Cell processors, because most coders can't do parallelism well Altera consumer FPGA, as they chose behavioral rather than declarative best practices... then the Intel merger... metastability in complex systems is hard, and most engineers can't do parallelism well... World Wide Web, because social-media and Marketers Dozens of personal projects, because sometimes things stop being fun. =3
• jFriedensreich 1y ago
  netflix falcor. the graphql hype killed a much better alternative for many usecases. there were only a few missing pieces and improvements such as a proxy based adapter layer for popular frontend frameworks. Im now the lonely last user hoping to find a way to reboot development
• alganet 1y ago
  XUL
• mattmaroon 1y ago
  Google Reader. Still would use it.
• kimchidude 1y ago
  There was a virtual platform through which to learn Chinese called ‘Zon’. Someone obviously put years of work into it but no one ever joined and it turned into this great looking ghost town.
• ozgor 1y ago
  Lanyrd.com & slideshare.com Nothing ever came close to easily find conferences to attend, and find the slides and conversation around them
• lormayna 1y ago
  * bzr: I always found git too much complex and not really ergonomic. I really liked bzr simplicity * Rethinkdb: I made some small projects with it in the past and it was easy to easy
  • follower 1y ago
    > bzr While not perfect, I have some hope that Jujutsu may be a path forward for improved ergonomics in version control: https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj/blob/main/README.md#introduction https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj/blob/main/README.md#introductio...
• anticodon 1y ago
  Plone CMS. When it appeared in 2001, there was nothing comparable. I'm not sure there still is. It was very flexible, allowed to build complex websites from components. Many ideas were pretty novel, at least I've never seen them in any web framework/CMS before. It still exists but nowhere as popular as it was in 2000-2010s.
• Chanderton 1y ago
  First Class and Hotline. Server/Client. First Class had broader userbase, such as schools and organizations in the groupware/collaborative segment (but also Mac user groups and so on). First Class was a comercial product (the server). It had filesharing (UL/DL), it had it's own desktop, mail, chat, IM, voice mail and more. Started out on Mac, but later became cross platform. Still you can find presentations and setup guides on old forgotten University/Schools websites. Hotline on the other hand, was very easy to setup and also pretty lightweight. It had a server tracker. In the beginning it was Mac only. Lot's of warez servers, but also different (non-warez) communities. It had filesharing (ul/dl from the file area), chat and a newsboard. The decline came after it's developers released the Windows versions. Most servers became clickbait pron/warez with malware etc. People started to move away to web and it Hotline basically died out. Now, there was some open source/clone projects that kept the spirit alive. But after a few years, web forums, torrents and other p2p-apps took over. But there is some servers running still in 2025 and open source server/client software still developed. Compared to First Class. Hotline was the Wild West. It only took 15 minutes to set up your own server and announce it on a server tracker (or keep it private). When i use Discord and other apps/services, it's not hard to think of FC/HL. But then, they were solutions of it's time. More about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FirstClass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FirstClass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotline_Communications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotline_Communications https://www.macintoshrepository.org/6691-hotline-connect-client-server-tracker- https://www.macintoshrepository.org/6691-hotline-connect-cli... https://github.com/mierau/hotline https://github.com/mierau/hotline https://github.com/jhalter/mobius https://github.com/jhalter/mobius
  • gregsadetsky 1y ago
    I ran a hotline server in my formative teenage years (on a server in my bedroom with a static ip), and we all hung out there. It was absolutely great.
• TriangleEdge 1y ago
  Google Stadia. I want to try games, but don't want to own a tv, desktop, or windows anything.
  • nylonstrung 1y ago
    Xbox cloud gaming works on Linux via a supported browser
• Angostura 1y ago
  Google Wave. It was horrible from a performance point of view, but was really interesting to use. Some of its features have made their way into the Google docs etc ecosystem and Office 365. But not all
• Razengan 1y ago
  All my ideas :') Also, I did not experience them personally, but I love watching computing history videos on YouTube, and a lot of the computers and operating systems from the 1980s and early 1990s got buried too soon, mostly because of their owners being short-sighted idiots in not realizing the full potential of what computers and video games could become, and having wildly successful hits on their hands with legions of faithful fans but not knowing how to build on that success or what the fans actually wanted to see in updated hardware.
• 1970-01-01 1y ago
  IPv6 - Everything was supposed to be flat, devices with just one unique IP addr. Nope.
  • kstrauser 1y ago
    It accounts for half of all Google’s customer traffic. It’s not dead, not by a long shot. If you have a mobile phone, you’re almost certainly using IPv6 today.
    • 1970-01-01 1y ago
      The flat Internet is dead.
      • kstrauser 1y ago
        Ah, I see the part you’re emphasizing. Yeah. That still stings. It didn’t have to be this way.
• _bent 1y ago
  Lytro light field cameras. The tech was impressive and the company was able to put two products on to the shelves, though unfortunately they hadn't quite reached the image quality needed for professional photographers. But now with the new Meta Ray-Bans featuring a light field display and with new media like gaussian splats we're on the verge of being able to make full usage of all the data those cameras were able capture, beyond the demos of "what if you could fix your focus after shooting" of back then. Beyond high tech, there's a big market for novelty kinda-bad cameras like Polaroids or Instax. The first Lytro has the perfect form factor for that and was already bulky enough that slapping a printer on it wouldn't have hurt.
  • s3p 1y ago
    Don't phones do this now? I remember Lytro cameras, they were really exciting.
    • phire 1y ago
      Phone cameras fake it. They don't capture a light field like Lytro did, they capture a regular image with a very deep depth of field, extract a depth map (usually with machine learning, but some phones augment it with stereoscopy or even LIDAR on high end iPhones) and then selectively blur based on depth.
  • bobmcnamara 1y ago
    > unfortunately they hadn't quite reached the image quality needed for professional photographers. I always wondered about that - since it works by interleaving pixels at different focal depths, there's always going to be a resolution tradeoff that a single-plane focus camera wouldn't. It's such a cool idea though, and no more difficult to manufacturer than a sensor + micro lens array.
    • summa_tech 1y ago
      In fact, the Lytro Illum (the big one) had a really nice, very flexible, bright super-zoom lens. If you ever wondered how that was achieved: having the microlens array and a light field sensor (1) allows relaxing so many aberration constraints on the lens that you could have a light, compact super-zoom. (1) it's not really different focal depths, it's actually more like multiple independent apertures at different spatial locations, each with a lower resolution sensor behind it - stereovision on steroids (stereoids?)
• teddyh 1y ago
  I remember being quite disappointed that PowerPC did not, contrary to expectations, dethrone the Intel hegemony.
  • morshu9001 1y ago
    Yes. At least Apple Silicon kinda did it, and it's RISC too.
• MomsAVoxell 1y ago
  Visix Vibe. It was a "WYSIWYG"-type visual programming environment for .. Java. It had its own cross platform UI and other frameworks too, so you could "write once in Java, and ship on all the things" .. well theoretically. It got abandoned too soon. But it was quite fun to build apps with it for a while, almost Delphi- like. I always wonder if it went open source, if things would have been different vis a vis Flash, etc.
• MomsAVoxell 1y ago
  SGI Irix, and SGI hardware in general, should be revived and return to the scene. I'd love to have an SGI laptop. Or an SGI cell phone or VR headset.
• ibaikov 1y ago
  Artifact by instagram founders. I discovered it (and thought it's great) by reading their termination announcement.
• hmcamp 1y ago
  Came here to say Google Wave
• carlesfe 1y ago
  I built a chatbot startup in 2015. It integrated with Whatsapp (which was possible at the time with some hacks), and had: - Multimodality: Text/audio/images input and output. Integrated OCR. - Connection with an asterisk server, it could send and receive voice phone calls! I used it to call for pizzas to a local place via whatsapp. This was prior to Google's famous demo calling a hairdresser to book a haircut. - It understood humor and message sentiment, told jokes and sometimes even chimed in with a "haha" if somebody said something funny in a group chat or sent an appropriate gif reaction - Memory (facts database) - Useful features such as scheduling, polling, translations, image search, etc. Regarding the tech, I used external models (Watson was pretty good at the time), plus classical NLP processing and symbolic reasoning that I learned in college. Nobody understood the point of it (where's the GUI? how do I know what to ask it? customers asked) and I didn't make a single dime out of the project. I closed it a couple years later. Sometimes I wonder what could've been of it.
• sidcool 1y ago
  Google wave
• tuna74 1y ago
  I am the only one that liked stereoscopic 3D. Up the frame rate (like in games and some movies) and it looks great!
• devl547 1y ago
  Gnome Conduit software. Used to synchronize a lot of my local-first data (calendar, photos, music) to different online services. Nice to see in one place where everything goes and what is the sync status.
• gorfian_robot 1y ago
  killed more like it: but I miss the old Sun/Solaris/Sparc days. make hardware expensive again!
• esafak 1y ago
  The prismatic news reader. It solved recommendations before the rest, but died because news died, and presumably made little money. Their attributed recommendations model is worth emulation. I don't remember if they supported both positive- and negative feedback, but Google news recommendation today do support attributed negative feedback.
• cyanbane 1y ago
  Yahoo Pipes.
• teo_zero 1y ago
  Gitless. I'm a fan of software that allows you to get your feet wet with simple concepts and progressively add complex ones when you feel you're ready. Gitless was my introduction to git.
  • follower 1y ago
    Just mentioned this in another reply but Jujutsu may be of interest as a maintained alternative to gitless: https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj/blob/main/README.md#introduction https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj/blob/main/README.md#introductio...
    • teo_zero 1y ago
      Thank you. I've just run through a jj tutorial and it indeed mirrors my mental model of commits, just like gitless did. I'm sure I'll become a fan!
• kmoser 1y ago
  Prodigy (the online service). I'm not saying I wish it was still alive, but it contained some amazing technology for the time (mid- to late 1980s), much of which is now present in web tech: - Client software that ran a VM which received "objects" from a central server (complete with versioning so it would intelligently download new objects when necessary). Versions were available for IBM (DOS), Windows, and Mac. Think of it as an early browser. - Multiple access points and large internal network for storing and delivering content nationwide. This was their proprietary CDN. - Robust programming language (TBOL/PAL) for developing client-side apps which could also interact with the servers. Just like Javascript. - Vector (NAPLPS) graphics for fast downloading (remember, Prodigy started in the days when modems maxed out at 1200 baud); later they added JPG support. - Vast array of online services: shopping, banking, nationwide news, BBSes, mail (before Internet email was popular), even airline reservations. All this was run by a partnership between IBM, Sears, and CBS (the latter dropped out early). They were the Google of the time.
  • skoskie 1y ago
    Good times. I used to fire it up, go eat breakfast, and come back just in time to see the weather forecast.
• Marsymars 1y ago
  The Starling Home Hub. Best way to bring Google/Nest hardware into HomeKit. Killed by Trump's tariffs.
• Terretta 1y ago
  Ray Ozzie's Groove, by Groove Networks, embraced and extinguished by MSFT: Ozzie, who had previously worked at IBM, was particularly interested in the challenge of remote collaboration. His vision culminated in the creation of Groove, which was released in 2001. The software distinguished itself from other collaboration tools of the time by allowing users to share files and work on documents in real-time—even without a continuous internet connection. Groove’s architecture was innovative in that it utilized a peer-to-peer networking model, enabling users to interact directly with each other and share information seamlessly. This approach allowed for a level of flexibility and responsiveness that was often missing in traditional client-server models. Asynchronous collaboration was a key feature, where team members could work on projects without needing to be online simultaneously. https://umatechnology.org/what-happened-to-microsoft-groove/ https://umatechnology.org/what-happened-to-microsoft-groove/ We built some things on it, was like CRDT for all the things.
• chucky_z 1y ago
  systemd-fleet, by the original CoreOS folks. https://github.com/coreos/fleet https://github.com/coreos/fleet I used this when it was brand new for a bit and it was so incredibly smooth and worked so well. It solved the problem of controlling systemd units remotely so well. I'm pretty sure the only reason it never actually took off was kubernetes and coreos's acquisition, however it actively solves the 'other half' of the k8s problem which is managing the state of the host itself.
• raphinou 1y ago
  Docker Swarm, so much easier to use than k8s. Still my preferred solution for hosting web apps.
• cranberryturkey 1y ago
  Zymotv
• tech234a 1y ago
  Cooperative Linux (coLinux) seemed like a cool concept. It let you run the Linux kernel alongside the Windows kernel while allowing both full access to the hardware. Unfortunately it hasn't fully made the jump from 32-bit to 64-bit. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_Linux [2]: http://www.colinux.org/ http://www.colinux.org/
• syncr0 1y ago
  Pocket. Never actually “read” anything later. But the dopamine hit of saving something with the click of a button to maybe find it later or tag. Yes there are solid alternatives, but Pocket had something sentimental about it.
• Linux-Fan 1y ago
  The signature function of the German ID card (“neuer Personalausweis”). Its 2025 and we still haven't solved secure online identification and we are still not using end-to-end encryption for e-mail, most e-mail is not even signed. Interaction with state agencies is still mostly via paper-based mail. The only successfully deployed online offer of the german state administration seems to be the online portal for tax filings “elster.de”. The use of a private key on the national ID card would have been able to provide all this and more using standard protocols. At least for identification, there is an expensive effort to re-design something similar in a smartphone-centric way and with less security and not based on standard approaches called “EUDI wallets”. For encrypted communication the agreed-on standard seems to be “log in to our portal with HTTPS and use our proprietary interfaces to send and receive messages”... Why did it die: Too expensive (~30€/year for certificate, >100€ for reader one time) and too complicated to use. Not enough positve PR. Acceptance at state-provided sites was added too late. In modern times, everything must be done with the smartphone, handling of physical cards is considered backwards hence this is probably not going to come back... Edit: Anothther simiarly advanced technoloy that also seems to have been replaced by inferiror substitute smartphone: HBCI banking (a standard...) using your actual bank card + reader device to authenticate transactions... replaced by proprietary app on proprietary smartphone OS...
  • Avamander 1y ago
    Some countries turned it into a part of their national ID system. Has worked great for the past 15 years. You can get a card reader for less than 20€. Works under any OS really. I can't remember the last time I got physical mail that wasn't some item I ordered. S/MIME died because it is in many ways worse than CDOC and ASiC-E containers over email. People are reviving such approaches with EIDAS2 and from that ERDS (Electronic Registered Delivery Service). But there are no EU-wide implementations as of yet. Those app-based approaches have also appeared, because well, they don't require a card reader. Though I'd rather see something NFC-based with a physical card. I personally find phone vendors' HSMs (and their equivalents) haven't seen enough scrutiny. Plus the apps are proprietary. The demand is definitely there, but I predict it'll take at least a decade for the rest of the EU to catching up to Estonia, Finland and a few others. Just 25 years later.
• MarsIronPI 1y ago
  The Lisp machine. I love Lisp, and I love the idea of every part of the system being a Lisp program that can be patched and modified at runtime by the user. Obviously in this day and age some security mechanisms would need to be introduced, but the system design is my hacker's dream.
• morshu9001 1y ago
  - Apple AirPort. Took a long time for advanced wifi solutions that "just work" to fill its place, and those are the Nest/Google things that have bs attached like mic+assistant. Unifi is too hard for consumers. - Gnome2 dropped from Ubuntu in favor of Unity - Ford Crown Victoria
  • sedawkgrep 1y ago
    > - Ford Crown Victoria You can't just drop that and not say why...
    • morshu9001 1y ago
      Haha true. Well I've got an ex-cop one and love how it drives. There was probably a legit reason for ending it, just too bad they never refreshed such a cool, iconic, reliable car with a better powertrain. By 2010, an old NA V8 with 4-speed slushbox was no longer viable whether it was meant for performance or efficiency. Needed ESC by law too. I don't care if it'd be turbo-4 or EV, it'd be awesome. Some people claim that EPA standards killed large sedans because of how SUVs have a lower bar. I don't know, maybe people want the room. But maybe an updated Vic would've sold well to fleets based on reputation. Dodge kept selling the Charger to civilians and police. Also, insert usual spiel about new cars having overcomplicated controls and hard to replace parts. Hot/cold knob doesn't take my eyes off the road.
  • al_borland 1y ago
    > Took a long time for advanced wifi solutions that "just work" to fill its place What is the modern-day successor? You only mentioned what isn't good. I loved the AirPort routers. I found it odd that Apple exited the market just as everyone else entered. I ended up getting a Linksys as a troubleshooting step when I was having internet issues. I don't think the AirPort was the issue, but after migrating, it didn't seem worth going back to a router that was effectively end of life. I still remember many years ago having a Sonos system and calling support due to some issues I was having. When they asked what type of router I had and I mentioned it was an AirPort, they immediately moved on to something else being the issue. The reputation was so solid that support wouldn't even bother troubleshooting it.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• educasean 1y ago
  Google Stadia. They had built a solid streaming platform for low latency cloud gaming but failed hard on actually having interesting games to play on it. You just can't launch a gaming platform with a handful of games that have been available everywhere and expect it to succeed.
  • morshu9001 1y ago
    I liked Stadia. There are plenty of competitors, but Google had the technical edge.
  • timonofathens 1y ago
    +1 I really loved Stadia I had a good connection and sometimes I forgot I was streaming a game. At least the died gracefully, I played for free and also got a chromecast + controller out of the deal
  • joquarky 1y ago
    I liked the idea, but Google already had a reputation of killing off good projects when Stadia was launched, so I didn't want to buy games that would disappear when Google got bored of maintaining it.
• modzu 1y ago
  dials and knobs
• preezer 1y ago
  Easy to answer.... webOS
• csense 1y ago
  Java Applets. All the buzz in the 2020's about WASM giving websites the ability to run compiled code at native speed, letting pages network with your server via WebRTC? Yeah, you could do that with Java Applets in 1999. If Sun (and later Oracle) had been less bumbling and more visionary -- if they hadn't forced you to use canvas instead of integrating Java's display API with the DOM, if they had a properly designed sandbox that wasn't full of security vulnerabilities? Java and the JVM could have co-evolved with JavaScript as a second language of the Web. Now Java applets are well and truly dead; the plugin's been removed from browsers, and even the plugin API's that allowed it to function have been deprecated and removed (I think; I'm not 100% sure about that).
  • matt_heimer 1y ago
    Java eventually got a DOM API but it was too late. https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/deployment/applet/manipulatingDOMFromApplet.html https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/deployment/applet/ma...
  • daxfohl 1y ago
    Java never had a real display API. I guess there was swing, but that was very ugly and stuck out like a sore thumb on a web page (or desktop for that matter). JavaFX eventually became a thing, and was probably better, but for whatever reason never really caught on.
• Wistar 1y ago
  I sure liked Aldus Freehand a lot more than Adobe Illustrator although it has been so long that I don’t remember specifics other than I generally understood how to use it a lot better than Illustrator.
  • follower 1y ago
    I vaguely wondered if FreeHand would make an appearance in this thread. :) Two features that come to mind as IIRC being unique (as compared to Illustrator) were multi-page documents and multiple page size multi-page documents. Ideal for the complete standard set of company branded print documents: business card, "With Compliments" slip, and letterhead. :D Adobe's acquisition of Macromedia and subsequent killing of (the IMO superior) FreeHand contributed directly to my subsequent decision to avoid closed source application software--especially for creative tools--even if alternatives were "technically inferior". (And, indeed, "creative tool killed/hampered for business reasons" is a story which has been repeated elsewhere multiple times in the quarter century[0] since.) While Inkscape is still missing features compared to FreeHand it is however also still here many years later and is what I've used ever since when I need 2D vector design software. (Although I've also been keeping an eye on Graphite: https://graphite.rs https://graphite.rs) ---- [0] Oh, weird, apparently it's actually less than 25 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_FreeHand#Adobe_FreeHand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_FreeHand#Adobe_FreeHand Seems I've been holding the grudge for less time than I thought. :D
• Einenlum 1y ago
  Maybe 10 years ago I discovered Stumble upon, a website which allowed you to randomly get a page on the internet based on your previous likes/dislikes and interests. I absolutely loved it. You could find some very niche pages. I guess this is what Kagi Small Web tries to achieve somehow, but without the personalization. They replaced StumbleUpon with "Mix", whatever it is. Probably because they didn't know how to earn money from it. Sad.
• daxfohl 1y ago
  Blackberry. Back in the Blackberry days I never pined for anything resembling a smartphone. Other than built-in GPS, I'm not sure my life is improved or worsened by having a computer on my person 24/7. That wasn't the case pre-internet or pre-cellphone, when I remember pining for something resembling those technologies.
  • castillar76 1y ago
    Agreed, and it’s not just the hardware keyboard (on which I could comfortably have written an entire novel) that I miss. It had just enough access to email that I could reply to things when necessary, even if it required a bit of typing (something very uncomfortable on a screen keyboard), and later on it had access to maps and enough web browsing to be able to look something up quickly. But the lack of an enormous app ecosystem and limited Internet access meant it didn’t become a doom-scrolling device to nearly the extent my current smartphone has, so I was more inclined to either pick up a laptop and do something deliberate or put it down and go do something useful like reading.
• AfterHIA 1y ago
  Ubiquity for Firefox/Chrome. Hit, "ctrl + spacebar to search for anything with simple typed parameters for search" was a killer product in 2005 and now Microsoft finally got wise to copy it in 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jef_Raskin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jef_Raskin
• kulahan 1y ago
  Plasma TVs. They’re nearly irrelevant now because of OLED technology, but they were actually fantastic tech. They had a bad reputation because the early models were hot, heavy, power hungry, and suffered from burn-in. Still, even in the early days they had great black levels and zero motion lag - they’d advertise it as “600 fps”. They seriously improved on power draws and heat, and were definitely superior if you wanted an ideal movie or sports watching experience. Buuut they were also competing with LED TVs, which could be really REALLY thin (rule of cool) and would just sip power. They died out.
• montjoy 1y ago
  Peep (The Network Auralizer). > replaces visual monitoring with a sonic `ecology' of natural sounds, where each kind of sound represents a specific kind of network event. https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa-2000/peep-network-auralizer-monitoring-your-network-sound https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa-2000/peep-network-aur... The concept is that we are wired to notice sounds that are out of the ordinary, but “ordinary” sounds are not distracting. I had forgotten about this project for a number of years until I read Peter Watts’s Blindsight.
• CarlJW 1y ago
  Warnier Orr Diagrams. Too early for the internet and adoption into UML. Think flowcharts crossed with pseudocode but following Structured Programming principles. Very useful for mocking up, designing and testing code logic before you write it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warnier/Orr_diagram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warnier/Orr_diagram
• dangus 1y ago
  Windows Phone. I felt like the OS hit a stride around 8.1, with some markets sporting somewhat impressive marketshare, and the corporate politics of the whole situation and Nokia merger screwed it up badly. I really think if Microsoft had doubled down and focused on getting flagship devices to all 4 flagship carriers it would have gone somewhere. But I remember at the time having a dead end of hardware where competitors were putting out new phones on all 4 carriers every year. With Windows Phone you were hopping between carrier exclusives or getting nothing because all the new Nokia/Microsoft phones were low end or mid-range at best.
• dzhiurgis 1y ago
  Apple Vision Pro
• morshu9001 1y ago
  Headphone jack on phones. Maybe some day Bluetooth will get fixed, until then this is just a way to milk customers via Airpods/Samsungpods. Sorta related, iPod car interface was a reliable way to play and control music, now replaced with CarPlay which has problems and also messes up your nav.
• immibis 1y ago
  It's not so much "before its time" as already had its time cut short, but Microsoft OLE. The premise was that you could insert any document into any other document. Worked with Office programs, mspaint, and some third-party programs. For example at school we had an electricity simulation program called Crocodile Physics, and you could embed a simulation in a PowerPoint slide. And the similarly named but completely separate OLE Automation, which let you script programs, across process boundaries. This is what let you write in VB(A): Set w = New Word.Application: Set e = new Excel.Application: Set doc = w.Open("foo.doc"); etc... - this was to Office (mostly) what shell scripting is to Linux, and enabled a lot of ad-hoc business process automation.
• mikewarot 1y ago
  Metamine had a amazing demo[1], which is only still with us on the Internet Archive. I've fawned over it before[2], but suffice it to say it was a normal programming language plus a magical equals which kept the left side of an assignment updated after the fact, for the life of the program. (Along with the normal non-magical one) The amazing part is that the author, Ymte Jan Broekhuizen, had coherent rules figured out for mixing declarative and imperitive programming. Figuring those out is a minor miracle in my mind. [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20201014024057/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvRc3c9TQ6c&gl=US&hl=en http://web.archive.org/web/20201014024057/https://www.youtub... [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=metamine&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
• krapp 1y ago
  Hack. I know a lot of it got folded into PHP, but the best parts of it, like native support for XHP and function whitelists, never got in AFAIK.
• josefrichter 1y ago
  Concorde :-)
• daxfohl 1y ago
  Cash? I know it's not a "project"; kind of the opposite really, but I do sometimes miss the days when buying stuff meant physically parting from something you're carrying with you.
• not--felix 1y ago
  RSS
• jesaemolisa 1y ago
  [dead]
• jesaemolisa 1y ago
  [dead]
• Foden23 1y ago
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• saddington 1y ago
  on the topic of death... i'm working on a saas based on it: http://deathnote.ai http://deathnote.ai
• pneumatics 1y ago
  Transmeta Crusoe, it would be very useful today for running Docker containers built for different instruction sets without being as slow as QEMU. The performance penalty was only about 20% and the power efficiency was actually better than native x86.
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