> The reasons it died are likely:

The reason Plan 9 died a swift death was that, unlike Unix – which hardware manufacturers could license for a song and adapt to their own hardware (and be guaranteed compatibility with lots of Unix software) – Bell Labs tried to sell Plan 9, as commercial software, for $350 a box.

(As I have written many times in the past: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22412539>, <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33937087>, and <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43641480>)

The team moved on to work on Inferno, which Plan 9 afficionados tend to forget about, which was also a much better idea as UNIX evolution, Plan 9 combined with a managed userspace, which also didn't went down well.

Plan 9 Filesystem Protocol lives on inside WSL2.

What’s stopping other Unix-like systems from adopting the everything is a file philosophy?

And they fixed symlinks.

UNIX is for dorks. We needed a Smalltalk style, "everything is an object and you can talk to all objects" but thankfully we got Java and, "object oriented" C++. The Alto operating system was leaps and bounds ahead of the Mac and Windows 3.1 system and it took Steve Jobs a decade to realize, "oh shit we could have just made everything an object." Then we get WebObjects and the lousy IPod and everything is fascist history.

#next #never #forget #thieves

> 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.

You have things backwards. The Copland project was horribly mismanaged. Anybody at Apple who came up with a new technology got it included in Copland, with no regard to feature creep or stability. There's a leaked build floating around from shortly before the project was cancelled. It's extremely unstable and even using basic desktop functionality causes hangs and crashes. In mid-late 1996, it became clear that Copland would never ship, and Apple decided the best course of action was to license an outside OS. They considered options such as Solaris, Windows NT, and BeOS, but of course ended up buying NeXT. Copland wasn't killed to justify buying NeXT, Apple bought NeXT because Copland was unshippable.

>- XHTML. [...] Would it kill people to have to close their tags properly?

XHTML appeals to the intuition that there should be a Strict Right Way To Do Things ... but you can't use that unforgiving framework for web documents that are widely shared.

The "real world" has 2 types of file formats:

(1) file types where consumers cannot contact/control/punish the authors (open-loop) : HTML, pdf, zip, csv, etc. The common theme is that the data itself is more important that the file format. That's why Adobe Reader will read malformed pdf files written by buggy PDF libraries. And both 7-Zip and Winrar can read malformed zip files with broken headers (because some old buggy Java libraries wrote bad zip files). MS Excel can import malformed csv files. E.g. the Citi bank export to csv wrote a malformed file and it was desirable that MS Excel imported it anyway because the raw data of dollar amounts was more important than the incorrect commas in the csv file -- and -- I have no way of contacting the programmer at Citi to tell them to fix their buggy code that created the bad csv file.

(2) file types where the consumer can control the author (closed-loop): programming language source code like .c, .java, etc or business interchange documents like EDI. There's no need to have a "lenient forgiving" gcc/clang compiler to parse ".c" source code because the "consumer-and-author" will be the same person. I.e. the developer sees the compiler stop at a syntax error so they edit and fix it and try to re-compile. For business interchange formats like EDI, a company like Walmart can tell the vendor to fix their broken EDI files.

XHTML wants to be in group (2) but web surfers can't control all the authors of .html so that's why lenient parsing of HTML "wins". XHTML would work better in a "closed-loop" environment such as a company writing internal documentation for its employees. E.g. an employee handbook can be written in strict XHTML because both the consumers and authors work at the same company. E.g. can't see the vacation policy because the XHTML syntax is wrong?!? Get on the Slack channel and tell the programmer or content author to fix it.

> - 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?

Amen. Postel’s Law was wrong:

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9413

We stop at the first sign of trouble for almost every other format, we do not need lax parsing for HTML. This has caused a multitude of security vulnerabilities and only makes it more difficult for pretty much everybody.

The attitude towards HTML5 parsing seemed to grow out of this weird contrarianism that everybody who wanted to do better than whatever Internet Explorer did had their head in the clouds and that the role of a standard was just to write down all the bugs.

I was all gung ho on XHTML back in the day until I realized that a single unclosed tag in an ad or another portion of our app that I had no control over would cause the entire page to fail. The user would see nothing except a giant ugly error. And your solution of rendering the rest of the page in Times New Roman isn’t an option. Do you try to maintain any of the HTML semantics or just render plain text? If it’s plain text, that’s useless. If you’re rendering anything with any semantics, then you need to know how to parse it. You’re back where you started.

Granted, I could ensure that my code was valid XHTML, but I’m a hypermeticulous autistic weirdo, and most other people aren’t. As much as XHTML “made sense”, it was completely unworkable in reality, because most people are slobs. Sometimes, worse really is better.

> Would it kill people to have to close their tags properly

It would kill the approachability of the language.

One of the joys of learning HTML when it tended to be hand-written was that if you made a mistake, you'd still see something just with distorted output.

That was a lot more approachable for a lot of people who were put off "real" programming languages because they were overwhelmed by terrible error messages any time they missed a bracket or misspelled something.

If you've learned to program in the last decade or two, you might not even realise just how bad compiler errors tended to be in most languages.

The kind of thing where you could miss a bracket on line 47 but end up with a compiler error complaining about something 20 lines away.

Rust ( in particular ) got everyone to bring up their game with respect to meaningful compiler errors.

But in the days of XHTML? Error messages were arcane, you had to dive in to see what the problem actually was.

Nice list. Some thoughts:

- I think without the move to NeXT, even if Jobs had come back to Apple, they would never have been able to get to the iPhone. iOS was - and still is - a unix-like OS, using unix-like philosophy, and I think that philosophy allowed them to build something game-changing compared to the SOTA in mobile OS technology at the time. So much so, Android follows suit. It doesn't have a command line, and installation is fine, so I'm not sure your line of reasoning holds strongly. One thing I think you might be hinting at though that is a missed trick: macOS today could learn a little from the way iOS and iPadOS is forced to do things and centralise configuration in a single place.

- I think transaction processing operating systems have been reinvented today as "serverless". The load/execute/quit cycle you describe is how you build in AWS Lambdas, GCP Cloud Run Functions or Azure Functions.

- Most of your other ideas (with an exception, see below), died either because of people trying to grab money rather than build cool tech, and arguably the free market decided to vote with its feet - I do wonder when we might next get a major change in hardware architectures again though, it does feel like we've now got "x86" and "ARM" and that's that for the next generation.

- XHTML died because it was too hard for people to get stuff done. The forgiving nature of the HTML specs is a feature, not a bug. We shouldn't expect people to be experts at reading specs to publish on the web, nor should it need special software that gatekeeps the web. It needs to be scrappy, and messy and evolutionary, because it is a technology that serves people - we don't want people to serve the technology.

> Modula. Modula 2 and 3 were reasonably good languages. Oberon was a flop. DEC was into Modula, but Modula went down with DEC.

If you appreciate Modula's design, take a look at Nim[1].

I remember reading the Wikipedia page for Modula-3[2] and thinking "huh, that's just like Nim" in every other section.

[1] https://nim-lang.org

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modula-3

> Would it kill people to have to close their tags properly?

Probably not, but what would be the benefit of having more pages fail to render? If xhtml had been coupled with some cool features which only worked in xhtml mode, it might have become successful, but on its own it does not provide much value.

> XHTML. Have you ever read the parsing rules for HTML 5, where the semantics for bad HTML were formalized?

I actually have, and its not that bad.

If anything, the worst part is foreign content (svg, mathml) which have different rules more similar to xml but also not the same as xml.

Just as an aside, browsers still support xhtml, just serve with application/xhtml+xml mime type, and it all works including aggressive error checking. This is very much a situation where consumers are voting with their feet not browser vendors forcing a choice.

> - 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?

IMO there's a place for XHTML as a generated output format, but I think HTML itself should stay easy to author and lightweight as a markup format. Specifically when it comes to tag omission, if I'm writing text I don't want to see a bunch of `</li>` or `</p>` everywhere. It's visual noise, and I just want a lightweight markup.

+1 Copland

BeOS. I like to daydream about an alternate reality where it was acquired by Sony, and used as the foundation for PlayStation, Sony smartphones, and eventually a viable alternative to Windows on their Vaio line.

Neal Stephenson, https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs81n/command.txt :

> Imagine a crossroads where four competing auto dealerships are situated… (Apple) sold motorized vehicles--expensive but attractively styled cars with their innards hermetically sealed, so that how they worked was something of a mystery.

> (Microsoft) is much, much bigger… the big dealership came out with a full-fledged car: a colossal station wagon (Windows 95). It had all the aesthetic appeal of a Soviet worker housing block, it leaked oil and blew gaskets, and it was an enormous success.

> On the other side of the road… (Be, Inc.) is selling fully operational Batmobiles (the BeOS). They are more beautiful and stylish even than the Euro-sedans, better designed, more technologically advanced, and at least as reliable as anything else on the market--and yet cheaper than the others.

> … and Linux, which is right next door, and which is not a business at all. It's a bunch of RVs, yurts, tepees, and geodesic domes set up in a field and organized by consensus. The people who live there are making tanks.

It would be years before OS X could handle things that wouldn’t cause BeOS to break a sweat, and BeOS still has a bit of a responsiveness edge that OS X still can't seem to match (probably due to the PDF rendering layer).

In addition to Photon, I would say QNX itself (the desktop OS). I ran QNX 6 Neutrino on my PIII 450 back in the day, and the experience was so much more better than every other mainstream OS on the market. The thing that blew me away was how responsive the desktop was while multitasking, something Linux struggled with even decades later.

Similarly, I'm also gutted that the QNX 1.44MB demo floppy didn't survive past the floppy era - they had some really good tech there. Imagine if they pitched it as a rescue/recovery OS for PCs, you could've run it entirely from the UEFI. Or say as an OS for smart TVs and other consumer smart devices.

Somehow I feel C# has become the right successor to Modula-3 ideas, even if has taken 25 years to get there.

GCC nowadays has Modula-2 as official frontend, not sure how much it will get used though.

XHTML, yep I miss it, was quite into it back then.

> 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.

TIL: what microchannel meant by micro and channel.

Also it had OS independent device-class drivers.

And you could stuff a new CPU on a card and pop it right in. Went from a 286+2MB to a 486dx2+32MB.

Word lens team was bought by google, its far better in google translate then the local app ever was. You could repeat the old app with a local LLM now pretty easily but it still won't be as close in quality as using google translate

> word lens

I don't know if you know it, that's a feature of Google Lens

CICS is still going strong as part of ZOS. There are industries where green screen, mainframe terminal apps still rule and CICS is driving them.

I love this mismatched list of grievances and I find myself agreeing with most of them. XHTML and proper CPU hypervisors in particular.

People being too lazy to close the <br /> tag was apparently a gateway drug into absolute mayhem. Modern HTML is a cesspool. I would hate to have to write a parser that's tolerant enough to deal with all the garbage people throw at it. Is that part of the reason why we have so few browsers?

CICS and HATS are perhaps the most annoying pieces of technology I’ve ever encountered.

The reason XHTML failed is because the spec required it to be sent with a new MIME type (application/xml+xhtml I believe) which no webserver did out of the box. Everything defaulted to text/html, which all browsers would interpret as HTML, and given the mismatching doctype, would interpret as tag soup (quirks mode/lenient).

Meanwhile, local files with the doctype would be treated as XHTML, so people assumed the doctype was all you needed. So everyone who tried to use XHTML didn't realize that it would go back to being read as HTML when they upload it to their webserver/return it from PHP/etc. Then, when something went wrong/worked differently than expected, the author would blame XHTML.

Edit: I see that I'm getting downvoted here; if any of this is factually incorrect I would like to be educated please.

Google wave was built on an awesome technology layer, and they they totally blew in on the user interface.... deciding to treat it as a set of separate items instead of a single document everyone everywhere all at once could edit.... killed it.

It make it seem needlessly complicated, and effectively erased all the positives.

I was blown away by the demo but then after I thought about it, it seemed like a nightmare to me. All the problems of slack of having to manually check channels for updates except X 100 (yea, I get that slack wasn't available then. My point is I saw that it seemed impossible to keep up with nested constantly updated hierarchical threads. Keeping up with channels on slack is bad enough so imagine if Wave had succeeded. It'd be even worse.

Google Wave had awesome tech but if you look at the demo in hindsight you can tell it’s just not a very good product. They tried making an all-in-one kind of product which just doesn’t work.

In a sense Wave still exists but was split into multiple products, so I wouldn’t say it’s “dead”. The tech that powered it is still used today in many of Google’s popular products. It turns out that having separate interfaces for separate purposes is just more user friendly than an all-in-one.

I managed trips with friends and it was a great form factor for ad-hoc discussions with docs and links included. I thought it was the future and in my very early programming days wrote probably the most insecure plugin ever to manage your servers.

https://github.com/shano/Wave-ServerAdmin

It's been 16 years. I should probably archive this..

Immediately thought of this.

Even the watered-down version of wave was something I used at my host startup, it was effectively our project management tool. And it was amazing at that.

I don't know how it would fare compared to the options available today, but back then, it shutting down was a tremendous loss.

Isn't Nextcloud (including Nextcloud Talk) a viable alternative? Certainly, something like Discord (centralized and closed source) isn't.

It was smoke and mirrors, spiced with everyone letting their imagination run away.

I downloaded the open-source version of the server to see if I could build a product around it, but it came with a serious limitation: The open-source server did not persist any data. That was a complete non-starter for me.

At that point I suspected it wasn't going anywhere. My suspicions were confirmed when I sat near some Wave team members at an event, and overhead one say, with stars in his eyes, "won't it be groovy when everyone's using Wave and..."

---

Cool concept, though.

Studied for some CS/EE final with my class on Google Wave. It absolutely rocked for making a study guide together. I can't even really remember how it worked, just that I was blown away by it.

Google Wave was way ahead of its time.

Slack is the new Google Wave, Wave was too much ahead of time.

Is there a video or anything of this version of Wave?

Discord is function wise the best now...

wave was fucking amazing. buggy but amazing

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.

> Google Play Music: I had uploaded thousands of MP3 files there. They killed it. I won't waste my time uploading again.

You can argue whether it's as good as GPM or not, but it's false to imply that your uploaded music disappeared when Google moved to YouTube Music. I made the transition, and all of my music moved without a new upload.

Chromecast Audio still works! They just don't sell them anymore. I use mine every day, and have been keeping an eye out for anyone selling theirs...

Picasa was awesome, they had face recognition years before almost everything else, in a nice offline package.

Unfortunately the last public version has a bug that randomly swaps face tags, so you end up training on the wrong persons faces just enough to throw it all off, and the recognition becomes effectively worthless on thousands of family photos. 8(

Digikam is a weak sauce replacement that barely gets the job done.

Google G Suite offered a free option after initially saying it was ending. just logged into my Workspace account: https://ibb.co/99jBLJnD

still have many domains on there, all with gmail

I'm still amused that they killed Google Notebook and then a few years later created Google Keep, an application with basically the same exact feature set.

Google Search: Not officially dead yet, but....

I still use PICASA it works fine. However, when google severed the gdrive-photo linking it meant my photos didn’t automatically download from google to my PC. This is what killed google for me.

I’m still using - free g suite - play music - finance - nfc wallet is just google wallet isn’t it? - chromecast, video and audio-only I guess play music is now YouTube music, and doesn't have uploads, so that can be considered dead, but the others seem alive to me.

> Google Chromecast: Wait, they killed Chromecast? I did not know that until I started writing this..

They have something called Google TV Streamer now, so for me it's more of a rebrand than really killing a product.

Immich is a great replacement for Google Photos, if maybe not Picasa.

I'm still upset that Google Maps no longer tracks my location. It was very useful to be able to go back and see how often and where I had gone.

Is there another app where I can store this locally?

I used Picasa and loved it, until I realized I want all my photos available from all my devices at all times and so gave in to Google Photos (for access, not backup)

> Google Hangouts:

Which particular thing called Hangouts? There were at least two, frankly I’d say more like four.

Google and Microsoft are both terrible about reusing names for different things in confusing ways.

> Can't keep track of all the Google chat apps.

And Hangouts was part of that problem. Remember Google Talk/Chat? That was where things began, and in my family we never wanted Hangouts, Talk/Chat was better.

Allo, Chat, Duo, Hangouts, Meet, Messenger, Talk, Voice… I’ve probably forgotten at least two more names, knowing Google. Most of these products have substantial overlap with most of the rest.

I think Chromecast has been replaced by Google TV which is a souped up Chromecast.

Picasa definitely went against the grain of Google, which is all about tying you to online services.

Hangouts had trouble scaling to many participants. Google Meet is fine, and better than e.g. MS Teams.

Legacy suite, free forever? Did they also promise a pony?..

Play Music: music is a legal minefield. Don't trust anybody commercial who suggests you upload music you did not write yourself.

Finance: IDK, I still get notifications about the stocks I'm interested in.

NFC Wallet: alive and kicking, I use it literally every day to pay for subway.

Can't say anything about Chromecast. I have a handful of ancient Chromecasts that work. I don't want any updates for them.

Google Desktop Search (and also the Search Appliance if you were an SMB).

Add Google Podcasts to the list. I switched to AntennaPod. Youtube Music has too noisy an interface.

Why did you keep on using so many Google products if those products get cancelled?

Why didn’t you quit Google after, say, the third product you used got canned?

Google finance was never killed by google?

I am just learning via this comment they’re killing chromecast. My disappointment is immeasurable. I have 3, and use them daily. This might be the push to get me to install network wide Adblock.

I should’ve realized when that recent update broke them for like a week, then the brought the all back online, but suddenly much buggier.

Am I the only one salty about Google Podcasts? For me that was the straw that broke the camel’s back… I dropped Android, switched to iOS, and slowly phasing out the Google products in my life.

Isn't it "Google TV Streamer" now?

Enabling novice normies to make games was excellent, and I believe the whole game industry benefited from this resulting injection of fresh ideas. A lot of indy developers with fresh takes on what games could be got started this way. Zachtronics is one example of many that comes to mind right now.

On the other hand, for every flash game made there were about ten thousands flash-based ads, and nearly as many websites that used flash poorly for things like basic navigation (remember flash based website dropdown menus?). And for a few years it seemed like every single restaurant with a website was using flash for the entire thing, the results were borderline unusable in the best cases. And let's not forget that as long as flash was dominant, it was choking out the demand to get proper video support into browsers. Flash based video players performed like dog shit and made life on Linux a real chore.

I wish Flash would have died sooner.

It was a plague on the web, you couldn't zoom, select text, go back, just a black box ignoring everything about your web browser.

Killing it was probably the best thing Jobs ever did.

Even if Adobe had gotten their act together and fixed all security holes, Apple would have still killed it. It was always a threat as a popular design tool. And decades later, with the HTML canvas hype faded, there's still no replacement to what Adobe Flash could do - any designer could create stellar, interactive design that can be embedded into any website...without a monthly subscription.

Godot is pretty awesome. Easy to learn, can do 2D or 3D, and can export to HTML5/webasm that works across all major OSes and browsers including mobile.

It’s far from perfect but I’ve been enjoying playing with it even for things that aren’t games and it has come a long way just in the last year or two. I feel like it’s close to (or is currently) having its Blender moment.

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.

Flash was the HyperCard of the 90s/early 2000s.

There hasn’t been a replacement, yet.

The big issue with Flash was how overused it was.

When Flash was on its way out one app made at the place I worked still said they needed it, and I couldn't figure out why... it was a Java app. After some digging, I found it, some horizontal dividers on the page. They could have, and should have, just been images. They didn't do anything. Yet someone made them in Flash.

I'd also say all the drop-down menu systems were an overuse. Splash screens on every car company's home page. It was out of hand.

I guess you could call it a victim of it's own success, where once it was time for it to die (due to mobile), very few people were sad to see it go.

It was actually fantastic even for creating websites. To think that 20 years later we still don't have tools to make similar stuff with similar ease is mindblowing.

Try Roblox! Unless you haven't yet. I was SO impressed. Everything works as expected. 5 minutes after starting the game making kit I totally understood why Roblox is worth billions. It just works. It's magic. All can be scripted, but also any 6y.o. can use it.

Yes. I never used flash personally, but I loved those little games people created with them. There was the whole scene of non developers creating little games of all kinds and it just ceased to exist.

Personal pet peeve, but as someone who still makes gifs, Image Ready. Adobe kind of absorbed Image Ready into Photoshop and it's just never lived up to how easy it was to make simple gifs in Image Ready

I was even fine with Flash being misused for web GUIs, just to pressure the open web to get its act together. At least devs got to pick 2 between [fancy, fast, easy]. If you want something better, make it instead of hobbling the competition.

Well, I miss Director which I used a lot for demos/prototyping.

it's called Roblox and it's bigger than Flash ever was

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.

Optane was impressive from tech standpoint.

We were about get rid of split between RAM and disk memory and use single stick for both!

Systems are stuck in old ways in how they model storage, so they weren't ready for something that is neither really RAM nor disk. Optane did inspire quite a few research projects for a while though. A few applications emerged in the server space, in particular.

I have an optane drive with the kernel on it, instant boot!

Not only because of price. The 'ecosystem' infrastructure wasn't there, or at least not spread wide enough. The 'mindshare'/thinking of ways how to do, neither. This is more aligned with (live) 'image-based' working environments like early Lisp and Smalltalk systems. Look at where they are now...

A few more thoughts about that, since I happen to have some of the last systems who actually had systems level support for that in their firmware, and early low-capacity optanes designed for that sort of use. It's fascinating to play with these, but they are low capacity, and bound to obsolete operating systems.

Given enough RAM, you can emulate that with working suspend and resume to/and from RAM.

Another avenue are the ever faster and larger SSDs, in practice, with some models it makes almost no difference anymore, since random access times are so fast, and transfer speeds insane. Maybe total and/or daily TBW remains a concern.

Both of these can be combined.

The problem with the Lytro was that the sensor/lens pair was just too darned small. If they had somehow scaled it up so that the sensor was about 4" in diameter, even if it meant using an interposing frosted glass plate or something to allow a smaller image sensor, the depth of field effects could have been fantastic. It would have allowed genuine and beautiful bokeh across almost any arbitrary focal plane, even pan/tilt, in software.

> 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.

Don't phones do this now? I remember Lytro cameras, they were really exciting.

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/

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...

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.

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.

Have you come across Genode (https://genode.org)?

It's kind of in that space, and is still actively developed.

Definitely recommend reading https://retool.com/pipes about the history of Pipes, with lots of input from the people who worked on it

(It’s not super obvious, especially on mobile, but once you see the site, just scroll down to see the content)

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.

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.

I loved pipes. I had rss feeds from all the sites where I was sharing content collected up and formatted via pipes into a single rss feed that was pulled into a php blog.

Then all those sites I used to post on stopped supporting rss one by one and finally pipes was killed off.

For a while I used a python library called riko that did the same thing as pipes without the visual editor. I have to thank it for getting me off php and into python.

https://github.com/nerevu/riko

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

[^2]: https://cdn.flowhub.org

[^3]: https://github.com/gorenje/erlang-red

I missed Yahoo Pipes a lot so I built something similar recently for myself :) I know there are a few alternatives out there, but had to scratch my own itch.

https://www.mashups.io

I can recommend Apache Camel (https://camel.apache.org) for similar data integration pipelines and even agentic workflows. There are even visual editors for Camel today, which IMHO make it extremely user friendly to build any kind of pipeline quickly.

Apache Karavan: https://karavan.space/ Kaoto (Red Hat): https://kaoto.io

Both are end 2 end usable within vscode.

Ah, this would get my vote too. I've seen a few attempts since, but I think you needed that era of "throw lots of money at any idea" to get it off the ground again.

Whoever took the decision to kill Vine was an absolute moron, even without hindsight. It was square videos, how hard could it have been to shove an ads banner above it and call it a day? Incredible

I will never forgive twitter for this catch and kill of a platform so full of life

I've thought about this too. Imagine all the drama the US government could've avoided if Vine had won over TikTok!

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.

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-wirel...

Wow, I forgot about this.

It was surprisingly great for the time. Apparently I was one of their 4 customers, too!

I had a Ricochet modem in '98-99 living in San Francisco. Just 10 years later the iPhone was launched, on 3G networks that had integer multiples better performance. How would I have been better off had Ricochet survived? This seems like a place where technological progress went --- extremely --- in the right direction.

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.

> 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.

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.

I talked to some Heroku reps at a local tech conference a year or so ago; it was clear that they were instructed to not have any personal opinions of the shredding of the free tier, but they did admit in a roundabout way that it lost them a lot of customers - some they were glad to get rid of as they were gaming the goodwill and costing Heroku lots of money, but weren't sure if it was a good long term idea or not.

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.

> One language, one deployment platform, one database, a couple plugins to choose from, everything simple and straightforward, no decision fatigue.

I feel like this also describes something like Vercel. Having never personally used Heroku, is Vercel all that different except Ruby vs JS as the chosen language?

Was going to say, I still use Heroku, and it's been working ok, but I'm getting increasingly creepy vibes from it and fear that it could be abandoned. Starting of course with Salesforce acquisition.

I use the core product for my SaaS apps. Great platform, does what it needs to do. Haven’t felt the need to switch. Sometimes tempted to move to a single VPS with Coolify or Dokku, but not interested in taking on the server admin burden.

I think their main failure points were the following:

- not lowering prices as time went off. They probably kept a super-huger margin profit, but they’re largely irrelevant today

- not building their own datacenters and staying in aws. That would have allowed them to lower prices and gain even more market share. Everyone that has been in amazon/aws likely has seen the internal market rate for ec2 instances and know there’s a HUGE profit margin deriving by building datacenters. Add the recent incredible improvements to compute density (you can easily get 256c/512t and literally terabytes of memory in a 2u box) and you get basically an infinite money glitch.

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.

> 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.

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.

> I think people underestimate the difficulty involved in the project

I don't think people do, it sounds like a nearly impossible struggle, and at the end you get a Windows clone. I can't imagine hating yourself enough to work on it for an extended period of time for no money and putting yourself and your hard work in legal risk. It's a miracle we have Wine and serious luck that we have Proton.

People losing Windows 10 support need to move on. There's Linux if you want to be free, and Apple if you still prefer to be guided. You might lose some of your video games. You can still move to Windows 11 if you think that people should serve their operating systems rather than vice versa.

The easiest way to avoid patent liabilities is to always be 20 years behind.

Delphi isn't dead - ver 13 was recently released - https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi. It's even cross platform, uses Skia as its graphics engine, its all very nice.

Apparently Python is now the language of choice for teaching programming, and I'm a bit worried about it because the type system is a mess.

I think Pascal or ADA are better language to start learning about types with a good base.

Check out Lazarus (https://www.lazarus-ide.org/) an open-source spiritual successor to Delhi's development environment.

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.

++1 for the lightspeed compiler

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.

> Quartz Composer

Have you looked at 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...

Good times. I used to fire it up, go eat breakfast, and come back just in time to see the weather forecast.

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.

Under construction gifs

AKA "back when Marc Andreessen had hair and not enough money to build an apocalypse bunker on a personal island."

That’s the internet before commercialisation and silos.

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.

I loved silverlight. Before I got a “serious” job, I was a summer intern at a small civil engineering consultancy that had gradually moved into developing custom software that it sold mostly to local town/city/county governments in Arizona (mostly custom mapping applications; for example, imagine Google Maps but you can see an overlay of all the street signs your city owns and click on one to insert a note into some database that a worker needs to go repair it… stuff like that).

Lots of their stuff was delivered as Silverlight apps. It turns out that getting office workers to install a blessed plugin from Microsoft and navigate to a web page is much easier than distributing binaries that you have to install and keep up to date. And developing for it was pure pleasure; you got to use C# and Visual Studio, and a GUI interface builder, rather than the Byzantine HTML/JS/CSS ecosystem.

I get why it never took off, but in this niche of small-time custom software it was really way nicer than anything else that existed at the time. Web distribution combined with classic desktop GUI development.

Both a Silverlight and Adobe Flex fan here!

Back in the day Microsoft sent someone to our university to demo all of their new and upcoming products. I remember Vista (then named Longhorn) and Silverlight being among them. I also remember people being particularly impressed by the demo they gave of the latter, but everything swiftly falling apart when someone queried whether it worked in other browsers. This was at a time when IE was being increasingly challenged by browsers embracing open standards. So there was an element of quiet amusement/frustration in seeing them continue to not get it.

It also had one of the best campy promotional videos ever produced: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8GIwFkIuP8

I will just leave this here: https://youtu.be/mg0l7f25bhU

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.

Sandstorm was a great idea, but in my opinion it was targeted wrong. It should have been a platform and marketplace for B2B SaaS, not B2C SaaS. Specifically, all the third-party services which typical web apps use could have been Sandstorm apps, like analytics, logging, email, customer service etc.

You may be happy to hear that the new Fedora installer is using Firefox under the hood. Ephemeral profile dir on startup, plus custom userChrome.css to hide most of Firefox UI, and I couldn't tell a difference between it and Electron.

https://github.com/rhinstaller/anaconda-webui

I wish RedHat made an easy-to-use framework out of it.

With more of Firefox's rendering migrating to Rust, there's got to be a market for a memory safe alternative to Electron now.

The candle that burned twice as bright was really adequacy.org, which sourced their trolls from Kuro5hin.

(Archive here: https://www.inadequacy.org/)

Rusty Foster (creator of Kuro5hin) is still writing! https://www.todayintabs.com/

Are there any spiritual successors?

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.

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.

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

Worth remembering it was the Microsoft partnership with Nokia that intentionally killed it.

TITCR.

Hit ctrl-f and typed Meego as soon as I saw this thread, hoping I'd be the first. Alas.

The N9 was literally a vision from an alternate timeline where a mobile platform from a major manufacturer was somehow hackable, polished, and secure. Favorite phone I've ever owned and I used it until it started to malfunction.

Had a Jolla for a bit, too. It was nice to see them try to keep the basic ideas going but unfortunately it was a pain in the ass to use thanks to their decision to go with a radio that only supported GSM/EDGE in the US. Had to carry around a MiFi just to give it acceptable data service.

I think the idea with Jolla is that if Nokia ever did an about-face, they were ready to be reabsorbed and get things back on the right track. Unfortunately, though we do once again have a "Nokia", it's just another Android white label with no interest in maintaining its own leading-edge smartphone platform.

When I saw the title, my first thought was also MeeGo. While I don't believe it would have been all that great had it not been abandoned, MeeGo absolutely should not have been discarded in such a disgraceful manner.

I was gonna say Meego. They killed it just as it was getting to a usable state. One of the last chances we had to get a proper third option in the mobile market.

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.

Self hosted Linkding is a pretty great modern equivalent https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding

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.

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.

It lives on as KaiOS. Has limited success as a low end phone platform now.

Why did they not pursue this? Were there any applications using this in the wild? It was not immediately obvious from their github repository.

https://eyg.run/ is heavily inspired by eve!

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.

Neocities[0] is going strong, if you just want an alternative. Copy paste your html to the online editor or upload your files, and that's it.

[0] https://neocities.org/

GitHub pages is frankly the closest in my opinion, as someone who used Geocities to host a domain for years longer than I probably should have.

There are few similar projects. neocities.org for example.

Github pages

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

… or just use Cloudflare Pages and upload a folder or zip of your static site via a web UI?

cloudflare pages

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.

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. ;-)

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.

I liked Stadia. There are plenty of competitors, but Google had the technical edge.

+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

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/

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.

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...).

It's incredible to me that they killed the whole tool instead of making a JS/Canvas port. Even without "full flash websites", there's still need for vectorial animations on the web.

Adobe Animate is still just Flash from a tool-standoint.

Are you referring to the SWF file format?

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.

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.

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.

I for one am so glad Flash died. At one point I dreaded navigating to a new website because of it.

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.

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.

I tried it twice and the onboarding experience was insurmountable. Never managed to achieve a critical mass of followers or whatever they call it, so things were permanently read-only for me. I'd reply but nobody saw it.

It was a fascinating protocol underneath, but the social follow structure seemed to select strongly for folks who already had a following or something.

So much drama there too, but it's designed to attract drmas

It's highly probable that a successor of this is in active use, we just don't know anything about it. :-/

This is so cool

Wow, why didnt this take off?

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.

Java eventually got a DOM API but it was too late. https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/deployment/applet/ma...

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.

you still have Lazarus, "a Delphi compatible cross-platform IDE for Rapid Application Development."

Gambas is a modern, open source Visual Basic dialect in the style of VB Classic.

twinBASIC tries hard to be a bug compatible successor.

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.

Same with Vale: https://vale.dev

Man I loves the original concept for demos but never build anything real with it. Curious if anyone did?

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/

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.

Same with Beaker Browser and Dat/Hyperdrive as its backend.

Sounds like Freenet (the new one, a.k.a. Locutus)

>> What was the bookmarks social tool called from 00’s?

del.icio.us! Funnily, also killed by yahoo like flickr

wait, I am still using (and paying) Flickr ...

The loss of Google Reader really does feel like the beginning of the end in retrospect.

There are plenty of clones, though. I use CommaFeed and it's pretty good, feels a lot like Google Reader.

been using The Old Reader for years now

It would have been very thick, too thick to compete.

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.)

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.

Gah. Fireworks and Dreamweaver were my "web designer" jumpstart. Ps and Ai had nothing on Fireworks

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.

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.

Still around as "Here Maps"

Try the Roc language https://www.roc-lang.org/

It's at a very early stage of development but looks promising

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.

It's been a number of years but my understanding was they kind of killed all the momentum it had by removing support for custom operators which broke everyone's code?

opa, along the same lines - really nice ML based language for isomorphic full stack web development.

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.

webOS was so ahead of its time, and seemed like it would have been a really strong contender to iPad OS.

There was the 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!

Atom was by GitHub, and VS Code by Microsoft. As soon as Microsoft bought VS Code, Atom’s fate was sealed.

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

Checkout Zed or Pulsar. Made by people who worked on Atom.

The creators went on to make Zed.

Try the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynabook instead...

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.

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.

Now in LG TVs

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.

> 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#introductio...

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.

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

There's now a standard for memory over a physical PCIe interface (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compute_Express_Link) and off-the-shelf products (https://www.micron.com/products/memory/cxl-memory).

I’m confused why this can’t be done in software?

    mount -t tmpfs ram /mnt/ramdisk

soon will be able to buy a gigabyte AI Top CXL R5X4. PCI expansion card with up to 512gb RAM over four DIMMs.

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?

Not really needed anymore on Linux with

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zram

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Zram

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Zram

for most purposes. (Assuming the host has enough RAM to spare, to begin with)

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#introductio...

VeraCrypt is very nearly a drop in replacement.

I used that!

Nowadays we have cryptocurrency-based Sia, Storj, which are kind of similar.

creator now makes wild, bespoke headphones https://www.reddit.com/user/pudjam667/submitted/

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.

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

I was super excited for BeOS myself.

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.

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.

OS/2 ISV Stardock gave us Win8 start button.

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!

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.

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.

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

Choo suffered from not having an ecosystem, same with mithtil and other "like react but not" also-rans.

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)

----

[0] Oh, weird, apparently it's actually less than 25 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_FreeHand#Adobe_FreeHand Seems I've been holding the grudge for less time than I thought. :D

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/

Xbox cloud gaming works on Linux via a supported browser

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.

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.

> It's unfortunate that there's been no proposals for database file systems for desktop operating systems since.

You can have one today if you want, although nobody knows about it.

Step 1. Install a local Oracle DB https://hub.docker.com/r/gvenzl/oracle-free#quick-start

Step 2. Set up DBFS https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/oracle-database/2...

Step 3. Mount it via FUSE or NFS.

Step 4. Also access the underlying tables via SQL.

OpenDoc was mostly given to Taligent (the Apple and IBM joint venture) to develop. It was full-on OO: about 35 files for a minimal application, which meant that Erich Gamma had to build a whole new type of IDE which was unusable. He likely learned his lesson: it's pretty hard to define interfaces between unknown components without forcing each one to know about all the others.

MIME types for mail addressed much of the demand for pluggable data types.

> OpenDoc

For anyone interested in the Apple future that could have been, check out Jim Miller's articles, e.g. on LiveDoc (https://www.miramontes.com/writing/livedoc/index.php)

Re: obtaining a legal copy of Genera, as of 2023 Symbolics still existed as a corporate entity and they continued to sell x86-64 laptops with "Portable Genera 2.0". I bought one from them then, and occasionally see them listing some on Ebay. (This isn't intended as an advertisement or endorsement, just a statement. I think it's quite unfortunate that Symbolics's software hasn't been made freely available, since it's now really only of historical interest.)

I'm intrigued by Symbolics Genera too. It would have been interesting seeing further development of Lisp OS, especially when they would have had internet connection. Rewriting part of your OS and see the changes in real time? Maybe web apps could have been just software written in Lisp, downloaded on the machine and directly being executed in a safe environment on top of the Genera image. Big stuff.

Perhaps because their repeated bad behavior as a company outweighed anything good they put out.

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.)

RIP the concept of owning your computer and user-written programs

Worse is better.

Take a look at FOKS. Made by the people who made Keybase.

https://foks.pub/

> 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.

> - Ford Crown Victoria

You can't just drop that and not say why...

I miss it so much.

Fortress had great ideas, but I'd say the closest thing to in the real world now might be Julia.

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)

At least with a smartphone it’s pretty clear when someone is filming you. Google Glass was too much of an enabler for creeps.

Google Wear is pretty much Google Glass on your wrist, so you don't burn out your eyes looking up and to the side.

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.

“Inevitable” does not mean “desirable”. Delaying bad outcomes is worthwhile.

Wild that people would downvote your low stake personal opinion given as a direct ask from OP. I am 100% with you.

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

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/ACpO6bz...

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.

LG smart TVs have it. They also license it to other smaller Chinese brands.

I had a Palm Pre and really enjoyed this, shame it didn’t make it.

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.

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.

It's alive and well!

I really liked Ceylon. It was competing against Groovy, Kotlin, and Scala which all seemed to come out around the same time.

Technology Connections would like a word.

https://youtu.be/hGVVAQVdEOs?t=693

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.

Web 3.0 in general is pretty much dead, federal services are not a replacement, we really needed decentralized services right about now

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.

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".

There is no place for spyware of any kind on my phone. Saying that it is to "protect the children" and "to catch terrorists" does not make it any more acceptable.

> The vast majority of the debate was dominated by how people imagined it worked, which was very different to how it actually worked.

But not very different to how it was actually going to work, as you say:

> If you change parts of it, sure.

Now try to reason your way out of the obvious "parts of it will definitely change" knee-jerk.