Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
343 points by ofalkaed 2 days ago
Just curious and who knows, maybe someone will adopt it or develop something new based on its ideas.
343 points by ofalkaed 2 days ago
Just curious and who knows, maybe someone will adopt it or develop something new based on its ideas.
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...
> retention project
Never heard this phrase before, but I can definitely see this happening at companies of that size
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.
Have you come across Genode (https://genode.org)?
It's kind of in that space, and is still actively developed.
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.
There's an excellent write up at https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/09/28/extreme...
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.
I've thought about this too. Imagine all the drama the US government could've avoided if Vine had won over TikTok!
With Elon running it? He probably would have actively sold it to china.
guys when you invent fictional alternate realities, you're allowed to leave people out of them completely. Anyone you like.
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.
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)
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I can totally see clabretro or cathode ray dude doing a video with you on this
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.
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.?
> 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.
What are the reasons that make you want to migrate away? Cost, flexibility, support..?
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.
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.
> 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.
"putting yourself and your hard work in legal risk"
Like what? I'm genuinely curious what personal risks faces anyone from contributing to ReactOS. I also am curious what kind of legal risk may threaten the work? I mean, even in the unlikely scenario that something gets proven illegal and ordered to be dismissed from the project, what would prevent any such particular expunged part to be re-implemented by some paid contractor (now under legally indisputable circumstances), thus rendering the initial effort (of legal action) moot?
I've heard people say this, and believed it myself for a long time, but recently I set up a windows XP VM and was shocked by how bad the quality of life was.
I think nostalgia is influencing this opinion quite a bit, and we don't realize the mountain of tiny usability improvements that have been made since XP
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Delphi 2, the first 32bit version of Delphi, had all of this. Some, like threads, even had wrappers (TThread), but Delphi came with Win32 bindings out of the box so all Win32 functions were available too - and it came bundled with documentation for the APIs. In addition, calling out to a DLL was trivial so even if a function wasn't available, you could just define it. Pretty much anything you could do with a C compiler was possible with Delphi 2 too.
Free Pascal obviously has all of that stuff too.
I have written a number of services in Delphi, some 20 years ago, all works fine.
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.
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.
I guess my abandoned/dead project might be Usenet. Sure, there were very dark places, and a lot of it was just a way to distribute porn, but that pretty much describes the Web. Usenet was like Reddit not controlled by a single company; like the Fediverse with infinite channels; like all of the world's threaded web fora displayed in exactly the way you want. We had that in the 1990s, and we're slowly groping toward getting it back.
That’s the internet before commercialisation and silos.
AKA "back when Marc Andreessen had hair and not enough money to build an apocalypse bunker on a personal island."
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.
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.
Sounds like a nice gig.
> 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
IIRC around that time, you could also distribute full-blown desktop applications (C# WinForms) in a special way via the browser, by which they were easily installable and self-updating. The tech was called ClickOnce https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/deployment/cl.... I think the flow was possibly IE-only, but that was not a big issue in a business context at that time.
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.
> Open web standards are great but consider where we could have been if competition drove them a different way? We're still stuck with JavaScript today (wasm still needs it). Layout/styling is caught up now but where would we be if that came sooner?
Why do you think JavaScript is a problem? And a big enough problem to risk destroying open web standards.
Flash & Silverlight were both ahead of the current open web standards at the time. They also didn't suffer as much from the browser wars.
Flash's ActionScript helped influence changes to modern JS that we all enjoy.
You sometimes need alternative ideas to promote & improve ideas for open web standards.
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/securityb...
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.
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
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.
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).
+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.
I think mistakes were made in not making it easier to adapt applications. (I disagree with Kenton's opinion this is futile, there are plenty of alternative systems which require bespoke apps, and if anything Sandstorm's biggest problem was not having enough name-brand ported apps working on it people expected.)
For example, making external network requests from a Sandstorm app is hard by default. Years after it was "dead", Ian Denhardt wrote a simple drop-in tool you could include in an app which would use a conventional HTTP proxy to hijack the requests from the app and turn them into Powerbox requests. Even though it isn't "the best" way to do it, it is very serviceable and approachable to devs. I think it's something Sandstorm should've supported by default, to abstract away that challenge.
The funny thing is, Sandstorm is actually kinda a pain if you know the engineering you want to do but the platform restricts you from it: It's actually much much better at nontechnical users just being able to use finished apps. I don't think the "use Sandstorm as infrastructure" story is nearly as good. The original Sandstorm company wasn't running a lot of their own infrastructure on Sandstorm, and some of it that was required hidden hacks to work around some of the big ways Sandstorm isn't really designed for hosting websites.
I still don't think it's dead, but since everyone who still really wants to work on Sandstorm has bills to pay and jobs to do (and kids to raise), we definitely aren't moving super fast.
Where I do agree with Kenton is that Sandstorm really excels at running vibe coded apps, I've been playing with it, and found it very easy to get AI tools to fix apps up for Sandstorm. And of course, a sandbox that only runs when the user is interacting with it and manages all of the authentication for you is the safest place to run untrustworthy code that may have security or performance bugs.
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.
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."
It also had one of the best campy promotional videos ever produced: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8GIwFkIuP8
This was my personal favorite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWYwY8GpuO0
Positron - Firefox version of Electron. "Electron-compatible runtime on top of Gecko" 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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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 and maybe twitter.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 :(
The "Eve" programming language / IDE - 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.
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), 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=ThjFFDwOXok
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.
I know about this one as well: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/comments/1ioij... but the author seems to have taken it private for now. I think he's the Gren author, which is a fork of Elm.
As for me, I brought some eve-y ideas to my language project: https://github.com/mech-lang/mech
I certainly know and admire eve. However I don't think I consciously took that many features from it into EYG. I'd be curios what the crossover is
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.
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.
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.
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.
Valid option - I used it myself for a very brief toe-dip into blogging earlier this year - but maybe worth noting that Google seems to flat-out refuse to crawl anything you put there. Won't pick it up by itself, won't read a sitemap you explicitly tell it about. It'll grudgingly index specific page URLs you tell it about, but that's kind of absurd. I don't know if it's because it's on a subdomain, or a Microsoft property, or because I was 100% ad- and tracker-free or what.
I tried DDG (Bing-backed, I believe) and it happily found everything with no manual intervention at all. That was the point where I ditched Google Search after 30 years.
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
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.
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.
It is between one and two orders of magnitude harder than geocities, and infinitely more expensive.
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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!)
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.
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.
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...).
There was the discontinued Adobe Edge suite, which was what you described.
Can it really do interactive things though, like games? The main draw card of Flash was its excellent integration of code and animation.
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.
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.
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. :)
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Gambas is a modern, open source Visual Basic dialect in the style of VB Classic.
Definitely Opa: 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.
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
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.
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.
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/ [2] https://austral-lang.org/spec/spec.html
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.
ouch, last “recent update” in 2023. Any idea what happened?
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!
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).
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...
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
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/Hotline_Communications
https://www.macintoshrepository.org/6691-hotline-connect-cli...
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.
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.
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.
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
>> What was the bookmarks social tool called from 00’s?
del.icio.us! Funnily, also killed by yahoo like flickr
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.
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/
We built some things on it, was like CRDT for all the things.
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.
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.
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.)
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.youtub...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
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.
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.
https://maruos.com/ 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.
Elm programming language. Arguably not dead but somewhat incomplete and not actively worked on.
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.
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/
I'm no frontend guy, but I think it did/was inspire(d) react (redux?) maybe. Corrections on this very welcome
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?).
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!
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.
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.
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.
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)
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...
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.
Try the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynabook instead...
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
Electron was originally named Atom Shell 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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=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
But I could see the technology behind it working wonders for Steam, Game Pass, etc.
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.
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.
Windows Longhorn. It looked cool and had some promising features that never made it into Vista, like WinFS.
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.
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
Opa language 2012, it was a typed nextjs before its time.
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
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.
> 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...
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.
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...
HN post from 2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35195029
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).
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.
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...
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