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Opera back in 2000s.
Compressing webpages, built in mail, built in BitTorrent client, tab stacking, "fit to width" which would remove horizontal scrollbars, page tiling, mouse gestures, rocker gestures, I think it even had a calendar.
It's a shame the direction Opera took after Jon left, but thankfully he started Vivaldi which feels like the spiritual successor.
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Opera also invented the browser Speed Dial, which was super handy back in the day.
But most importantly, Opera invented tabs, or at least the concept of tabbed browsing. I recall using Opera on Windows 3.11 and for the longest time, even during the Win 9x era, no other app used tabs.
In addition to mouse gestures, they had customisable keyboard shortcuts for practically every browser feature, again, something which very few apps bothered with.
The page compression built into Opera Mini was a life saver on Symbian and Windows Mobile devices back in the 2G/GPRS era. Opera Mini loaded pages blindingly quick and there was nothing else like it on the market, even leading up to early Android days.
but thankfully he started Vivaldi which feels like the spiritual successor.
Too bad he made the unfortunate decision of going with the Chromium engine instead of Gecko, or even making their own engine. I would've loved to use Vivalidi if it weren't for that fact.
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Opera didn't actually invent browser tabs. That's a common misconception.
Tabs was first invented for the browser InternetWorks
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Opera also invented full page zooming. Originally, browser zoom would only increase text size - everything else (including images, the actual page layout, etc) would remain the same size. Opera was the first browser to instead zoom into the entire page.
It also had a lot of features that either require extensions or don't even exist these days. Things like being able to disable JavaScript or change the User-agent per-site, basic content blocking before ad blockers existed (like modern-day ad blockers but you'd manually build your own list of things to block by going into content blocking mode and clicking on them), an option to only show cached images (useful on slow dial up connections), a fully customizable UI (literally every toolbar, button, and status bar segment could be moved around), and many more.
It was truly a web browser for the future, far far ahead of its time. I miss those days.
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Used to be the first thing we installed on phones and PCs. Opera was blazing fast on basic phones as far back as 2008sh.
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Opera?
The only web browser in the 90’s to try and charge money for a web browser‽
The only thing they were ahead of their time on is bilking people out of money for something that should have been free.
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Uh... You must not know much about the history of browsers. Practically every browser designed for consumer operating systems cost money back then. Netscape Navigator was made free, but only for individuals, academics and researchers. Many individuals still paid for the full Netscape Communicator suite though. Netscape's IPO was probably the most successful tech IPO ever at the time, and their revenue increased significantly quarter over quarter. People would go to shops and buy boxed copies of Netscape.
That was the case until Microsoft bundled IE with Windows. That was one of the major points of the Microsoft antitrust lawsuit - browser developers were losing a lot of money because Microsoft were abusing their dominance and bundling IE for free.
Netscape became fully free in 1998 since there was not other way they'd be able to compete with IE. The code was open-sourced and became what we know as Firefox today.
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VLC, when codec were thé worst.
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Absolutely VLC, VLC was excellent at what it does before codec issues were even that widespread.
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Words cannot convey how sketchy the MP4 codec scene was, pirating media in the Windows XP era. Every month you'd have to find some DivX CCCP K-Lite [cracked].7zip.exe and roll the fuckin' dice.
We were very proficient at reinstalling our operating systems.
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wouldnt this one really just be ffmpeg?
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VLC does use ffmpeg (or more specifically, libavcodec) for some of its codecs, but it uses a bunch of other libraries as well, including VLC specific ones.
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NextStep - eventually became Mac OS X (that’s why all sorts of system calls start with
NS)BeOS. Playing 4 video streams at the same time in 1995 was mind blowing.
OS/2 was WINE before WINE
SixDegrees was a social network before Friendster
Prodigy was an online service (and ISP later) owned by Sears, which had a significant mail-order business. It could have been Amazon.
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I used to work at Sears, and I could never figure out how a company that found its initial success in a catalog business didn’t immediately see the opportunities the internet presented. Now Sears is all but gone, and Bezos gets to go to space with Shatner :(
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Eddie fucking Lampert.
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They very likely saw, but very likely could not make the transition without causing revolt in its ranks and in its own middle management. Or even its own board directors.
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Man, I remember seeing that BeOS demonstration that had a spinning cube with a different video playing on each face, and being absolutely dumbfounded. Thanks for reminding me of that.
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Yeah that looked so promising
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that’s why all sorts of system calls start with
NSWhat do you mean with this?
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Programmers that make MacOS apps see a lot of things with "NS" in the name. For example, if you want to play sound in your code, you can use something called
NSSound. If you want to interact with the clipboard (or "pasteboard" as MacOS calls it), you use something calledNSPasteboard"NS" is short for "NeXTStep". Apple kept the old prefix even though it's called MacOS now.
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Flash and Java, honestly, albeit in different ways. Both saw the web as a platform above all platforms.
Flash was the only way for browsers to do anything high-performance or good-looking from like 1997 to 2010. Any idiot could slap together a cool spinning animation with gradient-colored vector graphics. There were countless genuinely-free games, apparently made for the fun of making them, and even more interactive animations, apparently made to be as offensive as humanly possible.
Java was the big-grey-rectangle alternative, where you knew your browser was about to spend five entire minutes loading something, just to demonstrate a bouncing ball experiment or whatever. But: it was a real general-purpose executable format, with no installation or setup. You stuck a program on a page and it worked right there on the page. Eventually. And once it loaded it'd hitch and jerk constantly, because garbage-collection was always a terrible idea. But sometimes you'd find a page that'd hitch and jerk through playing Quake 2 in your goddamn web browser.
What ultimately killed them was that Adobe is among the worst software companies in the world and Oracle is number one. Flash was a security nightmare. It was hacked together for impressive functionality, and then repackaged for ease of use, so it was about as exploit-hardened as a wet paper towel. The fact it ran poorly on phones (and Steve Jobs was a dick) was just the excuse to stop tolerating its endless vulnerabilities. Java meanwhile was an okay format owned by the devil. It served kinda the same role as WebAssembly does now, except absolutely no-one wanted to put up with licensing it, because Oracle likes to sue its competitors and fuckin' loves to sue its customers. The company name is an acronym for One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison. And if two devices running Java connect via wifi, he expects the air in-between them to be properly licensed. If the free software movement had not been founded to say "fuck printers," it would have sprung into being in order to say "fuck Oracle."
Anyway.
Google Chrome, intolerable leash that it now is, made Javascript usefully fast in 2008. Prior to that it was interpreted. Javascript calculators in the AOL days could lag. Mozilla responded with asm.js, inviting the language itself to be performant. Nowadays just about anything could be WASM + WebGPU, and quite frankly most things should be. But for some stupid reason even the chat programs written in Javascript bundle their own browser.
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IMO there's still nothing that's quite as good as Flash. Efficient vector animations that perform consistently across all major browsers are still unusually hard for non-developers. There are some solutions, but they usually aren't as designer or animator-friendly and require a huge JavaScript library to be loaded. The barrier to entry for non-developers (or inexperienced developers) creating games that run well cross-browser is still quite high too.
I remember creating a Flash-based chat system back in the day. Before WebSockets and Server Sent Events, Flash was the only way to get bidirectional sockets in a web browser, other than Java applets of course (which were pretty locked down by that point).
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Ruffle is obviously as good as Flash, by emulating Flash - but yeah, the creative environment is missing. We need some .io page that clones the old way of churning out 2D games and animations.
We're in a stupid period of computing where a legitimate way to get games on smartphones and computers is to publish software for DOS because everything has some kind of emulator for that archaic platform.
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The fact he called the language HolyC is brilliant. He might be crazy, but that doesn't mean he isn't a genius.
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Unfortunately your statements should be past tense :(. They died kind of tragically.
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Wasn't.
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Wow, that was a wild ride of a story. Very sad though.
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Do websites count? Vine fizzled out but it would have been a huge success with today's TikTok crowd.
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It had today's tiktok crowd. It was a huge hit. The only reason it failed is because of monetisation.
Only reason YouTube is popular. No competitor can match it in those terms.
Saying Vine was ahead of its time is like saying Digg or MySpace was ahead of its time. No it was at the precipice and just horribly failed to manage its growth and responding to competitors
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It was a huge hit.
It had 200 million monthly active users at peak, which is a decent number but still smaller than every other major social network. I don't think that's entirely due to monetization. I think one of the factors is that a lot of people still had small data caps at the time it initially launched (2013), which is not really conducive to spontaneously consuming and uploading video from mobile phones.
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Imho NAPSTER. Crazy days of sharing mp3's files.
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Not sure it was ahead of its time, it revolutionized an entire industry. To me it feels more as if it came at the exact right time.
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/thread
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UNIX systems in the 1960s. They are still in use to this day and modified ones run our phones, Steam Decks and space craft!
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This is a matter of interpretation, I'll wager, but to me, "before its time" implies something that came about too early, before the world was ready for it. I'd argue that Unix was of its time, since it was the operating system that went on to widespread success. That is to say, I think that it's Multics that was before its time. It was derided at the time for being too large and complex (2MB of memory—outrageous!!), and the creators of Unix were Multics programmers who borrowed many of its concepts to make a smaller, less resource-intensive OS that ran better on the computers of the day.
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Fair, my thoughts are of the current utilization and use-case we have for Unix-like systems makes it so dynamic and universal. I absolutely love it.
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Excel enabled non-programmers to create basically any app as long as they are fine with a cell-based UI. Same with Access and CRUD apps. I know people love to dunk on M$ here, and for good reasons too, but these two programs are probably responsible for a decent chunk or PoC/v1 projects worldwide.
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I use Excel for POCs quite a lot. Sometimes it's easier to generate a CSV file, load it up in Excel and test the maths there instead of writing code to do that. And you can visualise the data as well, so your tens of thousands of rows are easier to digest and understand if what you're doing is sound or not. It takes a lot more time to do decent data visualisation in JS or Python.
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MS did a little revolution in WYSIWYG editors. Most persons can't solve a basic tech problem but are proficient in using them. If there's any hate to them it's for their weird design decisions, being a monopolist and people using their programs for the things they were never prepared for. I still love MS '03 Office. It lacks some functions and can render pages differently than never editions due to converting formats, but it's a solid boring workhorse with everything at the end of your fingers.
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The pointing-finger cursor used for navigating stacks was later used in the first web browsers, as the hyperlink cursor.[39]
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HyperCard was awesome!
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I have been using computers since the 80s. I had a hiatus in the late 80s/early 90s. Seeing an ad in a magazine for HyperCard is what made me want to get back into it.
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All of it, because apparently humans were wholly unprepared for using computer technology responsibly.
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Real Player.
Nobody had enough bandwidth to actually stream anything. I guess some people had IDSN, and maybe even fewer cable internet, but the majority of the world was still on dial up. You can't stream video on dial up.
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It was pretty good for the time indeed! I had a 10MBit link back then, watched a lot of funny videos through RP.
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I liked that I could get loud bursts of static in real-time!!
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Google wave
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Google Wave was beautiful. I was rooting for it to replace email as a standard. So many possibilities lost...
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In retrospect, wave did feel like an EEE attempt by Google on email, I am happy it didn't replace email, but Google wave's features have since spread to web app standards
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I used it to generate a shit ton of policy documents in a hurry.
The company I was at was being staged to be purchased. We had Jack shit for policy documents. The company that was organizing our sale said they needed a wide range of formalized documentation.
I basically set my entire team up on wave. I threw up outlines in different threads and we all just went to fucking town writing policy. We would peer review, make suggestions on each other's policy read over stuff while we worked on our own things.
It really was an amazing product.
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All that collaboration stuff was integrated into Google Docs.
It's so good that Microsoft copied it - first with the web version of Word in live.com and then eventually into the desktop version of Word.
I agree though - Wave was ahead of its time.
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It's been quite a while so I might not be remembering correctly, but even though they advertised it as an application, wasn't Google Wave more akin to a proof of concept? I was under the impression they took that engine and incorporated it into their collaboration products like Google Docs?
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Postgres, Postgres has always been extremely ahead of the curve... Even when it was Ingres.
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Alter Ego, a 1986 life-simulator in which you start as a baby and play through an entire life, choose-your-own-adventure style.
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Google glasses, I think it's death was mainly because it looks nerdy aside of course the huge privacy concerns. Which honestly don't exist now. Look at twitch streamers streaming everywhere. People installing cameras at their home and connected to the net for the world to see. Now we are going hard with VR/AR even Apple has a product for it.
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The concerns exist and are bigger than ever. Ask c/privacy about it. You're referencing the fractional percentage of people who elect to be streamers. Irrelevant to the general population.
A decade ago, one of my local dives, never seen a fight break out there.. dude attacked a woman over them. You don't think people are more poor and angry and traumatized now?
https://www.eater.com/2014/2/25/6273629/woman-attacked-for-wearing-google-glass-at-a-bar-in-sf
I'd never hit a woman or condone violence like this. And, fuck invasive undercover surveillance cameras. This technology can stay in a fuckin dumpster.
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Fwiw, citing c/privacy on Lemmy is very, very much also referencing a fractional percentage of society.
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I mean, screw the camera. An affordable, non-intrusive heads-up display on glasses, we're still dying to actually make that a thing. There's a few third party solutions that still kind of do what they were doing but it's nowhere near as good.
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Yes, streamers might a bad example I admit but in terms of general population being privacy centric. I doubt most people don't really care until ofcourse it affects them if we do we would have huge backlash with Amazon Echo, Google assistant those stuff won't take off. Baby cameras, IP cameras installed in their very homes those things are a huge privacy concerns yet they are still here. We have TikTok/ Vine which people voluntarily submit videos. Theres Pokemon GO which prompt people to use their cameras to catch Pokemons. Not knowing if those image captured might be stored and analyze. Smartphone themselves we have no idea if that thing is recording us. I think Google glass failed simply because of its market which were rich and fashion centric did not like it. Compared to it's competition who still seem alive today.
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There are people who suddenly go offline completely because they have enough. I guess I should too
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The privacy concern is even worse than it was for google glass. 10 years ago, you could rest assured that google wasn't processing your video feed in a meaningful way because there was simply no way to meaningfully use it. Now, the stream can be analyzed on your phone using an AI for meaningful results, and that data can easily be sold because user telemetry is worth more now than ever before. People are also faster to dismiss privacy concerns, so it'll be an easier thing to sell to customers.
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I think it died because of technical problems more than anything. We didn't have batteries good enough back then, and the screen wasn't all that good. It was heavy, it had problems with overheating and it worked for couple of hours tops
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DLNA protocol.
Seriously, how has it been passed up by all the worst little steaming gimmicks?
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Okay, I’m probably super ignorant and in need of a lesson… Every piece of DLNA software I’ve ever messed with sucked and was a massive security and privacy issue? I haven’t looked at it much, but it didn’t seem worth it? Is it good? What’s good about it?
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It just works.
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The protocol is fine. Just fine. It lacked authentication and transcoding, builtin thumbnails, content metadata.
Without authentication or transcoding it didn't have the public umph it needed to get people to spend some decent time/money on graphical interface.
I've honestly never seen a GUI client that was even half reasonable to try to find a piece of media. Most of them are just generic file folder layouts. It's really no great surprise that Plex, Jellyfin and Emby push them out of the environment completely.
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Quake 3, modern first person shooters are still based on that game.
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Quake's are still the best shooters even now :D
I play Quake Champions every day
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GEOS on the C64 (and possibly others)? A desktop environment before machines really had the power to pull it off decently.
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Battlefield heroes. Somehow it couldn’t pay the bills while that style of game is insanely popular now.
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Okay this took me back a lot. The nostalgia hits hard.
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There's a version of the game that's kept online by fans and still playable
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Now I have the theme stuck in my head... Thanks ...
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You’re welcome, it’s a banger
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The Source game engine was completely unmatched in its time.
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VisiCalc
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Kai's Power Tools in 1992 . The interface was so next level it felt out of place and the more you used it features would get unlocked and more advanced. https://winworldpc.com/product/kais-power-tools/20
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I remember using an app called Kai's Power Goo, which is assume is made by the same person.
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Pretty bold assumption
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for those chatbot lovers, respect to the one from 1966 : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
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Dr Sbaitso early TTS and kinda-AI psychologist, with his cantankerous, all-caps responses.
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I had a lot of fun with this, it came with my Soundblaster 16 card I recall.
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Now that is a name I haven't heard in a long time! There are videos of Dr. Sbaitso usage on YouTube (of course). Also got this software with a Soundblaster card somewhen in the 90s.
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Dr. Sbaitso popped in my head and I had to see if anyone here remembered it. I had the privilege of being able to use it when it came out. Fun times!
You can still use it through the Classic Reloaded site!
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Hardware and software combo… video toaster from Newtech
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Toaster-
I expected an IOT toaster, but was disappointed.
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Google Wave RIP
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It sort of lived on as Apache wave which I think you could self host, but it died in 2018. Never used it… Vaguely aware of what it did and kind of want it now :(.
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Photoshop. Kinda obvious now but at the time it was as revolutionary as it is mundane now.
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Searching for almost anything was so much easy. Such a powerful tool that disappeared. Its performance 20 years ago was better than Finder is today. At least from my experience.
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Its performance 20 years ago was better than Finder is today
This is the case for a lot of software, and it drives me crazy. We used to have slow, relatively unreliable hard drives, single core processors, and significantly slower RAM, and yet some things feel slower today than they did 20 years ago. Try Windows 98 on an old PC (or a VM with a single throttled core) and compare it to any modern Windows OS. Try Visual Basic 6 and compare the startup and build speeds to any modern IDE.
It feels like some software has been getting slower more quickly than hardware has been getting faster...
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Developers went like: "it's free real estate"
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I'm gonna cheat a little one and mention the PSP GO (take it as an honorable mention because it uses software to work lol).
The damn thing was meant to be used with an online connection to get games, updates and DLCs but people failed to see the appeal to it (mostly because of the poor infrastructure we used to have) people decided that UMD was the better option and guess which of those thrived.
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That's downplaying how Sony tried forcing everyone to switch, once they'd already bought UMDs. They just could not stop themselves from fucking over their own customers. Buy a PSP! It needs Sony's special memory cards. No, extra-special ones, not the kind your Sony digital cameras use. Upgrade your PSP! Fuck you, buy new memory cards. Yeah it's the same shape, but it's special-er, you peasant. Upgrade your PSP again! And throw out all your games, because we didn't include a slot this time! It's all on the memory card, and of course you have to buy a new one, from us, specifically for this single gizmo, priced like it's made out of gold recovered from deep-water shipwrecks.
If they'd just launched with forced internet connectivity it might be a different story. God knows the OG PSP never spent long without getting leashed to a wall, so yet another game could forcibly install new firmware, once your battery reached exactly 100.0% charge.
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But thrived though?
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I mean, we have the PS5 digital edition and the Steam Deck, I think the format became very popular.
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zmodem. It was the fastest way to move data back in the day and was a trailblazer for streaming protocols. It excelled over dialup connections. Moving a file by say ftp over tcp/ip was painful by comparison.
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It was an evolution of previous protocols and only marginally better/faster than, say, ymodem.
It was useful, but was it really ahead of its time?
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Hmm… I remember zmodem being noticeably faster, more reliable, and flexible compared to its predecessors. But I think of it as ahead of its time inasmuch as what followed seemed a definite step back. Internet-based protocols which replaced it were quite a bit slower due to latency issues and what not, and it would take quite some time for new approaches to surface. Today, we have the like of bittorrent which does leap ahead in many ways but that was a long time coming.
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Robot Odyssey, an adventure game played by programming robots to help you. Still nothing like it.
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That sounds cool…
God, did you ever hear about core wars? Very different thing but another weird programming “game”
Redcode is kind of a bonkers assembly language too. I never really got into it because it’s kinda boring, but I could see this being crack for the right person.
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Space Engineers in dev mode also permits player coded behavior. The player may write scripts in C# and apply them to game objects. Scripts run in a sandboxed .NET environment.
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I've definitely spent time in the past looking for a game probably exactly like this! I figured surely someone made this. I'll definitely set that aside to delve into later. Thanks!
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Still feels like an untapped niche. Doesn't help that adventure games in general have mostly been folded into other genres now.
Human Resource Machine and even Factorio scratched that same part of my brain.
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Had never seeHad never seen that before. That is super cool!
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KeyKOS, EROS, and other capability-based mainframe OSes could offer security and data integrity guarantees that "modern" OSes are only now just catching up with. Nothing from the Unix or VMS lineages, including Linux and Windows¹, really comes close.
The next chance for widespread adoption of a capability-based system is maybe Fuchsia; if Google ever deploys it for anything other than Nest devices, or if its open-source core gets picked up by someone else.
¹ Windows isn't literally a VMS, but modern Windows descends from Windows NT, which was led by Dave Cutler, who had also been the tech lead on VMS. And there's the joke about "WNT" and "VMS".
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If games count, Black and White. I think that game is peak VR material just happened way before VR and now the IP is dead afaik
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KDX Peer to Peer and cross platform "sharing". loved the custom interface options. lucked into a few good servers that had hard to find vinyl shares.
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KDX as a concept actually had a "predecessor", Hotline, that was one of the best Mac OS warez scenes in its prime.
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thats a trip! I remember that but it was all but over before my time. I had some Corracho servers I connected to for a time as well. Very slow, but stable.
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Windows Vista
It looked so good, and brought 64-bit computing to the mainstream. Everyone fucking hated it because the computers that they had (which at the time was the majority) absolutely sucked.
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Superscape Do3D blew my mind back in the day. I used to spend weeks just building little houses and landscapes, then watch them come alive with virtual "NPCs" and such.
Definitely required some imagination, but for a time when connecting to the internet still made a noise, it was definitely impressive.
I remember when Minecraft was first being developed, my first thought was that it looked like a modern voxel-based Do3D.
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Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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NeXT. I still use WindowMaker partially out of nostalgia for NeXTSTEP. BeOS was also mind blowing. And can’t forget WebOS for phones.
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Visicalc
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Lisp Machines and Smalltak. We're still catching up to a lot of things that were possible with these systems.
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Mycroft I really want to see it's intents system revamped to take advantage of llms
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iOS. When it was launched, it was far ahead of Blankberry's OS.
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GeoWorks.
Here's a full GUI vector graphics/word processor/productivity app suite with clean Motif-esque decor and solid multitasking... and it runs on a 512k machine with a 5MHz CPU.
The C64 predecessor was impressive too, but straddles the other side of toy/professional IMO.
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Symbian Meego
