Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around? - cellml
======
wishinghand
The Macbook Pro chassis before the OLED touchstrip. I'm a web developer and
learned on MBPs. The touchpad was the right size, the keys had the right
amount of travel, the form factor and weight were perfect.

Right now I'm considering moving to developing on a Galaga Pro and using
Windows/WSL. I've got most things setup on my desktop how I like using
HyperTerm (I had too much trouble with Cmder), VS Code, and ZSH. I can't seem
to figure out how to install PHP 7.2 correctly to work on Laravel, nor get my
GPG and SSH keys for Github working.

The bright side is if I move to Windows I wouldn't have to give up very many
programs, or they have some rough but useable equivalents (Spectacle, Sequel
Pro, Gifox, Bear).

I was tempted to go with Elementary on the Razer Blade Stealth, but I still
want 32gb of RAM, and Propellerheads Reason doesn't work on Linux.

~~~
function_seven
Apple has ditched so many cool things in the MacBook line.

1) MagSafe. I know they really want to go all in on USB-C, but the original
MagSafe connector was awesome. Even the weaker 2.0 version was nice. There
were two instances where that connector saved my laptop.

2) The laser-drilled power indicator. That was so cool. It looked like the
light magically appeared _through_ the aluminum. Now there's no indication
whatsoever if your laptop is on or asleep or off.

3) The 2007-2011 keyboards. The ones with the real travel. Even the 2012
version with slightly reduced travel was okay. But my 2007 MacBook had the
best laptop keyboard I'd ever used.

4) HDMI and SD Card slot. These are the kinds of things that you happen to
need when you least expect it. When you're least likely to have that dongle
with you. They're also thin ports that will fit nicely without bulking up the
chassis.

5) Of course, function keys and an ESC key.

I'm going to keep my 2012 MBP going as long as I can. But when it dies or is
no longer supported, I'm pretty sure ThinkPad is where I'm headed.

~~~
bayindirh
While I also love MagSafe and its features, wouldn't having a more standard
port is much better?

iPhones are constantly bashed by a group of users because of not having USB-C
connectors. Having four USB-C ports with identical capabilities on a MacBook
pro is a more pragmatic and flexible solution to have, when compared to
MagSafe.

On the power level and power button issue, Apple changes its features to shape
customer behavior and expectation from its devices. Apple removed battery
meter from Macs since it's standby is too long (30 days) and robust (auto-
hibernation), so you're unlikely to run out of juice.

They also believe in the stability of MacOS such that it's not important
whether the machine is off or in standby. Because it boots in ~10 seconds and
wakes up in ~2. They want to remove these distinctions from their computers
and try to lower your cognitive load. Actually this is one of the finest
features of the Macs IMHO. They don't make you think to use it.

Open the lid, and if the screen doesn't come on, press the power button, done.

~~~
gambiting
>>While I also love MagSafe and its features, wouldn't having a more standard
port is much better?

I don't understand why it can't have both. Have a magsafe port, ship with a
magsafe charger. But if you happen to connect a USB-C charger to one of the
USB-C ports, charge through that too. No issue. Playstation portable was like
this - you could charge it through proprietary playstation charger, or if you
connected a mini-usb cable it would charge through it. No issue.

~~~
bayindirh
It's also possible and a sound idea, however I think that idea is filtered by
Johnny Ive's "remove everything which is not strictly necessary" rule, and his
love for clean designs and symmetry (which is an evolution of Sony design
philosophy BTW).

~~~
function_seven
Well Johnny has gone way too far. My needs include more than the bare minimum.
I get wanting to standardize in USB-C. Maybe move the magnet up a bit on the
cable?

What I don’t appreciate is the over-emphasis on useless symmetry or
minimalism. Good design is more than looks and polish. Functionality is the
reason I buy the thing. Design is why I choose the brand. If the functionality
isn’t there, I don’t care how pretty it is.

~~~
bayindirh
IMHO, Macs are much more functional than they look, but they need a different
way of thinking and some adjustment. Apple likes to move in front of the curve
in terms of connectivity and its utilization. It's their way of design, and
they like to show it as a part of the brand.

However, I'm not implying that everyone should be comfortable with the
operation principles of new MacBooks or their devices in general. I love the
challenge and the different perspectives they bring, but it's sometimes
limiting and slowing down until finding the best way to utilize them.

This is why we have different brands and designs, because one design indeed
doesn't fit all.

~~~
dahauns
To continue my Rams quotes from above: "[Good design] makes a product
understandable". If having to find out how to best use your tool is a
challenge (especially when the new iteration seems to be such an apparent step
backwards compared to the old), maybe it simply isn't good design.

~~~
gambiting
>> If having to find out how to best use your tool is a challenge (especially
when the new iteration seems to be such an apparent step backwards compared to
the old), maybe it simply isn't good design.

Cough, cough......USB-C. Looking at the plug there is no way to tell whether
the cable will support fast charging, video, or even 3.0 or just 2.0 USB. All
of those cables share the same socket but provide different functions.

~~~
dahauns
Well, this is where Apple gets it right - every USB-C socket supports
everything. (Ok, mostly. Looking at you, MacBook 12!)

~~~
gambiting
Socket - yes. But you can walk into an official Apple store, buy a brand new
MacBook Pro + an "apple approved" LG USB-C display, and guess what - the USB-C
cable that is bundled with your MacBook Pro cannot be used with the display
that you just bought. What's worse, MacOS won't tell you why it doesn't work -
it just won't. It's the worst and most user-hostile design in computers I have
seen in years.

~~~
dahauns
Ah, of course, I misread - the cables. No disagreement from me here. :)

------
hashhar
The Zune (media players) and Windows Phone (upto 8, not even 8.1). The fluid
interface with focus on readability and content.

The photos app was amazing. Live tiles are amazing. The music player and it's
live tile was amazing. The performance was the same whether on a low end
budget phone or the top of the line model.

So many good ui and ux decisions like the lack of hamburger menus and
placement of all menu items along the bottom of the screen with the extra
items being hidden away in a drop-down using ellipsis. System wide light and
dark themes jazzed up using an accent color that all of your apps respected.

The People hub (contacts app) was the central point for all social media.
Facebook and Twitter were integrated. I didn't need fb messenger. Skype and fb
messenger were integrated with the messaging app.

Damn, I wish we made it.

~~~
wishinghand
What was a live tile?

On a side note I do wish there were strong 3rd or 4th choices for a phone OS.
A shame Blackberry is now just an Android flavor.

~~~
xeromal
A live tile in windows phone, 8, 10, etc is an app icon that contains realtime
info like weather. I've never used the particular app mentioned, but live
tiles are just a cool way to display info.

~~~
wishinghand
Just looked them up on Youtube. It looks like a very good UI/UX idea.
Surprised Apple or Android hasn't copied it, except for the useless live clock
icon on their clock app.

~~~
Godel_unicode
I have a ton of widgets on my Android home screen which are exactly that.
Google at-a-glance, music player, calendar, stock screener, photos, it's
awesome.

~~~
hashhar
Widgets are nice but in the last 3 years of using an Android I've only ever
used widgets for my podcast app, music players, a few tap to dial contacts, a
calendar widget with the day view.

Widgets are a good idea but they look horribly inconsistent.

------
CiaranMcNulty
Pebble - they created a series of smart watches that had:

\- long battery life (2-7 days depending on model)

\- e-ink colour screens, that were always on

\- an extensive app/watchface ecosystem

\- actual attractive watches

I had a series of them and was all-in on the new models announced via
kickstarter, when they suddenly disappeared and were bought by Fitbit. All
forthcoming products were killed off.

They've been pretty reasonable with sunsetting the servers and helping the
community move towards an open model, but it's only a matter of time before my
Pebble Time Round bites the dust and I can't fix it (my partner's has already
gone)

~~~
sz4kerto
I have a Garmin sport/smart watch, it lasts for weeks and it has always-on
color display. Smart watches from other brands also last for many days or
weeks.

~~~
tallanvor
The Fenix 3 is still going strong for me after two years with it. I don't
usually use GPS on it, so I charge it about once a week when it's around 50%
charge (sometimes I forget to check, which is why I plan for about weekly
charging).

Also, the edge is slightly raised above the face on it, so while there are a
couple of nicks on the bezel, there are no scratches on the glass. The
sapphire glass may also be part of that.

App ecosystem is minimal, but I honestly don't need any apps anyway.

~~~
parliament32
I got mine for running/swimming/activities but I actually really like it as a
daily smartwatch. Like you said, some nicks on the bezel but otherwise it
seems indestructible.

------
rsync
Altavista. I miss it every single day.

Searching for technical (unix, programming, etc.) content is so much easier
when you can use nested parens and proper boolean language.

This is in contrast to google where searches return things that don't even
contain your keywords.

This is in contrast to google where the modifiers like allinsite: and '+' and
"quotes" are not respected or change their behavior over time.

Man I miss altavista...

~~~
Liru
> This is in contrast to google where searches return things that don't even
> contain your keywords.

This has become so frustrating as of late, especially when you search for
something like "c++ map" and it decides to completely ignore the "c++" part of
your search, leaving you with pages of actual maps. Slightly exaggerated
example since I can't remember any concrete ones off the top of my head, but
the actual situation happens way too often.

~~~
ChristianGeek
I just did a Google search on “c++ map” and didn’t see the behavior you
describe.

~~~
krono
What if I told you Google search results are partially based on behaviour
data, meaning the results you get for a search potentially differ from mine

It doesn't happen to me so it doesn't exist does not apply in this case

~~~
Zelmor
Use duck duck go, my lad.

~~~
krono
Thanks for reminding me! Just set it up as the default search provider in my
browser.

Google search doesn't really work for power users anymore and I don't see that
changing for the better anytime soon.

------
kevinmchugh
Grooveshark had a better interface for managing "currently playing" than
anything I've used before or since. Most apps don't even track what's
currently playing in an intelligent fashion.

Similarly, rockbox was really great mp3 player firmware, when I used to use
one of those. It had a funny feature I've never seen elsewhere: multi-lingual
article-ignoring sort. I had German band "Die Prinzen" on that mp3 player, and
that sorted under P, just like all it sorted the Beatles under B.

~~~
numbsafari
My wife still rues the loss of Grooveshark. She’s never recovered. I don’t
blame her. All other streaming services suck horribly.

~~~
aethr
The ability to quickly spin up a "radio broadcast" in Grooveshark for friends
was amazing. With a small group of five friends we set up a Friday DJ rotation
where one person would queue songs all day and the others listen in. All the
"broadcasts" got saved as playlists, which you could "favourite" from your own
account and go back to whenever you wanted. People could make requests when
they had a "next track" that would segue well with what you were already
playing. It was really fun!

I have never had a period of more high quality music discovery and I sorely
miss those playlists, many of which featured obscure/rare/live tracks that
simply aren't available in today's music services.

~~~
Siilwyn
You might like [https://jukebox.today/](https://jukebox.today/) for listening
with a group.

------
aerovistae
Ensemble Studios, makers of Age of Empires, Age of Empires 2, and Age of
Mythology, some of the best RTSs ever made. There are other great RTSs, but
they're all great in different ways from the Age series, which nothing else
resembles.

Microsoft bought them, and shut them down not long after for insufficient
profits. Sigh.

Age of Empires IV is being made now since they noticed there's demand, but the
studio they chose is a well-known clown collective. Hopes are not high.

~~~
zawerf
I thought it was being made because some redditor asked Bill Gates for it in
an AMA?
[https://np.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/49jkhn/im_bill_gates_c...](https://np.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/49jkhn/im_bill_gates_cochair_of_the_bill_melinda_gates/d0s9j8s/?sh=3648d883&st=J6N1TBZS)

Maybe they choose a random studio because were was just trying to appease
Gates' whims?

How bad is this "clown collective"?

~~~
cperciva
No, that game was under development long before the AMA.

------
fphhotchips
Google Reader. Now I have a mix of HN, Reddit and GMail, and none of them work
really how I like.

~~~
chrisfinne
Agreed.

I'm sure there were many reasons it died, but my theory is that Google
strategically wanted to kill it because the User was in control of the data-
sources and the algorithm. Google wanted people to migrate to Google+, News,
etc. where they control what you see.

This is what Facebook and Twitter did. Their feeds used to be a simple chrono
sort of sources you determined, but then they slowly took control.

In my mind, all these companies have shifted from being Platforms to being
Publishers. While they aren't writing the content, they are actively choosing
what content you see and don't see, i.e. being the Editor.

~~~
wp381640
I can't figure out what I've read up to on Twitter anymore since it shuffles
tweets around and inserts random "your follower also follows this person"
tweets which I didn't ask for

~~~
tildedave
If you turn off the "show the best tweets first" option in your content
preferences you get a chronological timeline back. (They made this change a
month or two ago)

~~~
wp381640
That's it! Thank you

------
aninteger
A diverse CPU collection.

For a while we had some good alternatives to Intel x86. Alpha, Sparc, Motorola
68k, PowerPC, MIPS. Now we just have 32 and 64 variants of x86 and ARM. I
guess powerpc is technically not dead yet (which is good!) although the new 64
bit powerpc is little endian I think...

As for companies, Sun Microsystems. I'd like to think that Sun, if they were
still around, would be handling Java better than Oracle is today. I'd like to
believe that they'd operate similar to Microsoft on the open source front.

~~~
jplayer01
It's a real shame we lost Sun. It was such an innovative company when it came
to technology - one of the few examples of really engineering led software
teams where management had no say in technical decisions. Unfortunately, the
market doesn't really reward world class technical solutions/expertise. I'm
still not sure what it rewards. Predatory business practices a la Oracle?

~~~
anoncoward111
I'm not sure if "rewards" is the correct verb for what is going on.

Rather, I would say that the market "is succeptible to near-permanent
exploitation by businesses like Oracle whose services cost way more than the
value they deliver"

~~~
jplayer01
You put it better than I ever could, thanks.

~~~
anoncoward111
No worries!! I worked at Sun/StorageTek as it was being folded into Oracle. It
was a hideous, disgusting process that saw more politics and internal lies
than I ever thought possible. Google and Salesforce got burned pretty hard by
Oracle canceling new tape development and manufacturing :(

------
tvanantwerp
Come next March, I'm going to be missing Google Inbox. Completely changed how
I use email for the better. I'm dreading going back to the tradition email
workflow and hope to God that somebody builds something to replace Inbox in my
life.

I also miss StumebleUpon from years ago. I don't even know if the site still
exists, but for me it died when it forced me to pick interests. The great
thing about that site was that it served me random things from outside of my
bubble. I saw all sorts of fascinating stuff that I'd never have seen if I
were trying to search for and curate content. I'm tired of algorithms trying
to sell me a faster horse.

~~~
Nowyouknow
Ditto on Inbox. Tried to use Spark as a replacement, but it wasn't even close
to providing the experience Inbox does. Do you have any alternatives in mind?

~~~
dylanpyle
It's pricey, but superhuman.com is very good.

------
kodablah
Surprised nobody mentioned them yet: Borland and their approach to UI
development. I know some of their products live on, but I am nostalgic towards
the wysiwyg days of old without being forced to use MS. I of course am aware
of modern equivalents, but sadly the market/users moved.

~~~
vintagedave
We still exist. Look up Embarcadero: Delphi and C++Builder live on. We see
increasing interest - I think there is some disillusion with some other dev
tools.

There's a new version coming out soon.

\-- David. (I work there.)

~~~
grandinj
Sorry, but it's no good anymore.

I cut my programming teeth on Turbo Pascal and Delphi 20 years ago, so I
thought I'd help a friends daughter with her homework assignment.

Could not even figure out how to create a project. I mean honestly, as a
professional SW dev I could not even create a project to contain her working
files, so was unable to open and close delphi and still run the files we were
working on.

No info tips to help figure out what all the GUI widgets do. Had to google all
the stupid things. No decent property inspection of the resulting widgets. No
layout managers, still uses pixel position layouts.

I was originally in favour of our education system continuining to use it, now
I'm solidly in favour of switching to Python.

~~~
vintagedave
Could you tell me what was confusing, please?

> as a professional SW dev I could not even create a project to contain her
> working files

I work as a product manager, and one of my aims is usability. I'm very
interested in the problems you faced, in order to solve them. Could you reply,
or drop me an email at david dot millington @embarcadero.com please? I am
always interested in talking to users.

In the meantime, to get you going: When you start, the IDE's default blank
state (the Welcome screen) has buttons to create a new project. Or, you can go
to the File > New menu, and choose a Windows (VCL) or cross-platform app.

> No info tips to help figure out what all the GUI widgets do.

You are right, that may be assumed knowledge, and the names are often tied to
the WinAPI progenitors of the modern day controls.

> No decent property inspection of the resulting widgets.

What is "decent" property inspection? The Object Inspector is a dockable
window, shown by default when designing (default position is the bottom left
of the screen.) It lists all properties and events, and is similar to Visual
Studio.

> I'm solidly in favour of switching to Python.

I'm sorry to hear that. As I said, one of my roles is to improve usability and
discoverability, and I'd really appreciate it if you'd share the issues you
encountered. For context, I've spoken to six customers in the past fortnight
about the upcoming beta release, focusing on UX, so this is something we do
regularly and is a genuine offer.

------
benjiweber
Nokia n900. Portable linux box, real keyboard.
[http://neo900.org/](http://neo900.org/) doesn't seem to have gained much
traction. [https://www.planetcom.co.uk/](https://www.planetcom.co.uk/) seems
to be the closest thing we have now.

~~~
lgbr
Have you tried Termux on Android? You essentially get a Linux container,
complete with package manager. I have actually used it for development on the
road.

~~~
dpflug
That's a far cry from a full Linux install with X, though. Not to mention the
hardware keyboard. I've not seen a phone in 6 years that had one.

------
chrisparton1991
Old-school Winamp. I use Spotify these days, but man it was fun to customise
skins and play with the awesome visualisers.

Half-Life 3 would also be nice, but I guess it was never "around" to begin
with.

~~~
schizoidboy
WINAMP, WINamp, winamp... it really...

Still works. Winamp is still my main music player (with classic skin, of
course). I run it through Wine on Fedora 28. Some things cause crashes, but
the only things I really care about are MilkDrop, the media library, and
playlists and they all work fine. I've never been able to find something that
comes close to MilkDrop.

Here are my installation instructions (after installing Wine) although I
haven't tried them fresh in a few years (Fedora and Wine upgrades haven't
screwed anything up):

    
    
      $ wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Winetricks/winetricks/master/src/winetricks
      $ chmod +x winetricks
      $ ./winetricks -q directmusic directplay directx9 gdiplus ie8 mfc42 wmp10 windowmanagerdecorated=n
      $ ./winetricks winamp
      Launch Winamp
      To get rid of some weird font issues: Right click Winamp > Options > Preferences... > General Preferences > Playlist > select Use font: MS Sans Serif
      To fix bug https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12060: Winamp > Options > Preferences... > Plug-ins > Visualization > MilkDrop v2.25c > Configure > WINDOWED settings > Uncheck Integrate with winamp skin

~~~
soverance
You can get MilkDrop 2 on Kodi, which turned out to be a just fine replacement
for winamp once you strip all the other nonsense away.

------
client4
Westwood Studios. I loved their games including their final game C&C Renegade,
even though EA rushed Renegade out the door and shut the studio down.

~~~
ellius
Nox. Oh Nox.

~~~
ct520
Nox was a fun lan game for sure

------
akoster
Sun Microsystems, especially after hearing more about the company, it’s
culture and products from this [0] talk posted in this [1] comment in this [1]
thread.

[0]
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc)
[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18217952](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18217952)
[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18217762](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18217762)

~~~
Twirrim
Good products, engineering. Badly managed.

One of the crazier things Oracle found when they were buying them was that the
sales staff were given commission based on the total value of the sale, with
no requirement for a profit to be made. People in the sales team would merrily
sell stuff that cost $200,000 for $100,000, and earn a tidy commission, even
though it meant the company was hemorrhaging.

~~~
linksnapzz
It was also great if you were an academic and needed equipment for a cool
research project.

"What kind of discount will we need to give you to make sure you're doing all
this work on SPARC/Solaris equipment?"

"100%"

"Done!"

...and then they'd send you the servers you need, and perhaps one extra that
....accidentally...fell off the truck.

------
santoshmaharshi
I remember... Google Reader - Dont even have to explain why :-) Kuro5hin -
Site similar to slashdot Windows Phone UI - The phone didn't work but has
changed mobile interfaces a lot. Specially remember the black UI and
readability, which is now known as Night mode. Nokia Phones - Now back, bright
colors and good camera. I have accidentally drop tested it many times, once
from a 2nd floor, which landed on pebbled surface.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Surprised more people haven't named Google Reader - I wonder if it's because
we wouldn't choose to use it again, after having been burned before.

~~~
jamesgeck0
Several of the alternatives have gotten pretty good in the meantime. I wish it
wasn't dead, but I don't miss it.

------
corodra
More mentality than product, but I’m tired of companies not focusing on
solving problems well and focusing more on generating a religion around their
tech. I feel like prior to the iPod, things either worked well or didn’t. Now,
you can put out the most half ass tech, generate a religion and have an
“argument” against well matured tech and call for its death by fire. Looking
at you NoSQL-anything.

Maybe it’s always been this way, I’m only 31. I just feel that making a real
attempt at solving a problem is now a discontinued goal. It’s all about that
religion. And you know what, tech geeks are extremely religious. At times, I
feel there are fundamentalist terrorists that’d tell Apple and NoSQL folks to
chill out and have a cup of tolerance.

~~~
garganzol
Yep, we are right at the middle of that craze. A group of buzz makers tries to
steal the glory from the real titans under disguise of so called disruption.
All without delivering the real value, but with tons of religious preaching.

The computing industry probably reached the levels of Hollywood in 1930s where
every Joe and Mary were going to make it. It clearly is a fad, but at the same
time we have to face the fact that computing industry had become more mature.

As a result, it started to absorb wider areas and masses of people. While the
"preaching fad" will certainly fade away, we have to deal with increased
technological segregation caused but the massive influx.

~~~
corodra
As much as I wish you were correct, but I don't know if this is the "middle".
It's all speculation. Hell, maybe tomorrow will be the day that social media
will be banned and punishable by death by the Hague. But, I personally don't
foresee too much of a slow down until there's a catastrophe due to it.
Theranos I think is a good case study as to how the whole cult/religion
mindset in tech is stupid and potentially dangerous. But that religious modal
works fantastic in the scope of Apple and Google. Yes, there are the rebel
movements against these guys, but let's be honest: "There's dozens of us!
Dozens!". Relatively speaking to whom they cater to. Hell there will always be
folks like Musk and Jobs. Both were the second coming of Jesus for their
respective groups. Both are deeply flawed... well, assholes if you actually
knew them. Jobs literally funded one of the largest sweatshops on the planet
to make iPods and iPhones. Musk has the same emotional temperament as Trump.
Facing the fact, most people in tech are just as religious as West Boro
Baptist Church followers. Actually, I'd argue more because they don't realize
they are. At least in most well rooted religions "Don't believe in false
idols", at least teaches you that you are praying to something. That makes you
aware that you are "praying". No difference between Sunday service and a tech
stage conference with the giant projector images of everyone's current
worshiping idol. "We removed the audio jack and you should all be happy,
amen".

And people clapped to that shit.

This could actually be a super long legit post I could make. But long story
short, Silicon Valley is the new Vatican. They're imposing their ideology of
what they think is right (We own your personal information to better sell to
you). Only difference, there's many more sects within it, all going for the
same populous (Google, Apple, Facebook, etc). They hide behind having "faith
in disruptive tech" but deliver, first off crap tech and second really
intrusive, ethically shit-stained privacy practices.

I'm getting soap boxy and this requires a lot of explaining. I still think
there's still more room for this all to get worse. Obviously, I want to be
wrong. Like, I hope one day you can go "Dude, you realize how stupid you
were?"

My legs are getting numb from doing this on a toilet with my phone.

------
CaliforniaKarl
Groklaw

There are important legal things happening, involving our industry, and which
I think do not get the coverage required.

~~~
eitland
Can't really believe I had forgotten about that. Feels like I read it a few
months ago and last update was in 2013!

I guess life is short and moves fast!

------
itwasntandy
I miss Boundary.

Their traffic flow monitoring with per second granularity was utterly amazing.
It had almost no overhead, it gave the equivalent of netflow data for
instances in EC2, way before AWS gave VPC flow logs. It was incredible.

Alas their sales team were incredibly difficult to deal with, managing to both
seem to not know how or what they were selling, whilst at the same time being
incredibly heavy handed, escalating to my VP over a minor delay in contract
signing and causing trouble to the point I had to almost beg my VP not to tear
up the contract because of their actions.

As a result of what I perceive to be the sales org's failure, the company was
forced to pivot into a generic monitoring product, which lost its identity and
got borged by BMC.

There's nothing like boundary on the market today, if there was I'd be lining
up to buy it.

~~~
tptacek
Was Boundary agent-based? You'd install something on all your instances, or
start from their AMI or something?

~~~
captain_perl
Yes, Boundary is agent-based.

I visited their office in SF when they were 2 guys. :)

We used Boundary at Netflix to monitor Cassandra clusters - you can see
mentions of that on Slideshare.

VividCortex takes the Boundary concept a step farther for databases.

RackPing.com currently has non-agent visualization tools for SREs now, but
will also have a Boundary-style agent shortly. (Disclaimer: affiliated with
them.)

------
renegadesensei
I miss variety in smartphone design.

Everything looks the same these days. Samsung and Apple endlessly copy each
other and virtually every smartphone has the same phablet aesthetic now. I
miss the variety in shapes, sizes, physical keyboards, gaming features,
operating systems, etc.

~~~
highace
I'm cheering for the Razer Phone 2.

It has no notch, it isn't obsessed with a high screen-to-body ratio. It isn't
that thin or particularly light.

But it does have a 120hz screen that nobody else has, and once you see it with
your own eyes you'll be wondering why other manufacturers aren't pushing for
it too. It does have unashamedly large stereo speakers for market-leading
volume and clarity. It does have a unique glowing logo on the back, just like
the old Macbooks. And it also has a 4000mah battery that'll last the whole day
easily.

If you want a phone that's trying to break the meta, this is it.

~~~
wilsonnb3
Eh my iPad Pro has a 120hz screen and I couldn’t care less. I notice no
difference when using my phones 60hz screen.

------
abhiminator
Safari browser for Windows.

I miss the option of having a well made browser from a _trusted_ source as an
alternative to IE, Firefox, and Chrome (which was then still a relatively new
entrant into the browser market).

Apple stopped supporting Safari for Windows OS from v6.0 onward, back in 2012.
[0]

[0] [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/07/28/safari-for-windows-
discont...](https://www.ghacks.net/2012/07/28/safari-for-windows-
discontinued/)

------
mistersquid
FFFFFound [0] [1] [2]

[0] [https://ffffound.com](https://ffffound.com)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FFFFOUND](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FFFFOUND)!

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14204960](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14204960)

~~~
iM8t
I was so sad when I found out that they've pulled the plug on that project.
Too late to export data, so I lost all my data.

------
seattle_spring
Blizzard Entertainment, back when they made well-written atmospheric games
instead of e-sports garbage.

~~~
eksemplar
I think they are still pretty good at atmospheric and I don’t think they were
ever really that great at writing. It was just easier to enjoy when you were
young, but a lot of bad writing is.

I do miss blizzard north though.

~~~
dvlsg
I don't know.. Diablo 2s storyline was quite a bit better than whatever
happened in Diablo 3.

~~~
tatar
Oh man, this grinds my gears so much. It's not even the story itself, I
thought the plot was pretty ok, even good for a generation of gamers that
never met Diablo.

You know what was the real issue there? The dialogues, the screenplay, what
the voice actors end up saying you know. The fucking dialogues in this game is
so bad, the worst action flix of the 80s pale in comparison.

Especially the first demoness, Magda or whatever her name was. Holy fucking
shit. I've never seen a character given that shitty dialogue in my entire life
as an avid movies fan.

~~~
dvlsg
That's a fair point. I remember being especially frustrated by Azmodan, the
supposed "most capable battlefield general" _literally_ yelling his secret
plans at me in Act 3.

------
drawkbox
Mac Pro "cheese grater" towers and arguably Apple's best Pro machine or tower
ever [1].

Mojave macOS version just recently unfortunately EOL'd my last Mac Pro (Mid
2010 with no Metal capable GPU), such a nice design and powerful pro machine
still to this day.

[1] [https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/08/07/apples-mac-pro-
ch...](https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/08/07/apples-mac-pro-cheese-
grater-is-12-years-old-and-is-the-best-mac-ever-made)

~~~
DerekL
You can upgrade to a Metal-capable GPU, if you want.

[https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208898](https://support.apple.com/en-
us/HT208898)

I’ve tried this recently, but then I found I needed a new PCIe power cable,
which I had to order from NewEgg.

------
LeoPanthera
HyperCard.

It's been decades and I've still never found a better way to make simple GUI
applications.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
In general there seems to have been a trend away from trying to enable users
via personal computing. I'm sure you'll get a bunch of responses to this post
linking you to someone's web-app builder, possibly some that are hold-your-
work-hostage subscription services. It's not the same, and people who didn't
live through the 80s and 90s, when the future of computing was still bright,
won't even see why it isn't the same.

~~~
scroot
100%. Whenever I say I miss Hypercard, people find imitations but that's not
the point. Hypercard was holistically perfect for a personal computer of the
mid-90s. Having an equivalent today would be beyond mere imitation. It would
have to extend the values and respect for users (ahem, "authors")

------
fegul
The Palm Pre (and WebOS)

When it first came out I thought it was kinda cute so I got it for my gf but I
ended up loving it.

The slider mechanism was solid, the OS was a breeze to use, and it was years
before Android and iOS fully caught up with the "cards" concept.

It revolutionized the mobile experience in many ways for me.

~~~
snuxoll
I had a Palm Pre Plus the moment they launched on AT&T, WebOS was amazing -
and ironically ahead of its time with all the popularity technologies like
React Native have these days.

I'm actually kind of pissed at the new Palm device TCL launched, what a waste
of the brand.

------
htwillie
Kai's Photo Soap and Kai's Power Goo. Or anything by Kai.

Especially the little tools like the texture explorer and fractal generator.

The user interfaces were refreshingly unique.

~~~
jonah
Check out Adrian Mendoza's photo-based works. He's still using Kai's Power
Tools and other filters on a PowerMac.

(Not sure he has a site with that work but it's scattered throughout his
Twitter feed[1] along with some neat aerial photography of SF and the bay
area.

[1]
[https://twitter.com/Amenfoto/status/1002426100767526913](https://twitter.com/Amenfoto/status/1002426100767526913)

------
Jemm
Browsers that did not have to reload the page when you hit the back button.

Webpages designed to use the least bandwidth, load fast and be accessible.

Companies that had older staff who had enough experience to not make the same
mistakes over and over again.

~~~
java_script
When a site has a redesign nowadays, I can almost always count on them
breaking "Open Link in new Tab". Most recent example was Chase bank and I
think Google's account security page. Same with a redesign project I just
joined at work....

------
qwerty456127
Aardvark was the best Q&A system I've ever seen, felt like the most miraculous
thing I've seen in my life. Sadly I've only learnt about it from the news when
Google bought it and in just about a year Google closed it.

It worked like this: you just write (on the website or in ICQ) an question (in
whatever a form on whatever a subject, no limitations or rules, just avoid
offence), it gets routed to a number of semi-random people all over the world
(you included for the other people's questions, once you receive a question
you can answer it but there is nothing to encourage or discourage you, purely
voluntary, and nobody but the question author will see you answer), you
receive the answers (you can also answer an answer to thank/feedback or ask
for a clarification). Everything was semi-anonymous, you were not forced to
disclose yourself. Unlike Quora Q&As were not recorded (openly at least).
Unlike Quora, whatever you ask (whatever a question you could imagine) you
would always receive at least some useful and interesting answers in minutes-
day (and could request more if not satisfied). Unlike StackExchange you hadn't
to bother with boring rules, the format was just like asking a good friend
that knows everything and enjoys answering your questions. I've ran out of
questions my imagination could supply back in the days, now I have much more
but there is no Aardvark any more :-(

~~~
walterbell
What was their business model?

~~~
qwerty456127
I dunno. Maybe they could scan a question for keywords and show some targeted
ads but I can't remember any (my brain has already got trained to always
ignore ads so I can't even remember if there were ads or if there were no ads,
there were not too many if there were).

------
lev99
Demonoid, a private torrent tracker.

It had a wide range of quality files and the enforced ratio kept seeders
around.

~~~
maxmcd
And on that note: what.cd

~~~
chalkandpaste
Oh man, I miss what so hard. Can't find anything comparable today. Those were
the golden days, when I could find obscure albums that you couldn't even pay
good money for.

~~~
jaryd
[https://redacted.ch](https://redacted.ch)

------
letientai299
Picasa, the best image manager I have used. Nothing come close to it.

~~~
xref
amen, I'm still limping along with it on Windows 10 but nothing else compares
at all for managing your original photos. (I also use Google photos but that
is a recompressed jpeg copy of your original)

~~~
rexf
I run Picasa on my Windows 7 machine, but the latency when loading DSLR JPGs
is too slow. Thus the software is unusable for me.

Here's an old discussion of the slow refining behavior (to view a JPG)
[https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/picasa/-XPN4e...](https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/picasa/-XPN4esP-
VU)

------
johns
Rdio. No other streaming service has come close to the UX perfection of Rdio.

~~~
jonah
When they were both new, I tried out Rdio and Spotify. Rdio won my
subscription hands down and it was long after they'd shut down that I finally
bit the bullet and subscribed to Spotify.

------
panic
I miss the social features of the original del.icio.us. Pinboard is okay, but
it's much harder to find other people to follow.

~~~
sarpdag
I miss it too because of that I am working on Zibillion as a hobby project
currently, [https://zibillion.com/](https://zibillion.com/) but it is not
there yet.

------
oppositelock
Video game arcades. They were amazing during their heyday, but I was also
young. I want both of those things back!

~~~
mlaux
They still exist, but they're incredibly niche nowadays. Arcades are split up
into two categories: small stores that cater to niches, like classic American
games or imported modern Japanese games [1][2], or huge chains that specialize
in 'family entertainment' [3] that include bowling and food.

The arcade isn't dead yet - there's still plenty of enthusiasm for rhythm and
fighting games, which I believe is actually growing. At least among my friend
group, it's much more rewarding to face off in person than to be trashtalked
by some anonymous gamer on an online console gaming service. Also, when the
arcade closes, there's nothing better than just sitting around and chatting
for a few hours. Arcades make a fantastic "third place" [4].

[1] [http://freeplayrichardson.com/](http://freeplayrichardson.com/)

[2] [http://arcadeufo.com/](http://arcadeufo.com/) (disclaimer - owner of this
place)

[3] [https://www.round1usa.com/](https://www.round1usa.com/)

[4]
[https://www.pps.org/article/roldenburg](https://www.pps.org/article/roldenburg)

~~~
spicytunacone
Wow, I've completely forgotten about ArcadeUFO. Completely fell off my radar
which is strange since you guys have more legacy than institutions like WNF
and, in some sense, Next Level. I even still see mentions of 8otB here and
there. You had a F-Zero AX machine at one point, correct?

I definitely agree arcades make a fantastic third place. Planning trips to
e.g., Arcade Infinity (RIP) or a Round 1 is one thing, but having a place
outside of school and home I can routinely drop in and feel welcome even when
I have no particular business to do there was why I kept going to local mall
Tilt arcades (and Borders bookstores while I'm at it). Even as more machines
go online in Japan[0] or scenes establish other events for their game[1], I
still think they're a worthwhile addition to a community.

[0]: [https://medium.com/@sasuraiger/japan-
trip-2017-2018-online-f...](https://medium.com/@sasuraiger/japan-
trip-2017-2018-online-fighting-games-in-japanese-arcades-a84213e3218a)

[1]:
[https://fugutabetai.com/?postid=581](https://fugutabetai.com/?postid=581)

------
ivanmaeder
Adobe Fireworks.

Easy, intuitive vector-based editor with bitmap support. Ideal for
creating/editing images for UIs.

It worked the way I expected an image editing tool to work. The complete
opposite of Photoshop and Gimp (I don't understand the mental model there).

Sketch is a decent replacement—although there are some UI decisions I don't
agree with—and I believe Figma is also very similar.

~~~
loftyal
Adobe really screwed up letting this die, now they've only realized it was a
mistake, and released XD which is so far inferior to Fireworks

------
awad
I have a lot of love for Sidecar. When I first moved up to SF, 'ridesharing'
was truly in its infancy as Uber was still Black-car/Taxi only and Lyft was
still a part of Zimride. Uber might have taken most of the market while Lyft
might have won as the 'not-Uber' but, having had all three in the early days,
it really stood out to me how much Sidecar was innovating ahead of the other
two product-wise, only to be immediately copied thereafter and eventually
driven out of business. Off the top of my head, they were the first to debut
real time price quotes, line/pool service, some kind of delivery integration,
and if I am not mistaken was the original 'rideshare' wherein a regular person
could pick up passengers. Might be a few more I'm missing. I've always held
the belief that they had the best product team of them all in the early days.

~~~
FebruaryStar
Have you hear about Via? Unfortunately it hadn't reached SF yet, but it's
active in NYC and I LOVE it. Super friendly drivers, very efficient and pretty
cheap. Don't know how they preserve these low prices for so many years but...

------
iseanstevens
Virgin America- not perfect but when I was flying BOS<->SFO a lot it was
simply amazing. One of few corporations that felt like it had soul. The seat
back ordering system made things so much better. Not to mention decent
internet on basically every flight. I looked forward to flying. Def cried a
few tears losing them.

AIM - settable status plus chat that almost everyone I knew was on

Early to Mid 90’s Radio Shack. Felt like culture was growing, in a good way

Apple Newton - stupidly ahead of it’s time and for all it’s flaws, still one
of the best note taking paradigms I’ve used. Continuous scrolling plus
shape/text recognition and vector editibility, multi copy-paste via drag and
drop to edge of screen and decent assistant logic as well.

~~~
umichguy
VX was the only airline in recent times I actually look forward to flying
with. I dreaded most of the others.

------
bArray
Sony Walkman music players with long battery life and without massive screens
[1]. Particularly the stick style with a built in male USB connector.

I still use one every day, but it's starting to show its age and I know that
one day something will give. The battery life has slowly degraded and the
buttons are a little more wobbly than they used to be.

The beauty of them was that they consume little power, are very simple to use,
are very rugged and are exceptionally reliable. It did one job and it did it
well.

[1] [https://www.sony.com/electronics/walkman-digital-music-
playe...](https://www.sony.com/electronics/walkman-digital-music-
players/t/walkman)

------
jcdreads
I miss DabbleDB greatly.

I once made a real meals-and-visits schedule signup sheet app for a sick
relative (dozens of folks signing up for slots over days, etc.) in about 20
minutes, including learning a bunch about the tool.

Ultimately it "just" made CRUD apps, but it made the process amazingly fast.
The equivalent of updating a Django model and view was usually a click or two
with no waiting, and the only typing was to name things.

~~~
peatmoss
This was a cool illustration of the Smalltalk programming language. I never
found a use for Dabble (well, until recently when I went looking for it), but
the demos were magical.

------
luxpsycho
Not the product itself, but there were only two features of Spotify around
~2010 that I used, which have both been removed:

* Set as Current Playlist: would allow me, with one action, to set the next playlist, but not interrupt the current song. Song would finish playing, then only song from selected playlist would follow (until I'd set a new 'Current Playlist' again).

* Empty Playlist: I used to have a plsylist called NULL with no songs in it. Combined with the Set as Current Playlist feature, this would allow me to, with one action and without waiting, let the current song finish, and then not have another one start (e.g. to go to bed, play a game, or to focus more intensely). Nowadays you cannot have an empty playlist anymore.

~~~
bryogenic
In order to achieve the NULL playlist you could have a playlist with one song
which is silent.

~~~
etblg
Or better yet -- make it that sound TV stations play when they've stopped
airing for the day, for some extra nostalgia.

------
elhenrico
LucasArts and the best adventure games ever made, like Monkey Island and Grim
Fandango.

~~~
phodo
totally agree - also the Indiana jones games

------
lowpro
Sunrise calendar app.

I’m a naturally unorganized person, and sunrise was honestly the only
calendar/task tracker that has ever kept me organized. I loved it and really
used it, but it was bought by Microsoft and shutdown.

They integrated some parts into outlook, but outlook is used for work and I
don’t like to get my work schedule and personal schedule mixed up. Sunrise
just worked and I really haven’t found something that’s helped since. I’ve
paid for some other calendar apps and they just aren’t the same. RIP

~~~
dawidw
What was so special about that app?

I've checked info at wiki and it seems like it was just calendar with daily
schedule - birthdays, meetings etc. Nothing extraordinary. The same
functionality you should have nowadays in every calendar app - Google,
Microsoft etc.

~~~
lowpro
It was the same functionality, however the UI was better imo and the platform
integrated with almost every service. And since I use Microsoft for work and
Google for school for me it was nice to have one with everything I wanted in
it. Maybe any 3rd party app would have worked that way but I haven’t found it.

It’s been awhile now, but I remember it took me about 10 seconds to add an
event which was really nice and all the fields I cared about were right at the
top, so I didn’t have to stop in the middle of a conversation to actually add
an event.

That’s what I remember anyway, technically pretty much every calendar app has
the same functionality, sunrise just had great UX/UI, and integration so I
could avoid the big players.

------
birchy
The scripting language for the Macintosh's rolodex-type database (Hypercard)
called "HyperText". I'm not aware of any more natural language scripting tool
before or since. I can still write code in it, some two decades later... For
example: 'put the first character of the third word of line 5 of card field
"sometext" into theChar' or 'put the value of card field "typehere" * 1.25
into theValue'

~~~
dminor14
I was on the HyperCard 2.0 team. I'm also nostalgic for it. It's a shame no
one has created anything as simple and useful for generating web pages.

~~~
scroot
One could argue that things have regressed:

[https://twitter.com/ecgade/status/1029795513514774529](https://twitter.com/ecgade/status/1029795513514774529)

------
CosmicShadow
Is there a site that anyone knows of that allows people to track if a consumer
item has been discontinued and what the best alternatives are?

This is less about tech products/services/games and more about stuff you'd buy
at Walmart or the grocery store.

For example, my wife has used a very specific eye liner for years in a certain
colour, and then the brand discontinued the line with no equivalent
replacement and we can't seem to find a similar one (so many wasted trips to
various stores). We had to google it and find a few other folks complaining as
well on various random forums that it's been discontinued just to confirm.
Same goes for specific products in sensitive-skin editions or that one flavour
of something you like.

I was thinking of maybe making a site like this, but figured I'd ask the crowd
about what I might be missing or if anyone else has the same issues and would
be interested in using it?

Why does it always feel like the one thing we like and use regularly is the
only thing that no longer has shelf space at the store?

~~~
ZoomStop
Interesting idea, an alternativeto.net style site for consumer products with
crowd maintained lists. I'm sure you could affiliate link to a lot of the
products to help finance the effort.

------
mamcx
FoxPro.

So far, the dbase family was the best, IMHO, for make business apps.

I'm working slowly in a modern take:

[http://tablam.org](http://tablam.org)

Starting from a relational language (not a rdbms!) that be as usable as
lua/python. Eventually, add a interactive jupyter-like terminal and
Access/FoxPro like IDE environment to make forms and reports. Integrate sqlite
and maybe lmdb or similar.

Yep... a lot of things!

------
lettergram
Pebble, they we're hands down the best watch I owned. The Apple watch needs a
constant charge and really is it's own phone outright. Pebble was the watch
that worked with the phone and the design seemed to understand (especially the
Pebble time steel), that the watch needs to be an assistant, not the main
thing.

------
richev
Psion[0] - in particular the Series 3c[1]

[0]
[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06/26/psion_special/](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06/26/psion_special/)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_3)

~~~
ptman
You have no doubt heard of
[https://www.planetcom.co.uk/](https://www.planetcom.co.uk/) , a psion alumni
project.

------
xj9
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songbird_%28software%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songbird_%28software%29)

~~~
nitemice
Clementine and MusicBee are pretty good replacements

------
Theodores
SGI Cosmo Worlds.

This was a VRML authoring tool that worked on a PC. The interface was like a
cut down Maya in some respects but it was also 'better than Maya' if you
wanted a real time scene graph with scripts to make it interactive with sounds
and content updated in 'frames' outside the 3D window.

This software was well ahead of its time and more fun than Lego. However, much
like Lego, you did need to have a child-like level of creativity and ability
to get absorbed in non-addictive play. Games can have you hooked for hours,
for you to feel guilty for wasting time. Spending the same time creating
virtual worlds in Cosmo Worlds was just as absorbing, however, you could feel
quite proud of what you made at the end, much like childhood Lego experiences.

Despite how brilliant Cosmo Worlds was and how sophisticated one's creations
were, the problem was that the rest of the world were not on the same page.
They were happy with faux 3D and a flat, 2D world, particularly when it came
to the web. We are still stuck in the boring 'Windows' 2D world and do not
appreciate what the people at SGI were trying to do.

------
larkeith
The Graffiti shorthand for Palm PDAs [1]. It still far outshines any
handwriting recognition systems available on modern devices both in terms of
speed and usability.

Also, not really an individual product, but I miss durable consumer devices -
I used a flipphone that had survived being run over by a tractor for years
after the fact, and my old laptop could probably stop a bullet. If we could
develop touchscreen glass that didn't break on a strong sneeze, I would be
delighted (though the phone repair industry, perhaps less-so).

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti_%28Palm_OS%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti_%28Palm_OS%29)

~~~
akavel
For the keyboard, see:
[https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/a/42032](https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/a/42032)

~~~
larkeith
Alas, it seems to have been removed from the Google Play Store. I'll have to
see if I can find it elsewhere, preferably malware-free.

------
jdlyga
I really miss AIM. It's great having real-time conversations with people you
know are online. Facebook Messenger is similar, but it doesn't fill quite the
same need.

~~~
panic
I think that feeling has more to do with the way people used the internet than
it does with AIM itself. Nobody "goes online" any more. Now we're always
online, so it's less special.

~~~
justtopost
But statuses were VERY useful, and we have no analog today.

------
nstart
Glitch by the makers of slack. I had two usernames which I played under to
experience the various talent trees. The game is in my opinion unique up to
this day as a shared multiplayer world where the odds of meeting a random who
was friendly and helpful was very high.

I would spend an hour or so each day meeting random people and we'd go off on
random quests, exchange materials, grow things together.

The game may not have survived but the game itself certainly left a mark where
it proved that a community based game could be peaceful, cooperative, and a
metric ton of fun. Even more importantly, the game was amazing even if you met
only two other real players in a single hour session. I could go on for hours
praising everything that tiny speck made with glitch.

It would be a dream come true if Stewart used some of those millions from
slack to revive glitch as a pay to play game so that the game is self
supporting. There are a lot of us who miss the world of glitch terribly. Good
times. Sniff. Good times.

------
bottled_poe
I miss a functional democratically elected government. Too bad it was
discontinued years ago :’-(

~~~
singularity2001
Direct Democracy.

We had that 2500 years ago and it lead to the most amazing flourishing of
culture, science, arts etc ...

It has not honestly been tried since then. Maybe it became impractical because
states grew too big. Now with the internet it could become practical again.

Unfortunately it was opposed and subverted in the Pirate Party. I was shocked
how many people are _opposed_ to true democracy. They seem to confuse
individual ignorance with the wisdom of crowds.

~~~
justin--sane
Working quite well here in Switzerland...

~~~
utopcell
Please elaborate

------
mstaoru
Squaresoft, the company that made Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy Tactics,
Xenogears. After merging with Enix, their games just lost that magical touch
they had.

Firefly TV series.

Comme des Garcons Kyoto perfume.

And, of course, I second the MacBook '14-15 revival! Touchbar begone!

~~~
cbanek
Love Squaresoft. Also love Enix though, they did some great games (E.V.O.,
Robotrek, Actraiser, DragonQuest, Bust a Groove). But I agree, after the
merger, they both seemed a little less interesting and unique. I always loved
how quirky all the games were.

Also, Koei games are amazing.

------
frontendstrong
Google Inbox. It's still around, but not for long.

~~~
ncphillips
I tried switching to gmail after I heard the news. Terrible experience. Wound
up deleting a bunch of emails I had archived from Inbox. Switched back, I hope
the sunset is a long ways off

~~~
kyriakos
Switching back to Gmail feels like going back to stone age. Inbox ui is so
much cleaner.

------
thrower123
Impressions Games. Made the Caesar, Lords of the Realm, and Civil War General
series of games. I put thousands of hours in on those games. Most of them are
now on GoG, but my favorite, Civil War Generals 2, is still not, and is very
fiddly to get working on modern OSs.

------
PhantomGremlin
The old HP. The one that designed and built wonderful calculators like my
ancient HP 42S. The calculator that still works 25+ years later, and just
needs the occasional purchase of a few button cell batteries to keep it going.

The old HP probably would have been able to give Apple a good run for their
money in smartphones and laptops.

------
vermaden
I miss the REAL ThinkPads from 2011 and earlier with REAL ThinkPad 7-row
keyboards.

The ThinkPad 25 Anniversary Edition is a step in good direction but Lenovo
does not plan to introduce more of them.

Same with Dell D630 with extended battery that was in front and server well as
palm rest, very nice piece of hardware.

Same with ThinkPad X301.

Not to mention SparcBook or PowerBook ...

------
shiado
Napster, Gnutella, etc... There are a lot of modern improvements such as much
faster internet, much more storage, etc... Bittorrent doesn't quite achieve
the easy discoverability of new content. I think it is time for a new piracy
paradigm.

------
paultopia
Eudora! Like, classic Eudora. The only good email client ever.

~~~
112233
Opera! Like Opera 12. The only good email and nntp and rss client ever. Full
text indexed search speed and huge folder handling...

------
spilk
Wunderground. Whatever they've done to the site in the past few years is just
terrible.

~~~
why_only_15
I think it was bought by IBM which is what screwed it up

~~~
Jtsummers
The downhill slide started when The Weather Company bought it in 2012. TWC’s
site was useless for all the ads at the time and that’s largely what pushed me
to search and find Weather Underground. After the acquisition they plastered
Weather Underground in ads as well. IBM hasn’t helped them, but they didn’t
make them much worse either.

------
jaggederest
Bump, actually. The other day was trying to transfer files and contact info
and it's still an annoyance.

~~~
jrruethe
I came here to say this. Nowadays I use magic-wormhole and nitroshare, but
when it comes to transferring Android to Android, Bump was the easiest.

I'm pretty sure Google bought them, and I was hoping they would actually do
something with the technology, but nothing ever came of it.

~~~
jaggederest
There was a discussion the other day that the Bump team merged into Google
Photos, which is certainly a creditable application, but not maybe as
distinctive as Bump was.

Sort of tragic that the company folded, could have been a nice lifestyle app
for someone I think.

------
eftpotrm
RoboDJ, an old Winamp plugin.

I have an absurdly large music collection, and tend to listen while I work. I
tried doing the 'just queue up albums and hit play' model. Random songs I'd
picked up from nowhere, or albums I'd forgotten I'd got, just slipped out
altogether. Shuffling the whole collection means you end up listening to a lot
of mediocrity.

RoboDJ let me score each song (with default values for unscored content), then
auto fed my playlist with a weighted average. It wasn't perfect - it could
crash and wipe your library, and its maths model contained a basic flaw which
caused averages to drift off. But it provided a really pretty good experience
of having a personalised radio station, and did a much better job of
normalising content across slightly inconsistent tagging than any other
library plugin I've used.

I've now got some _really_ complicated smart playlists on iTunes which
_almost_ do as well, but they're much less powerful. Plus Apple pushed through
a change in a software update a while back which stopped anything but trivial
smart playlists updating on the device, which kills that unless you sync every
day. Not great when you're travelling and the massive library is on the home
NAS. Plus, that iPod classic isn't going to live forever.

One day, I'll find the time to write the player app for Android that'll
replicate RoboDJ, minus the dodgy averages, plus some extra features I wanted.
I know what I want, it's not that complicated a tool at its core. But there's
always something more important than 'slightly nicer auto playing music' to
write :-\

------
iforgotpassword
Opera presto. I only realized how "close" I was to my browser in every aspect
it worked when it became unusable due to age. I was quite surprised about that
discovery, since other switches I made in the past (windows to Linux for
example) seemed much larger. I'm still recovering from this loss. ;)

~~~
JdeBP
What is your opinion of Vivaldi?

~~~
iforgotpassword
It's chrome on steroids. I use it mostly on my laptop, with chrome exclusively
for google services.

While it's trying hard to please old Opera users while at the same time moving
forward and introducing new ideas, it's just not feeling like home. I like
that it's making "power user" features easier to access than Chrome, that's
one of the things I got used to with Opera. But overall it feels a little
slower, which might be attributable to the JS user interface, or just in
general that it's quite fat, being based on Blink. Especially opening up new
windows feels _really_ sluggish. There isn't many pages left on the web that
do that, but you run into those every now and then. I think FF and Chrome
"fix" this by just opening them as new tabs, but Vivaldi tries to restore the
old feel of having those simple UI-less floating popup windows; with mediocre
success.

I still use Opera 12 alongside of Vivaldi and Firefox at work just for fun,
it's fine for browsing status pages, cgit and similar things on our intranet,
and with those simple pages it's notably faster than anything else on the
market. Navigating the history is another big offender here on FF/Chrome.
Clicking back multiple times in Opera will instantly restore any previous
page, there is no perceieved delay or re-layouting, which just feels "right"
and so much more consistent than any modern SPA that tries to achieve the same
in millions of lines of Javascript.

I could come up with a bunch more examples, but that's already more rambling
than anyone wants to read I guess. :-)

------
tonyedgecombe
Skype before Microsoft got their hands on it.

~~~
utopcell
What's wrong with skype now ? I think they've done a good job with it, plus
it's a nice platform to test their experimental bot stuff on.

------
tptacek
Small iPhones.

~~~
andrewxhill
Held on to my last SE until the cracks were too many and I had to put pressure
on the cable to get it charging...

~~~
ssaunier_
Did you try using a safety pin to remove dust from the USB port? Works
everytime with a bunch of friends who had an SE but could not charge it
properly.

~~~
andrewxhill
Wha! I'll try this in the morning, I've been still using it on the side.

------
wiz21c
The Print Shop : that tools allowed to print lots of stuff like cards,
banners, etc. But what set it apart IMHO, is that it was soooo easy, so
rewarding. Kids could use it. And it had a style of its own (that's so much
cooler than printing stock internet photos).

All 4th gen languages efforts such as powerbuilder, dBase, etc. I still feel
like they were on the right track.

------
Spearchucker
Windows Phone on Nokia Hardware. Have extensively used both iOS/iPhone and
Android/Xperia since my last Windows Phone and neither come even close to WP
usability, and although the sense of quality the iPhone gives me does match
what I felt with Nokia, nothing has come close to matching the 1520,the best
mobile device I've ever used.

~~~
expertentipp
Shame that there are no alternatives in mobile OS market. WP was a really good
attempt with a realistic chance of success.

------
biztos
DEC.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Equipment_Corporation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Equipment_Corporation)

I always thought they were really cool.

Though admittedly this might just be nostalgia as a DEC server running Digital
UNIX was the first system I got to write "real" software on as an adult.

~~~
jki275
DEC running VMS was my first real programming experience... FORTRAN 77.

DEC was awesome. VMS was the foundation of Windows NT as well.

------
puzzlingcaptcha
Standalone Google Talk app, back when it could still federate with XMPP.

I'm so bitter about this I still run an ejabberd server for a close group of
friends (things like central message archive or carbons finally work, and
there is conversations for android)

------
IdontRememberIt
All nationally emblematic products that have now be sent to China for
production. (I am Swiss, so when I see a pure "Swiss product" actually made in
China, I feel uncomfortable about the marketing trying to highlight the
Swissness of a Chinese product especially when they are considered luxury:
Bally shoes, Sigg bottles, ...)

~~~
justtopost
A US state went so far as to ban sale of US flags not made in the country. It
was seen as a xenophobic statement then, but starting to change now.

~~~
IdontRememberIt
You have to watch this "Confederate shop supplier from China" (Whole video is
amazing):
[https://youtu.be/RDd10-poMm8?t=900](https://youtu.be/RDd10-poMm8?t=900)

------
IdontRememberIt
Sega in the game console business (dreamcast).

------
mikey_p
Eudora circa '96 or so. I loved that it had personality. If you started typing
without any window open it would beep for the first several keystrokes and
then a dialog would pop up after a bit that said something like "You can
continue typing but no one is listening right now."

In later versions it was changed to some terse message like "No window open to
receive input" and it popped up once for every keystroke, instead of waiting
til the 5 keystroke or so.

------
reitanqild
1.) The old Google before they messed up search and went so far that they
needed to remove the slogan about not being evil.

------
lewisflude
Stumbleupon. I remember spending hours discovering all sorts of strange and
niche sites, that I would never have found otherwise. So much esoteric and
random stuff came up, and sent me down many rabbit holes that changes my life
such as learning about DIY electronics etc.

~~~
SuoDuanDao
I forgot how fun that was! I'm checking out their new site right now!

------
MistahKoala
One discontinued product that comes to mind - and is missed almost daily - is
Evernote's Clearly. Nothing else comes close for simplified reading in the
browser. Pocket does the reading experience well, but items have to be added
to its archive in order to be read, and its ability to consistently capture
articles in full lets it down (in contrast to Clearly and Evernote's
'simplified article' view, which lets users easily adjust the scope of page
elements to 'capture'). It was also Clearly's styling that gave it an edge
over other on-screen readers (light-on-black styling shouldn't be a
competitive advantage for something so simple, but it is for simplified
reading plugins).

------
randcraw
I miss Borders bookstore, especially the flagship store in Ann Arbor. That was
a great place to explore what I don't know.

~~~
DigitalWheelie
As far as big box bookstores, I miss Borders too. Don't care for Barnes &
Noble for some reason. Borders just felt...better.

------
ravenstine
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbitz_(drink)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbitz_\(drink\))

~~~
spilk
I still have an unopened bottle, it does not look very tasty anymore though.

~~~
ravenstine
Are the little balls still intact or have they disintegrated?

~~~
spilk
They are intact but have gotten darker in color, they are no longer the bright
orange you would have hoped for.

[https://i.imgur.com/Pu3mNsb.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/Pu3mNsb.jpg)

------
sengork
Irix and SGI computers 90s era design in general.

~~~
Theodores
Sad to see Silicon Graphics so far down this list.

IRIX Indigo Magic Desktop was the Rolls Royce of user interfaces in an era
when Apple computers couldn't even do multi-tasking and PC's still had an
interface (Windows) that sat on MS-DOS. Linux was a 'toy' with a GUI that was
positively 'off-brand' and the Sun version of X-Window was just plain awkward,
clunky and slow. Meanwhile, on SGI computers, you could have a 'CPU eater' 3D
rendered desktop background with real-time video compositing in 3D scenes
going on in your programs.

SGI computers were also 'useless' at things normal people used PCs for. So no
spreadsheets and certainly no word-processors. Games were also lacking, yet so
many games were built with SGI machines.

Regarding the design of the boxes, nothing exuded power and awe in quite the
same way. Racks of SGI hardware made a place 'mission control', other stuff is
just data centre plumbing that just does not project a futuristic vision of
cool. To take an automotive analogy a gaggle of SGI machines was more like a
Formula 1 grid of cars whereas any other computers en-masse just looked like a
supermarket car park.

There was something accessible about video and 3D on the SGI machines that has
not been seen since. Hardware may be better today but it does not compel you
to want to play with it.

I blame Microsoft for destroying SGI even though there were problems with the
wider SGI management and business model. We ended up with a 2D flat web
whereas had SGI been around then I am sure that things would have been 3D, in
the browser, as per the awesome demos that came with the machines back then.

~~~
sjm-yc-acct
SGI's 3D APIs, OpenGL and Open Inventor, were sublimely innovative. Some of us
are even trying to keep Open Inventor alive:

[https://bitbucket.org/Coin3D/coin/wiki/Home](https://bitbucket.org/Coin3D/coin/wiki/Home)

[https://common-lisp.net/project/clive](https://common-lisp.net/project/clive)

I wish more tech businesses were about the greatest common factor, and not the
least common denominator. If I could find a place like SGI to work, I would
camp on their doorstep until they let me in.

~~~
Theodores
The thing about SGI back in the day was that it was more fun to work in TV,
movies, geology, weather forecasting, serious computing at a respectable
university and so on. I never aspired to work for SGI but knowing how to turn
the behemoths on and type a few commands kind of got me working in disciplines
that normally required extraordinary levels of study and professional
dedication, e.g. meteorology.

I am glad that Open Inventor lives on!

However, IRIS Explorer, remember that one? That was awesome and I wish it
existed today. My peak time for playing with IRIS Explorer was when I had my
first SGI box, an early purple box Indigo. I think I had the super-deluxe
'Elan' model, but that was still under-powered for Iris Explorer. In latter
times when I had a small fleet of Onyxii and O2s at my disposal I didn't have
access to IRIS Explorer.

NAG in the UK bought IRIS Explorer and didn't port it to more modern
computers. At least this was a better fate than what happened to CosmoWorlds,
this was sold to Computer Associates who killed it.

In an odd way I think that the world was better when it cost $100000 to have a
decent computer on your desk. You valued your time more.

------
nodesocket
I really wish RethinkDB the company with all founders and engineers would have
survived. Their documentation, polish, and web admin interface was heads and
shoulders above.

The concept of changefeeds at the database level was super powerful. ReQL was
nice to work with and using a ORM such as thinky[1] was a pleasure.

If only (I know it's not easy) they could have inked some enterprise deals and
focused on the business and generating revenue.

[1] [https://github.com/neumino/thinky](https://github.com/neumino/thinky)

~~~
ryan-allen
Me too, do you think you could use it at all in production now or would you
not touch it?

I was looking forward to trying out FoundationDB before Apple shut it down.

~~~
rubiquity
Apple recently open sourced FoundationDB
[https://apple.github.io/foundationdb/](https://apple.github.io/foundationdb/)

------
reitanqild
2.) WhatsApp, the paid messenger app with a decent approach to pricacy, before
Facebook bought it and made it into a metadata harvesting engine.

------
luckman212
Gmail (pre-August 2018)

~~~
tempestn
Have you dug into the settings? I hated the change too, but found that the
aspects I most hated (mostly the hover buttons that made everything jump
around when used with the preview pane) were configurable.

~~~
waterhouse
The aspect I most hate is the load time. Takes about 6 seconds to start
displaying emails. Is there something to be done about that? (Note: I'm using
Firefox on a Mac.) I've been mostly using the "basic HTML" version, which
loads in less than a second.

~~~
tempestn
I'm using Firefox on Windows 10. Loads in about 1.5s for me. Obviously it'll
depend on PC and internet connection. I would try it with addons disabled
though. (Restart with addons disabled / in safe mode in the help menu.) In the
past I've found misbehaved addons (particularly the god-awful skype one that
used to always force install itself) would bring gmail to a crawl.

------
MistahKoala
If we can consider discontinued features as part of 'discontinued products',
examples that come to mind are things like boolean operators on eBay (also
coinciding with a time when eBay search results weren't filled with irrelevant
junk). And index dates on Google search results.

------
arthuryip
Crashplan for home. Still haven't found another unlimited plan with linux
client.

~~~
tempestn
Yeah, same boat here. Currently using the discounted small business version.
Not sure what I'm going to do once that expires. I haven't decide whether it's
worth the time investment to use something open source like
[https://github.com/gilbertchen/duplicacy](https://github.com/gilbertchen/duplicacy)
with eg Backblaze B2, or if I'll just bite the bullet and pay the full
$10/month for Crashplan SB.

~~~
balladeer
After using the discounted small business version till this month I finally
moved my backup to: restic [0] + B2.

It was really just a 30m job and I have a setup that backups 4 times a day and
prunes etc twice a week. You might want to checkout their forum if you need
any help. I had tried Borg and duplicity [1] too but found restic to be
perfect for my need.

I also have Tarsnap[2] for the double backup of my most important data.

[0] [http://restic.net](http://restic.net)
[https://github.com/restic/restic](https://github.com/restic/restic). This
project also lists alternatives with supported feature list
[https://github.com/restic/others](https://github.com/restic/others)

[1] [http://borgbackup.org](http://borgbackup.org),
[http://duplicity.nongnu.org](http://duplicity.nongnu.org)

[2] [https://www.tarsnap.com](https://www.tarsnap.com) and has a simple but
functional Qt GUI [https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap-
gui](https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap-gui)

------
ct520
Macbook pros when they had a good keyboard!

~~~
SmirkingRevenge
They were called Powerbooks back then :)

------
scarecrowbob
Old school Radio Shack.

~~~
cbm-vic-20
"Resistor? Sorry we only sell Sprint phones."

~~~
scarecrowbob
Actually, the last time I was in one (Fredericksburg, TX maybe 2016?), they
still had components. The folks in the store had no idea what they were, and
there was a really bad selection,

but there were parts.

------
chasedehan
Haagen-Dazs black cherry amaretto gelato

~~~
notatoad
Oh, shit, that was discontinued? I thought my grocery store just ran out.

------
jefftk
The Axis-49 [1]. Ninety eight velocity sensitive keys in a hexagonal layout,
ready to be remapped to Wicki-Hayden. I discovered them after they were
discontinued and when a used one popped up after several years I bought it,
but I'm really disappointed these didn't catch on.

[1] [https://www.c-thru-music.com/cgi/?page=prod_axis-49](https://www.c-thru-
music.com/cgi/?page=prod_axis-49)

~~~
emmanueloga_
Have you become proficient with them? I thought it was an interesting idea but
the quality of the hardware is really pretty poor (buttons get stuck as you
press them) and the hexagonal layout does not really seem that easy to learn /
operate.

~~~
jefftk
_> Have you become proficient with them?_

After about three weeks of playing around with mine I was better at playing
melodies on it than I am at piano, and I've been playing piano for decades.
[https://youtu.be/3Qyg914392Q](https://youtu.be/3Qyg914392Q)
[https://www.jefftk.com/jeff-band/marcell.mp3](https://www.jefftk.com/jeff-
band/marcell.mp3)

 _> the quality of the hardware is really pretty poor (buttons get stuck as
you press them)_

I haven't had that problem; hopeful that I don't!

 _> the hexagonal layout does not really seem that easy to learn / operate_

Are you talking about the Harmonic Table layout that it ships with? I don't
like that layout at all. I converted mine to Wicki-Hayden:
[https://www.jefftk.com/p/rearranging-
axis-49-keys](https://www.jefftk.com/p/rearranging-axis-49-keys)

~~~
emmanueloga_
Yeah I was talking about the harmonic table. Good tips, I'll give the wicki-
hayden layout a try!

------
keyle
Mac OSX Snow Leopard. Butter smooth and uncluttered.

~~~
wingworks
aah the good old days

------
larrydag
Google Finance. I really liked the interface and ease of use of tracking
tickers and looking up balance sheet metrics. I also liked tracking a personal
portfolio.

~~~
bashmydotfiles
You should check out bravos: [https://bravos.co/](https://bravos.co/)

The interface is great, and it was started by people that really miss Google
Finance.

------
rdl
Zeo sleep monitor, a low accuracy low precision low cost EEG-based sleep
monitor, which worked a lot better for me than the movement-based systems.
What I mainly cared about was tracking when I actually went to sleep.

~~~
nickreese
Was looking for this. Completely agree.

------
Lathie
I really wanted a Pebble Time 2 ):

~~~
stevewillows
I have a Pebble 2 HR and two OG Pebbles. The app store and most functionality
is still active through [http://rebble.io](http://rebble.io)

If you want a Pebble, definitely get one. I wear the HR daily, and will wear
it until one of us dies.

------
wlesieutre
Not tech related, but I could go for some Altoids Sours.

On the tech side, I switched from a Pebble Time to an Apple Watch. I like all
the fitness stuff, but I think I would've liked a Pebble Time 2 with fitness
stuff better.

~~~
androidgirl
Glad I'm not the only one who though of Altoids Sours

~~~
wlesieutre
THEY WERE DELICIOUS. And apparently not popular enough, for reasons I'll never
understand.

Related, if they could put back lime Skittles instead of this green apple
nonsense, that'd be great. What do people have against citrusy candy?

------
eterps
The Amiga, can't remember another time when computers were that much fun.

~~~
mar77i
AMIGA!!!

------
stevewillows
One thing I really wanted, but never picked up was a Little Printer from BERG.
[1]

The only thing holding me back was the use of thermal paper, but the overall
concept is excellent for us compulsive list makers.

My dream is to find a narrow impact printer (2" wide) that I can print to via
network or USB.

[1] [https://vimeo.com/32796535](https://vimeo.com/32796535)

------
rubiquity
Rdio. I’ll just leave it simply at that.

------
bbgm
Friendfeed. The community [1] a small group of bioinformatics folks started
there was just amazing. We were never able to recreate it.

1\. [http://cameronneylon.net/blog/friendfeed-for-scientists-
what...](http://cameronneylon.net/blog/friendfeed-for-scientists-what-why-and-
how/)

------
spazmoose
I really wish the Logitech Y-RAU7 wireless keyboard was still around.

1\. In my opinion, its ergonomic/split keyboard design is much more
comfortable than the standard 108-keyboard layout (which I find causes wrist
cramping). 2\. The mechanical keys offer key feedback that is often not found
in a wireless keyboard 3\. The four programmable buttons, the seven media
buttons, and the sleep button offer convenience without being obstructive. 4\.
Even being a wireless keyboard, it is responsive enough for playing most video
games. 5\. The overall construction of they keyboard is quite solid, without
being overly bulky (though it is slightly larger than an average keyboard).
I've had mine for more than a decade.

In my opinion, this is one of the best keyboard designs I have ever come
across. I like the design so much that I have one for work, one for at home,
as well as a backup for at home in case it ever breaks.

------
gfosco
Macromedia Director. Probably an unpopular opinion but I loved it.

------
chadiem
Flagship smartphones with a plastic body and a removable battery. For those
who do not need the waterproof feature, and need the ability to go from 0% to
100% in a few seconds.

~~~
justtopost
The samsung S5 line has headphone port, waterproofing, removable battery, sim,
micro sd. Why compromise?

------
dkrikun
Old dumbphone indestructible nokia phones. That was a thing. I usually have a
dumbphone at in case my smart one fails, but the dumbphones of today are just
like cheap junk..

------
Brian_K_White
The old crispy bubbly apple pies at McDonalds. I think they are still like
that in Europe. I had one in London a couple years ago and almost got a dozen
to smuggle home.

~~~
SmallDeadGuy
Yeah we still have those in the UK, they're amazing. Where are you from that
they discontinued them?

------
tsumnia
Grooveshark and Songza; I'll skip over Grooveshark since there's already a
post mourning its loss.

I liked Songza's non-tailoring to me and more to the situations (rainy day for
rainy days, party for late nights, even novelty playlists for Game of Thrones,
musical scores from movies, etc).

When Google Play Music acquired Songza, they "sort of" integrated these
things, but now just a shell of its former self where the "themed" playlist
names stayed, but now its an echo chamber of stuff I've already heard. Sadly,
there's no discovery anymore. And while it seems contradictory, I don't want
to look for it. Grooveshark's radio stations and Songza's original playlists
had a way of playing songs I never heard or haven't heard in a long time.

------
peteforde
Oh, man.

Polaroid SX film

Nikon CoolScan 9000 scanners

Clorets gum

Fruitips popsicles

Panago's "Mediterranean" wings

GE Bright Stik tubes

Moves app

Pebble Time

Glitch (@stewart's game between Flickr and Slack)

Dropbox Packrat addon

Winamp

ICQ

Infiltration zine

Shift magazine

I didn't even have to put effort into this list; it's way longer in reality.
However, making it made me sad and frustrated.

------
api
Old MathCAD in the Windows 95 era was an amazing intuitive visual math
program. Helped me learn and I miss it whenever I have to delve into heavy
math of any kind.

Modern tools have regressed a lot UI wise. I feel like excluding easy but
shallow web and mobile UIs we are in a UI dark age.

------
geuis
Bolo by Stuart Cheshire. Originally release for MacOS in the early 90s. Ended
up playing that game for a decade before switching to the good WinBolo Clone.
Honestly one of most fun multiplayer games I’ve ever seen that has somehow
faded into history.

~~~
ericd
Oh man, probably the most played game of my childhood. Certainly my first
networked multiplayer game I wonder if there are communities out there still
playing it.

------
gypsyBelly
Turntable.fm was the funnest and IMO the best way to discover music and users
had an incentive (gamification) to play new interesting music.

------
ternaryoperator
Dr. Dobb's Journal

~~~
tonyedgecombe
and Byte magazine.

~~~
avhon1
small consolation: the back issues are available on the internet archive

[https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine](https://archive.org/details/byte-
magazine)

------
toomuchtodo
Original Gmail [+].

[+] [https://i.imgur.com/aJC5NK1.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/aJC5NK1.jpg)

~~~
krackers
You're in luck - Gmail html version is still available
[https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15049?hl=en](https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15049?hl=en)

------
jvvlimme
SimCity up until SC4.

EA really dropped the ball there, completely destroying a classic. No one ever
asked for a multiplayer version. And most just want to build a big city, not
the tiny sh _th_ les it only lets you build now.

~~~
mholmes680
On the off chance you (or someone else) didnt come across it: Cities Skylines
is worth the price. (though i didnt stick with it through the expansion packs)

[https://www.paradoxplaza.com/cities-skylines/CSCS00GSK-
MASTE...](https://www.paradoxplaza.com/cities-skylines/CSCS00GSK-MASTER.html)

~~~
tvanantwerp
Cities: Skylines is an amazing city builder with a massive library of mods.
Check out r/CitiesSkylines for screenshots of some of the cities people can
build--some of them look like photos of actual cities!

------
tradesmanhelix
I miss Umano. It was an app that collated a feed of human-read articles. It’s
one of the few iPhone apps that I was willing to pay for a yearly subscription
in order to unlock some premium features like offline listening.

Great UI and all of the readers were top-notch with new content every day.
Haven’t found a replacement that works as well or where the voices used are as
good. Sadly, Dropbox acquired them and then shut them down - really wish I
knew why they wanted them in the first place. Just hope the founders got some
decent $$$ from the deal for their excellent product.

------
ropeladder
Weatherspark.

It's still around but a mere shadow of its former (flash-based) glory. Using
every other weather site is agony.

~~~
Splines
Yes! Their charts/graphs were amazing to play with.

Using it today feels like a "Show HN" MVP version of their full product.

------
jktzes
The mailbox that was acquired by Dropbox. They invented the “swipe your email
to do things” trick and then no more. They have clients on iOS and Mac that
work seamlessly. I still miss it very much.

------
jfk13
Metrowerks CodeWarrior.

Xcode and Visual Studio have come a long way, but in its day CodeWarrior felt
so much more efficient and productive than the alternatives; imagine what it
might be today if it had continued!

~~~
jobigoud
Wow, you miss CodeWarrior? That is so surprising to me, I hated it :-)

~~~
jfk13
Fair enough -- different tools suit different users! :)

------
harel
The Commodore Amiga. The desktop would have looked much different had they
stayed alive. For better or worst.

------
gorbypark
Be and BeOS!

~~~
avhon1
HaikuOS (modern rewrite of BeOS) just had its first beta release!

[https://www.haiku-os.org/](https://www.haiku-os.org/)

------
ryannevius
Aardvark –
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardvark_(search_engine)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardvark_\(search_engine\))

------
qwerty456127
Ubuntu Unity. As soon as it got mature (some last Ubuntu releases including
it) it became the best desktop environment I've ever seen. I was not amazed
when they gave up Gnome2 and started Unity (I've moved to XFCE for many years)
but learnt to love it later and the move to Gnome3 feels a disaster to me
(IMHO Gnome3 is great for tablets but horrible for desktop). Now I've
reproduced an environment very similar to Unity with KDE5 and enjoy it but I
would certainly love Unity to actually come back.

------
sevensor
The whole digital audio player / MP3 player product category, before the
middle-end got hollowed out. As far as I can tell, the choice is now between
dodgy sub-$30 knockoffs and gold-plated audiophile gear. Since the buttons
fell off my Yepp, I'm much less able to carry around my music collection than
I was ten years ago. I used to get 30 hours of playback from a unit that was
only slightly bigger than its double-A battery. (So what if I could only carry
10 hours of music? It had an FM radio!)

------
vram22
Some of the original Palm devices. I had a Palm IV or V and later a Palm Zire.
Bought the former from Malaysia and the latter on a trip to the US. Both were
great devices, considering both hardware and software. Instant booting back
into the app you were last using after a shutdown, good bundled set of
productivity / PIM apps, many third-party apps (I even tried Pippy, a port of
Python for my Palm IV/V, but while it worked some, sadly, it crashed a lot),
great-looking bright colorful screen (in the case of the Zire; the IV/V was
black and white), light weight, the Graffiti handwriting recognition system,
etc. One not so good thing was that net connectivity was via separate add-ons
like small modems. This was before wireless Internet access became ubiquitous.
Unfortunately, as often happens, later changes of biz and tech direction led
to changes in products and to the company later closing or being sold, don't
remember which. There was also a similar product company started later, called
Handspring, IIRC by one or more of the founders of Palm. They too may have had
a good product, one might have been called the Treo. Didn't get to try it.
Lost track of what happened in that product field after that. Later there was
Palm OS, which I think HP bought and then sold off, the usual corporate buy-
keep-sell sort of story that happens a lot.

------
scrumbledober
3d Doritos. There was something about their packaging (some aerated black
plastic) was bad for the environment but they were really good and they could
find some other way to package them

~~~
ChickeNES
They still sell them in Mexico, and you can buy them on eBay

------
gwlperl
The Acura Integra (or anything like it 3-door hatchbacks are all mostly gone).

TV's with more than 3 HDMI inputs.

~~~
justtopost
Problem is, the integra had independent wishbone/multilink suspension, that
was much more expensive to produce and maintain than todays McStrut cars.
There will not likely be an economy car with amazing suspension in that manner
again until electrics are cheap, due to price factors alone. Even BMW moved to
struts. Thankfully the new Mx5 are just as good as they were in the 90s fo
those who lack cargo... and passengers.

------
cosrnos
Sunrise Calendar. They shut down the service shortly after being acquired by
Microsoft for the Office 365 team and I haven't found a calendar app I like as
much as that one.

------
JamesAdir
the older models of the the ThinkPad X line by Lenovo. The current model is
just a fancy ultrabook instead of a working machine. Althoght they have a
similiar product (the X1 line) they decided to make the current line useless
with less battery power, no Ethernet jack (in corp environment this is
essential) and with almost zero options for upgradability and fixability.
Really miss the older models like the X240, X200 and even before which was
just sturdier.

------
listentojohan
The Sunrise Calendar <3 It was close to perfect for me.
[http://blog.sunrise.am/](http://blog.sunrise.am/)

------
justjonathan
DabbleDB, it was such a great way to play with data til you knew how it should
be organized.

------
MartinPetkov
The original PlayStation Portable. No other console I've had so far has been
quite as fun to play, mobile gaming just isn't the same, and I had a lot of
fun learning to crack it and install pirated games. I used to take it on road
trips and even watch full movies, it was a great way to pass the time as a
kid. I had it repaired twice before it finally gave out, and the nostalgia
sometimes hits and I consider getting one again.

~~~
v4n4d1s
Have you tried the Nintendo Switch?

------
plinkplink
Physical qwerty keyboards on phones. I still miss the Motorola Droid 3 after
all these years. photo: [https://bit.ly/2yXQWU3](https://bit.ly/2yXQWU3)

On-screen keyboards are good and all, but there has never been as great a
feeling as sliding out a full keyboard and wailing on it. I doubt I'll ever be
as fast with an on-screen interface as I was with actually typing on a
physical keyboard.

------
itpragmatik
1password stand-alone desktop version with no cloud connectivity/saas
requirement

~~~
cbm-vic-20
Would KeePassXC work for you? There are mobile apps that read the same format
it uses.

------
btrettel
I used to use an old Linux file manager called DFM back in 2002 to 2006 or so.
Doesn't seem to be online any longer, but this looks like a copy of the
original website sans graphics:
[http://distro.ibiblio.org/amigolinux/download/DeskTop/IconMg...](http://distro.ibiblio.org/amigolinux/download/DeskTop/IconMgmt/dfm-0.99.9/kaisersite.dedfm.html)

I have the source code saved somewhere.

This file manager had one nice feature that I haven't seen again: the use of a
plain text config file to set which commands are used to open particular
files. It might have used regex. You could also override the configuration
manually by file too in the properties dialog box. If I recall correctly the
icons were also set in the same file and also could be manually set.

The file manager is obsolete otherwise, but from time to time I have wanted to
have the same feature again. You could easily get very precise this way. I use
Thunar now, but maybe there's another file manager that can be configured more
to my liking.

~~~
9diov
You can use Ranger
([https://github.com/ranger/ranger](https://github.com/ranger/ranger)) which
is available on most Linux distros nowadays. It is fully hackable (written in
Python). You can change the file association (which command to open which
file) by editing ~/.config/ranger/rifle.conf. More details here:
[https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ranger#File_association](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ranger#File_association)

~~~
btrettel
Thanks, I was hoping someone would be able to point me towards a similar file
manager!

------
therealmarv
Palm Pre. I'm not a die hard Palm Pre fan but powered up the first gen
recently and one could see the beauty of the user interface.

------
soapdog
I know this will not be a popular reply but I miss the Apple Newton dearly and
wished they had the chance to ship a 3.0 version. The Newton OS 2.0 was so
much better than what came before it, I think the message pad was the best
personal computer I had in terms of actually being personal. It felt like your
machine in a way that modern smartphones don't.

------
PascLeRasc
I miss companies being able to put out one really good product without being
bought out or trying to become a huge corporation. Github, Nest, Waze, Oculus,
it's a long list. I think we'll lose SoundCloud to a buyout within the next
year. Roku and Sonos are decent holdouts but I'm sure they're getting offers
all the time.

------
capex
Chrome Bookmarks Manager. Since its removal I haven't been able to find a good
alternative for saving bookmarks on Chrome.

~~~
tvanantwerp
Agreed, I loved it. I moved to Firefox with their Quantum release, and I
barely even use bookmarks now because it's such a clunky UI for it.

------
biql
Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer 2.0. Easily most pleasant to hold mouse. It's
heartbreaking to use anything else after that.

I'd think that the rise of gaming industry, and especially competitive games,
would bring us more refined forms of computer devices, but in fact, every new
shiny gaming mouse I tried wasn't even close.

------
mitchtbaum
Since no one else mentioned it, Yahoo Pipes.

~~~
utopcell
Indeed!

------
puzzlingcaptcha
Black Isle Studios (Fallout 2, Planescape:Torment, Icewind Dale) and Troika
Games (Arcanum, Vampire the Masquerade)

~~~
pricechild
Don't forget Baldur's Gate?

~~~
puzzlingcaptcha
Sure, but IIRC Baldurs was developed mostly by BioWare, Black Isle/Interplay
were publishers.

~~~
pricechild
Aha I did not know that, thanks!

------
micmerrington
Craigslist personals. I met my wife there almost 10 years and 3 kids ago.
Quite a bummer that it's gone.

------
krackers
Palm/HP WebOS

~~~
seltzered_
I really miss the multi-tasking dynamic where you could have 'stacks' of
documents within one app (e.g. browser tabs).

~~~
krackers
It's amazing that webOS pretty much nailed multitasking on mobile years ago.
It took Android and iOS several years to copy the cards interface, and even
then it's a half baked implementation.

------
threatofrain
iPhone SE

------
chrisbrandow
Microsoft word 5.1 for Mac.

That was my favorite “word processor”. Great balance of features, ease of use,
and reliability.

------
nhance
Turntable.fm

~~~
IgorPartola
Came here to say this. It was such a fun service.

~~~
kyleashipley
I still spend time in Plug.dj on a regular basis. It doesn't have the
population or momentum of Turntable, but there's still something magical about
social music.

------
meuk
Youtube without ads and easy download.

~~~
ahstilde
Youtube-dl and ublock.

Adding these to ublock as custom filters removes a lot of extraneous stuff in
the player, too:

    
    
        youtube.com##.ytp-pause-overlay
        youtube.com##.ytp-title-channel
        youtube.com##.ytp-ce-element
        youtube.com##.subscribecard-endscreen
        youtube.com/get_endscreen?

------
btschaegg
Hmmm, I'll have to think about that one some more.

Ironically, what directly comes to mind for me are two mice:

\- The Genius DX-Eco

\- The original Roccat Pyra

As far as I can tell, both aren't actively produced anymore. The DX-Eco was an
attempt to power a wireless mouse with a capacitator that is loaded to full
charge (~4h of usage) in 4 minutes. The Pyra was just a great mouse (and its
successors have lost a lot of its great features): Optionally wireless,
running on easily exchangable AAA batteries, not too big, good sensor, not too
pricy (~30$, if I remember correctly), didn't need the crappy Roccat driver to
work properly. I really wished I had bought a second one when mine broke.

On second thought, combining the two would sound even more exciting than
bringing a single one of them back.

------
davidbarker
Logitech MX Revolution mouse. I’ve tried their subsequent mice but none of
them feel quite the same.

~~~
wp381640
Never understood how a company could do a product so well and then regress
from there.

------
lummox1
Atchison topeka & santa fe railway passenger service

~~~
AnimalMuppet
I wish I had gotten the chance. I got to ride the Southern Pacific and Rock
Island from Tucson to Topeka, but I was only four at the time, so I don't
remember too much about it.

------
caviv
I really really loved del.icio.us RIP. Today I am using the alternative
[https://yabs.io](https://yabs.io) \- but I don't understand why something so
good was closed and now needed to be developed again.

------
newnewpdro
IBM ThinkPads

~~~
lykr0n
The Lenovo ThinkPads are surprisingly not that bad

~~~
derekp7
But they get worse every generation. Sometimes they undo something horrible
(like when they replaced the function keys with a touch strip on the X1
Carbon, or got rid of the track pad mouse buttons), but other mistakes remain
(like changing the keyboard to the same style as everyone else, instead of the
Selectric Typewrite shaped keys). And they used to be the poster child for
good Linux support, but that's starting to drift away also (things like the
fingerprint reader).

~~~
lykr0n
I'm typing this on a X1 Carbon Gen6 running Arch Linux. I don't know about the
fingerprint reader, but everything else works 100%.

~~~
derekp7
I got an X1 Yoga (2017 model) last year, and if I can't use bluetooth
headphones while on wifi under Linux. Soon as audio starts playing, the wifi
will cut out. Problem doesn't occur under Windows. (This is with the latest
Fedora, haven't tried other distros yet).

The problem goes away if I switch the wifi to a 5GHZ band, however that isn't
an option except at home.

------
mtaksrud
Sun Microsystems
[https://web.archive.org/web/20090228143021/http://www.sun.co...](https://web.archive.org/web/20090228143021/http://www.sun.com:80/)

------
pawelwentpawel
Screenhero, which got acquired by Slack and integrated into it. It was great
as a stand-alone product which I used not only for remote pair coding but also
for just calling friends and family whenever we needed to share control of one
screen.

------
fritzy
Ultima Online 2

------
blaerk
* Sun Microsystems (not oracle)

* Psygnosis (before becoming subsidiary of Sony Computer Entertainment)

* IRN BRU candy bars

~~~
forsakenkraken
I'm surprised Sun wasn't posted sooner.

Can we add Solaris Zones to the list? I mean I know they're not technically
dead, but it can't be long till it's gone can it?

------
lenomad
Widget Workshop [1]

It was a electronics tinkering game where you had different components like
timers, light bulbs, switches, gravity testers and what not, which you could
connect with wires and build interesting things.

They had several demos that you could check out, like poem generators, dog
barking sound generator machine and other interesting stuff.

As a kid, it really helped fuel my imagination to make new contraptions out of
random things.

I haven't seen an alternate that works on modern systems or phones. The
original version, I believe, worked only till Windows ME or so.

[1] [https://youtu.be/Vc9F_QayL5s](https://youtu.be/Vc9F_QayL5s)

~~~
inyorgroove
I really loved the incredible machine[1] Apparently there was a version
released in 2011.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incredible_Machine_(series...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incredible_Machine_\(series\))

------
dackdel
everything about the 2012 mbps. the iphone se. the ipod. the headphone jack.
mag safe.

------
egypturnash
Creature House's "Expression". It was a natural-media vector art program, with
amazingly snappy performance on early-2000 era machines. They got eaten by
Microsoft _right_ around the time I stopped being a broke college student and
could actually buy a copy, so I ended up learning Illustrator inside out
instead.

I still miss its "freeze layer" feature. Got a complex vector layer? Freeze
it: the program would cache a bitmap copy of the whole layer with whatever
complex transparency you had, lock the layer for editing, and use that cached
image for the preview render as you worked.

------
bk8335
Screenhero used to be great for remote pair programming, but as its gone to
premium slack only I haven't been able to use it since. I'm surprised there
haven't been any copycats made since it was acquired

~~~
cbartlett
[https://tuple.app/](https://tuple.app/) is aiming to fill this gap

------
flynniec6
Zite. Nothing has come close ever since for dropping random articles in front
of me that were perfectly relevant. Flipboard was no good and nothing ever
worked. The amount of times I tweeted an article and somebody asked me "how
did you even find that?" was a clear indication it worked well.

[https://readwrite.com/2014/03/05/why-zite-flipboard-
acquisit...](https://readwrite.com/2014/03/05/why-zite-flipboard-acquisition-
cnn-perfect-news-reading-experience/)

------
ryan-allen
Canv.as by m00t from 4chan, it was really fun remixing stuff and a lot of it
was very wholesome and light hearted.

MP3.com, as there was a lot of strange unsigned music on there. I lost my
archive when CD backups failed, such a shame. I had so much good stuff.

Geocities, but I think I miss more the web as it was before it got mainstream,
back when it was weird and you had to hack up some HTML to make a 'personal
website', and kids would put comments in saying I WORKED REALLY HARD ON THIS
PLZ DO NOT COPY :)

Though there's a lot of great stuff now, Youtube is amazing.

------
hannob
KDE 3.

I used it for years, it was a good and mostly stable desktop environment. Then
with KDE 4 they added all kinds of fancy features that added instability,
strange error messages and then made them non-optional.

~~~
avhon1
KDE 3 has been forked in to Trinity.

[http://trinitydesktop.org/](http://trinitydesktop.org/)

~~~
hannob
Oh I didn't know that... I'll try it out!

------
tasuki
Google Wave! Turned into Apache Wave, which officially retired Jan 2018.

------
tempestn
SageTV. You could hook up an HD cable box and record shows to a PC or server
with a simple, intuitive interface for later viewing. Basically turned your PC
or home server into an infinite PVR. It was wonderful. Google purchased and
shuttered them a few years back. For a while I tried a regular pvr + Slingbox,
but found it to be such garbage that I basically just stopped watching most
sports rather than deal with the hassle of trying to use it. (For anything
besides sports the streaming options work alright now.)

~~~
pronoiac
It looks like SageTV was open sourced:
[https://github.com/google/sagetv](https://github.com/google/sagetv)

~~~
tempestn
Interesting. I wonder if I still have the hardware around here somewhere. Not
sure if it's worth the time at this point though.

------
dbalagula22
I bought a laptop last week and made sure not to get a Macbook for the simple
reason that I cannot stand the keyboard. I got a Dell line business laptop
(Latitude). Although it’s priced more highly than other laptops with the same
specs, the keyboard and feel of it are unbelievably good. It’s probably my
favorite dev machine I’ve ever used. I know the attitude towards Windows
machines, and maybe even Dell, but I would suggest people walk into a store
and just feel one of these in person. It’s incredible

------
fruzz
Manual typewriters. I have two that I use every week, and they're wonderful
distraction free devices that don't require power.

Seems like the the best manual typewriters were made in the sixties.

------
gwbas1c
Windows 2000 and Windows 7. Those were the most polished versions, IMO.

Even though Windows 10 is technically better, the unpredictable experience
brought about by the update system is a step backwards.

------
bsenftner
Fatbabies.com was the scathing gossip site for any Internet company bad
behavior. During the original dotcom boom, guessing if you knew anyone
described was a common drinking activity.

------
gpmcadam
Screenhero.

Unfortunately, when Slack acquired it and supposedly included the
functionality, it just wasn't anywhere near as good.

Still, to this day, there's nothing as good as Screenhero for remote pairing.

~~~
vital101
It isn't quite the same, but I've had great luck with a combination of VS Live
Share ([https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=MS-
vsliv...](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=MS-
vsliveshare.vsliveshare)) and then Zoom or some other tool for voice
communication.

~~~
gpmcadam
Unfortunately, there's no substitute at all for having access to the entire
desktop, with super low latency and built-in voice.

ScreenSharing.app is about as good as it gets, I've found.

------
smilesnd
Kazaa, not so much wish it was around but I wish the experience was around. I
would be up late downloading all sorts of random stuff some really strange
videos people made, or some music someone created or modify. Didn't have the
legal hurdles people have with youtube or soundcloud so you would find some
really random or strange things people created.
"If_You_Like_Korn_limp_marilyn.mp3" was all the info you got and you would
never know who the band was or anything.

~~~
jobigoud
Yeah, I miss the concept of a special folder that is shared with the rest of
the internet. Drop files in there and they are automatically discoverable by
random strangers. Like a massive common drive that we all have access to.

------
nathan_long
My first iPod Nano with a scroll wheel. I could adjust the volume and scrub
back/forward through a podcast without looking at the device. All it did was
play music and podcasts, and it did it very well.

Now I have an iPod Touch. It's heavier than I want in my pocket for running.
It has a bunch of apps besides music which I don't need, and which necessitate
it having a lock screen. And ironically, because it has a "touch screen", you
can't use it solely by touch.

------
twtw
Thinking Machines.

That company was too far ahead of its time. The trends in process technology
steamrolled their architecture, but if they were around now they could
probably do incredibly well.

------
czardoz
The Sony Ericsson K550i, amazing phone, with a beautiful camera cover which
opened the camera app when flipped. Also supported J2ME apps, which was the
best part about it.

------
pgreenwood
Commodore International

------
fugazithehaxoar
Incredible Universe was an IKEA-sized, mid-90's electronics retailer that
existed before the dominance of Best Buy. It was an amazing customer
experience and you could demo pretty much anything in the store. They famously
had video game consoles even in the child-care area. Every DIY PC builder,
circuitry geek and soldering enthusiast went there for supplies. Eventually
they started hemorrhaging money and sold out to Fry's.

------
kdelok
Soluto - it profiled your Windows boot time and did some other performance
monitoring. There are alternatives (e.g. Task Manager's Startup tab), but I
feel like they lack some of its killer features:

    
    
      - Option to defer process start, rather than disable it entirely.
    
      - Aggregated statistics on what other people did, and recommendations for a curated set of processes (e.g. Spotify, Steam).
    
      - Generally nice UI design.

------
reaperducer
Crazy Eddie

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy_Eddie](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy_Eddie)

------
epaga
The email-based reminder system / assistant "Sandy", it was so nice to just
forward emails to "her" and get reminded.
[https://lifehacker.com/321644/sandys-your-personal-
assistant...](https://lifehacker.com/321644/sandys-your-personal-assistant-
via-email) Shut down with virtually no equivalent replacement. :(

------
jaytho
the Xtranormal website where you could script cartoon movies of anything for
free.

~~~
hoistbypetard
I clicked through to say Xtranormal. Here's one of my all time favorites:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pc64xWxRsag](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pc64xWxRsag)

------
bsvalley
Most of the successful products/companies that got acquired and destroyed by
larger players. I want them all back as independent companies.

------
plessthanpt05
Taptu (rss reader app)

Google news and weather app (not the horrible new Google news app with all
those annoying animations)

Flagship/higher-end phones with a headphone jack

------
grujicd
Panoramio. I used these photos in Google Earth heavily before every travel.
Street view is a poor replacement, I'm missing so much stuff that was off the
road. I could see what the beaches look like, what's the terrain at some
point, path through wood. Heck, even just frequency of Panoramio photos at
some location would tell me what's interesting to see there.

~~~
enimodas
It seems mapsights.com was able to backup most.

------
qwerty456127
Jinni.com was an amazing movie/tvshow recommendation service. You could enter
the movies/shows you've enjoyed (or just choose one particular) and it would
recommend you other movies/shows you may like and specify in what particular
aspects are these similar to your choice/preferences. I haven't found any
alternative nearly as good so far.

------
jamiegreen
11 inch Macbook Air. Best laptop I have ever owned

~~~
arsenico
Give a 12" MacBook a try. For me, that is the best laptop I've owned.

~~~
jamiegreen
Thanks! The reason I haven't is I feel they went too far in the power/thinness
balance. I never thought "if only my MacBook was a bit thinner". So I get less
power and have to pay 1/3 as much again. The new ones seem so underpowered.
Also I am not a fan of the new keyboard and they got rid of the mag connection
for the power cable. Not convinced so far.

------
fergie
[https://del.icio.us/](https://del.icio.us/) it was a link-sharing site that
used to attract great contributions. It was bought by Yahoo who for reasons
best known to themselves shut it down just as it was at its zenith, and just
before link sharing sites became the most important thing on the internet.

------
reeddavid
kimonolabs – cloud-hosted web scraping, configured in a browser-based UI. It
would let you make a GET request to your scraper, which would live-scrape the
web and return structured data. They were acquired by Palantir, and kimonolabs
shut down. [http://www.kimonolabs.com/](http://www.kimonolabs.com/)

------
mikro2nd
The text editor "Brief" \- by UnderWare iirc - in an age when humour was still
allowed in commercial software. Was a fully programmable editor for DOS - a
sort of cleaned-up, nicer UX riff off emacs. The programming language was its
own lispish thing, though in later editions they also glued on a C-like
language that did the same things.

------
dolbyzerr
Moves app, it was a fitness tracker startup, bought by Facebook and recently
closed. I was logging all my movements with it as a lifelogging app. It worked
pretty well and I had 5 years of my data there. Maybe it wasn't the best
fitness tracker app but it was the best movement tracker. Now I am using
Gyroscope but the data is kind of lost.

------
birchy
I forget what it was called, or even who had it (a social media site?, maybe
Blogger?), but it was a service that slideshowed images that users were
uploading. It was a good way to waste time. It was a site that seemed to have
users that would post interesting images, and it was fun to see some of them.
You could pause it, I believe.

------
oceanghost
The Here One earbuds by Doppler Labs.

Absolutely the best BT earphones I've ever used-- and I've owned about 25
pairs in my life.

------
birchy
Eudora email client. I still use one of the last versions. I don't know how
I'd function without the filing systems and filtering features, as well as the
easy to manage multiple POP accounts ("personalties") and the templates
("stationary"). It just makes juggling everything so much easier.

------
dgarceran
Google Reader. I know there are many better options, but I had all my RSS
there and it was really easy to use for me.

------
mmjaa
SGI. I wish they'd return, and build laptops and pocket computers. You know,
give Apple a run for the money ..

------
aylmao
Mailbox. I've missed it less since I discovered Spark, but Mailbox was the OG
app that made me not hate email.

------
scooble
The Nokia N9. The swipable interface was a joy to use, and the always visible
clock/notifications was ahead of its time. The window/app management system
was also heaps better than anything today. It was a travesty what happened to
it, and I still unreasonably bitter about the whole thing.

~~~
porcupinetv
Nokia N900 with Maemo 5! Physical keyboard. Camera with a shutter slide (I'm
still not comfortable with my phone having 2 cameras exposed at all times).
Highly customizable...
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N900](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N900)

------
hendzen
turntable.fm. Amazing product/community. Better for music discovery than
anything else I have ever used.

------
daledavies
Commodore Amiga

------
nabilhat
Honestly? The Pantech C300 phone. Any more, anytime I'm anywhere I don't care
about interruptions that aren't urgent enough to warrant a call or text, I
wish I was carrying a ridiculously tiny luddite flip phone rather than an
entire pocket full of expensive fragile computer.

------
theshadowmonkey
Google Reader

I loved the simplicity and the usability aspects of it. I use Feedly these
days. But, I hope reader was around.

------
gonational
Pschitt!

This is the absolute best soda drink, low in sugar and very refreshing.

It’s not really discontinued, but it’s basically impossible to get in the US;
extremely hard to find in France.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pschitt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pschitt)

------
jdofaz
The Kmart that used to be by my house

------
gregn610
[powerbuilder]([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBuilder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBuilder)),
for business crud apps. i think was version 11 when it peaked before going all
web/.net

------
Zaheer
Sparrow Email Client
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparrow_(email_client)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparrow_\(email_client\)))
- Simple, fast, easy-to-use email client. As good as it gets!

~~~
ssaunier_
Still works on macOS Mojave, and I use it everyday. True email client not
relying on any third-party API / company to work.

------
luord
Gnome 2 with Beryl. Not practical but damn if that wasn't a fun desktop
environment to use.

------
donquichotte
The Kawasaki KLR 650 and the Suzuki DR 650. These make great, reliable long
distance adventure bikes suitable for almost any terrain.

You may argue that these bikes are still in production, but in Europe its all
but impossible to lay hands on them due to EURO5 emission norms.

------
rocky1138
BufferBox. I was, and still am, so pissed at Google for simply buying them
just to shut them down. It was so convenient to get packages shipped to a box
rather than to my apartment, which invariably ends up with me having to go to
some distribution centre.

------
drpixie
The original Motorola RAZR flip phone. And in general, phones with actual
buttons you can feel.

~~~
city41
It boggles my mind we've been suffering with virtual keyboards for over a
decade now. Surely someone will remove this pain? Anyone? Hello?

~~~
stevewodil
there will be a new interface for controlling your phones and future devices
that doesn't require typing. I would hold out for that :D

Look at Neuralink

------
gnicholas
Secret. Good for a quick social interaction but never led to long sessions
like FB or Twitter.

------
ctack
The Next Thing - are the makers of CHIP and PocketCHIP. Such cool retro
products. I still use my PocketCHIP daily. A tiny linux machine with a full
keyboard. Products that are open to hacking and extension and give a feeling
that anything is possible.

------
Animats
Wildfire, the phone system. Way, way ahead of its time. Microsoft bought it
and dropped it.

------
pawel_dyda
Logitech Elite Keyboard for its volume jog and "mouse" wheel to scroll web
pages.

------
paddy_m
I wish that Symbolics was still a going concern. I wish that openGenera was a
going concern so that it could developed and distributed to run in a VM. The
lisp machine computing environment still sounds so well thought out and
engineered.

------
wdrw
The Zeo sleep monitoring headband. As far as I know, the only consumer device
that accurately measured and reported sleep stages based on actual direct
brainwave measurement, and not just secondary indicators like pulse and
movement.

------
SunboX
Firefox OS, Windows Mobile / Windows Phone

Diversity matters, otherwise we loose standardisation.

------
catchmeifyoucan
I miss rdio, before Spotify. I loved how in Rdio, you could search for a song,
and then the next song after the one you play would be from that album. In
Spotify, the search results begin playing! It's so frustrating.

------
cimmanom
Full keyboard flip phones. That old Env3 might be the handiest phone I ever
owned.

~~~
su8898
this! A decent full keyboard Android phone (even at the cost of a reduced
screen size) would be fantastic.

------
willismichael
Atari ST & Commodore Amiga

------
dep_b
AudioGalaxy. So much better than Napster and all of the others around that
time.

------
rhspeer
H.D. Smith perfect handle tools.

From my understanding they went out of business in the great depression.
However their hand tools endure through quality and continued utility.

If you ever get to hold a he Smith 660 screwdriver it is a surprising joy

------
paulie_a
Aol instant messenger. I always thought that team was forgotten about during
multiple buyouts. I had been using it since the 90's. I stayed logged in the
night it shut down and was disconnected.

------
garfieldnate
I miss being able to +1 a website via Google+. I never used the social aspect
of Google+, but seeing +1's on a page was super helpful and was my way of
giving a quick compliment to any website.

------
shpx
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-
time_text](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_text)

Back in the day, to chat with a coworker you and him would connect into the
same unix box and do `talk <username>`[0]. You didn't have to press Enter to
send a message, the other person could see what you were typing on every
keystroke. Like in Google Docs.

I probably only like this idea because it's different. The wikipedia article
mentions that older versions of the ICQ messenger used to have this feature. I
have no idea why they removed it but I'm guessing they it's because it was a
useless source of complexity that no one was using. Another counterargument is
that Google Docs actually stores all the information you need to play back the
creation of a google doc[1] and no one really seems to use it besides teachers
checking for plagiarism. This could just be because no one knows about it.

But it's still surprising to me that none of today's chat clients do this or
even have it as an experimental option. You could use peer-to-peer UDP for
real-time text and only provide delivery guarantees using your centralized
service after the user hits enter.

It's difficult to describe, but I noticed chatting with people in this way
leads to more abstract conversations, so you'd probably have a hard time
adopting this with people that don't already trust each other. It's also
frustrating to see how slow people type and everyone types slow because you're
comparing it to speech.

It could be useful in situations where you need answers as fast as possible
(think first responders), but it would be such a tiny improvement.

You could generalized this idea to any piece of human generated text. It would
be cool if instead of just the finished text of a book we also had a list of
every key stroke the author and editor typed and their associated timestamps.
It would be like open sourcing a small part of their creative process. Such a
fine grained revision history might let you clear up some ambiguities in the
finished text. Beyond that, it's probably useless for creative writing since
composing the book would become an artistic performance, which might take a
toll on creativity. I still think about it from time to time. Storage is
cheap, why not collect the data now and see if it becomes useful later.

We could have a Hacker News where you could watch me composing this comment,
like in a Google Doc. And play it back after I had posted it. It wouldn't
provide any value, but still, why not? We have the storage space. Why not have
it as an option? For those who want to be a bit more "transparent" or just
want to watch themselves type after they're done. I'd use it. Surely there's
no drawback (besides performance/scalability and space) for simply giving
people the option to not destroy information...

If you had this information for all the text you've ever written, you probably
would want to keep it for at least a few files.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_(software)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_\(software\))
just do `apt install talk`. If you're on macOS, you have it installed already
I think.

[1] [http://draftback.com](http://draftback.com) I don't know if it still
works. I also don't know if Google stores absolute timestamps or just a
history of edits.

~~~
Jtsummers
Not only could you chat in real time, you could also share parts of each
others console. When I was in school, this was very useful as most of my
friends were older than me. A couple of them effectively tutored me over ytalk
(this was before we had learned what screen could do, then we switched to
that). ytalk was great for ad hoc chatting and sharing, though.

------
deepnotderp
DEC Alpha

------
phodo
Visual Basic (the original version, pre=VBA that was embedded in office)

------
zanbaldwin
MediaMonkey, and the OCD of making sure every single IDv3 tag was correct and
formatted to a standard. I think that's a big part of why I'm so obsessive
over coding standards now.

------
n2j3
last.fm in the pre-CBS era

------
firdaus
\- glitch (the game) \- Ubuntu Linux with Unity \- Posterous \- Ducksboard

~~~
__warlord__
I'll miss unity too, allowing you to scale the resolution per monitor is
something that gnome can't just do :(

------
qwerty456127
Amiga personal computers were amazing, that's a pity there is no active
development in the Amiga world nowadays and an Amiga is not a viable
alternative to a modern PC/Mac.

------
feralfoo
Sparrow (email client)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparrow_(email_client)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparrow_\(email_client\))

------
HHalvi
Carousel and Mailbox by Dropbox. God i loved the design language and maturity
of Dropbox as a company/product in the 2012-2014 era compared to the trash it
has become now.

------
dkrikun
Ubuntu around 2010. It got fat and lazy after that so we no have to use
xubuntu etc. for old pc's. Lots of PC games naturally: half-life, quake3,
fallout2, gta2 etc. etc.

------
KozmoNau7
Simple, ad/tracking-free websites as the gold standard for the web.

Basic HTML, maybe a little bit of CSS and some rudimentary JS for forms and
such. Hell, even good old frames. The frontier days of personal web pages,
with questionable design choices, full of personally chosen content. Anything
relevant to whatever interests, from Amiga graphics to ornithology.

I miss the simple web of the 90s, where you could have an open contact form
(or even your personal email address) and a guestbook on your webpage, without
it getting instantly spammed to hell.

Maybe I should get around to making my own retro-style webpage, hand-coded for
old times' sake.

------
mooze
Google Moderator. It was a reddit-like service that allowed you to crowdsource
popular opinions. We used it to pinpoint UX issues in the early days of our
startup.

------
irlib
Miss Google Reader.

Now I have to host a miniflux to have relatively similar experience. Still, GR
was much more convenient.

Miss Mr.Reader as a RSS client on iPad. Miss AlienBlue Reddit client.

------
focusaurus
Palm and the Palm Pilot. UI responded instantly to every input. 2 AAA
batteries lasted a month. With years of heavy usage I never encountered a
single bug.

------
firdaus
Google Desktop Search

------
kahlonel
Macbook Air

~~~
sbr464
Still avail at the apple store I think.

Will never forget being in the audience at the unveil, watching Steve Jobs
pull it out of an envelope.

------
kidsil
Rockbox supported music players.

The best music player I've ever had was Sansa Clip with Rockbox installed.
Sadly they don't produce them anymore.

------
awake
Timeful. By far the best calendar I’ve ever used nothing else even comes
close. I literally felt an order of magnitude more productive.

------
utopcell
The Spectrum ZX from Sinclair. I miss the immediacy of a blinking cursor, just
waiting there for you next command. Simple and elegant.

------
forkLding
Tilt payment app in Canada, we don't have half of the payment apps like Venmo
in the US and it is quite inconvenient sometimes

------
nfoz
* Psygnosis

* Amiga

* dumb TVs

* Blackberry OS

* Zune

* Bryce

* WordPerfect

* Gopher

~~~
_mrmnmly
Psygnosis and Metal Fatigue game <3

------
aethant
Rdio

------
the_gastropod
Rdio! It's really a shame Spotify "won" the music streaming battle. Rdio was
such a beautifully designed service.

------
andrewmackrodt
Ducksboard, it was a prettier geckoboard alternative which worked better.
Acquired by New relic to integrate into insights IIRC.

------
tacoman
Roku SoundBridge M1001. Beautiful VFD display, simple to use, and no phone or
tablet required.

BlackBerry 10 devices with physical keyboards.

------
pippolong
Ambrosia software

~~~
mikey_p
They're actually still around and make iPad, iPhone games and have ported
several of their utilities to OS X, but it's nothing like their late 90s
heyday. Played the crap out of Escape Velocity, Avara, Barrack, etc. Learned
to make website just to put a page up for my EV plugins (mods, addons? can't
remember what they were called).

------
qwerty456127
Old-style Heroes of Might & Magic by NWC/3DO. Versions > 3 look fancy but
don't feel this magic to play.

------
catchmeifyoucan
I miss the old Mint app. The new Mint has one screen with nested navigations
and four useless tabs that I don't use.

------
AznHisoka
Topsy. Being able to see the tweets surrounding a keyword was so useful. as
well as seeing the monthly trends in volume.

------
AnsisMalins
Pebble! The only smartwartch with a battery.

~~~
tryum
And the never released pebble core ! It would have been the perfect partner
for running with GPS tracking and bluetooth music ;)

------
genericone
Tap Tap Revenge, Disney removed everything from app stores after buying out
Tapulous for financial reason of the day.

------
xadoc
Dr Dobb's Jolt Awards. There are still many technical books being published
would be nice to have some curation.

------
cardamomo
Punchfork. Much better for recipe discovery than other sites I've found. It
was integrated into DuckDuckGo, too!

------
hollaur
Sunrise Calendar

------
masonic
The Sony digital headset AM/FM radio.

~~~
devmunchies
Sony.

------
darpa_escapee
Palm Pre and webOS. Form factor beat the Nokia N900 in portability and the OS
was just as Linux-y as Maemo was.

------
berti
Aces Studio/Microsoft Aces, responsible for the Microsoft Flight Simulator
series, shutdown by MS in 2009.

~~~
com2kid
I know this story! I was told approximately the following by someone who used
to be on the MS Flight Sim team.

So years ago, Flight Sim was part of Home and Office, but they were in the
process of moving over to the gaming division. Back in 2009, the call came
throughout Microsoft that teams had to cut a certain % of their head count, it
so happened that for Home and Office, the size of the Flight Sim team was
about the % of the headcount that needed to be cut.

So the head of Home and Office didn't let the transfer of Flight Sim go
through, and instead kept them in the H&O division as a sacrificial lamb.
Thus, a perfectly profitable product got cut.

(Division names may be wrong, they change a lot over time)

------
Eiriksmal
Coke BlāK. It shouldn't have worked, it's a terrible idea... But why did it
taste so incredibly good?

~~~
throwaway46434
Yes! Part of the fun was figuring out what random bodega carried it.

------
mdiep
ScreenHero.

Slack built it their app, but made it way slower and ruined the simple UI.
What used to take 3-5s now takes 30-60s.

------
galkk
Microsoft Money. Very convenient and had good reporting. Mint is ok, but it's
reporting is very weak.

------
eb0la
hinv form SGI IRIX.

With 5 keystrokes you could see what kind of hardware you were running. Very
handy to open a support case with a simple copy and paste.

SGI IRIX was the second Unix I learnt. Cool OS, Cool Desktop, and I miss the
blue SGI Indy box my boss had... and that I inherited when he left the
company.

------
wkrause
Prismatic

It was an intelligent news reader that had amazing content discovery based on
my interests and a solid UI.

------
epc
four11.com, an early (1995?) opt-in contact directory.

Vaguely recall it supporting LDAP. When Yahoo bought it in 1997 they promptly
shut off everything but the web mail, much like Comcast buying Plaxo a decade
later and killing most of the utility of Plaxo once the deal closed.

------
nerdy
Caselabs :(

 _(Sorry to be the bearer of bad news about their recent closure if you didn
't already know)_

------
dublidu
I miss Mailbox. They had a Mac client and mobile apps that where best in class
at the time.

------
yantrams
I'm surprised no one has mentioned Nokia N9 / Meego yet. Slickest mobile UX
ever!

------
WillPostForFood
MySpace - social networking was better back before the facebook "real name"
era.

~~~
umichguy
Really? Don't get me wrong, MySpace did have its own thing going on back then,
but was filled with creeps and strangers I'd rather not connect with it. When
Facebook came about in my freshman year in 2004, it was a breath of
freshair....now, not so much.

~~~
WillPostForFood
Ultimately, yeah, I preferred the random, weird, mostly anonymous interactions
on MySpace to having my relatives and highs school acquaintances who I haven't
seen in a dozen years stalking my Facebook page.

~~~
umichguy
Fair enough.

------
zubair_io
Window phone

------
qbaqbaqba
Anything related to RSS, XMPP...

------
jwhite_nc
I totally miss Pulse.me before Linkedin bought it and absorbed it Gravitonium
style.

------
gotts
I actually enjoyed Google Wave.

~~~
el_chapitan
95% of the time, I wondered what problem Google Wave was trying to solve. But
that 5% of the problem where it was the sweet spot was amazing.

------
scrollinondubs
Rdio GrowlVoice (Mac-native Google voice client) Plancast Kimono Labs Yahoo
Pipes

------
yogdog
It's actually still available but not for a long time - Google's Inbox.

------
santix
MSN Messenger and/or ICQ.

------
sbr464
The entire minidisc ecosystem.

------
guynawar
I really loved Detour. I feel like it could have changed the way people
travel.

------
JensRantil
Bump. Exchanging contact information by bumping phones was fun and
frictionless.

------
simonebrunozzi
The old evernote, before all the crap.

And Google reader. Not perfect, but it was all I needed.

------
discordance
Google Reader and the old Google Finance (the stock screener was awesome)

------
sidcool
Google's Nexus phones.

~~~
stevewodil
for the most part I think that OnePlus fits this gap, although they are maybe
a little too expensive still to truly fit the same role

------
forkLding
Limewire

------
jvagner
i used to use an app or a feature for listening to music while going to sleep,
and it would fade the volume to zero for the last bit of your sleep time
setting.

none of the apps i have now do something like that.

------
est
Macromedia Flash.

Not the browser plugin, but the authoring tool to make animations easy.

------
5555624
Lotus Magellan. It made searching for things on my computer easy.

------
gslin
Google Reader. It's much faster and cleaner than Feedly...

------
ajeet_dhaliwal
Do soon to be discontinued products count? If so, Inbox (Google)

------
rahimnathwani
Detour (tour guide app)

------
doktorn
CygnusEd on the Amiga.

------
doubt_me
Anybody from Germany want to ship me some Red Bull Cola?

~~~
philoticstrand
If you're in the US, it's finally back in stores!

------
TuringNYC
The Macbook Pro chassis before the low-travel keyboard.

------
hguhghuff
iPod shuffle before they stuffed up the design. That was the perfect device
but of course they had to make it smaller thus the clip no longer held.

------
lucaslee
wired apple keyboard

------
moeffju
last.fm. the best music discovery community. I wish I could afford to buy it
back from whoever owns it now and is letting it die slowly.

------
bitmover
kozmo.com

------
theflyingmouse
Xbox Kinect and Microsoft Lumia dual sim phones.

------
sizzle
PalmOS, the touchpad was ahead of its time...

------
binarnosp
OpenSolaris from Sun. It was a joy to use it.

------
singularity2001
Commodore (brilliant makers of Amiga and C64)

------
kleinmatic
Google Reader, QuarkXPress 3.2, Lotus Improv.

------
aygul
Google Wave, Google Reader, Google+, Schemer

------
reacweb
First, Sun Microsystems.

Second, maybe Radioshack.

Third, the twillight zone.

------
627467
Palm Tungsten T

------
akavel
gmane.org

for browsing archives of various interesting mailing lists in a nice way, with
a lighweight, dense, and fast UX

------
Thriptic
Dedicated server software and lanning.

------
zmix
Electronics

* The Commodore Amiga * The Pebble smartwatch

Food

* Yonett Yoghurt (Hungarian)

------
pestkranker
Groove shark!

------
HocusLocus
Radium paint kits for watch hands

~~~
ce4
Scary stuff. Good it's gone.

------
gwbas1c
Flip phones, like the Startac.

------
rollopack
The website tracks4bikers.com

------
gehant
Corn Flakes, the old recipe

------
SteveNuts
Snapple Elements (beverage)

------
ricardobeat
Rdio.

Grooveshark.

Sparrow email client.

de.licio.us

ffffound

TextMate (I know it’s still around)

bu.mp

------
_threads
Parse.com

------
JasonFruit
PyGTK.

------
LVB
Ecco Pro

~~~
Joeri
Same for me. I used to take all my notes in Ecco Pro, and I haven't found any
outliner that comes close. A modern Ecco Pro with cloud-syncing would be
awesome.

------
mgkimsal
McDLT

------
dplgk
Pownce

------
dnr
The old 7-row ThinkPad keyboard.

Also Rdio.

------
poisonarena
orbitz, those guys who made those weird drinks with floating things

------
corpMaverick
The incredible machine.

------
dhotson
I really miss Muxtape.

------
brandonmenc
Mary Janes, the candy.

~~~
Neener54
These are still around. You just have to shop for them a bit.

[https://www.amazon.com/Mary-Janes-Old-Fashioned-
Candy/dp/B01...](https://www.amazon.com/Mary-Janes-Old-Fashioned-
Candy/dp/B017GDK6M0/ref=sr_1_1_sspa?ie=UTF8&qid=1539660607&sr=8-1-spons&keywords=mary+janes+candy&psc=1)

~~~
brandonmenc
I just bought 5 lbs. on Amazon, but they are recently discontinued, so once
they're gone, they're gone.

------
LukeHoersten
Rdio and Google Inbox

------
syngrog66
the Escape key, Apple

~~~
stevewodil
I know! I wish the non-touchbar models got 8th gen processor upgrades, now I'm
stuck with the touchbar but it's not that bad I guess......

------
AnimalMuppet
Gorillas.bas

BZFlag on networked SGIs.

------
vertline3
The Nature Company

------
LTL_FTC
Palm Pre and WebOS

------
_____bee_____
Google RSS Reader

------
sharathgm
Inbox, very soon.

------
fbonawiede
Sunrise calendar

------
jcsnv
Sunrise calendar

------
kulor
Sunrise Calendar

------
vvilliam0
Google Inbox :(

------
arminiusreturns
PC Accelerator

------
rollopack
Google Reader

------
aargh_aargh
Opera Browser

------
DebasishPanda
Wunderlist :(

------
megadethz
google reader

------
benoror
Google Inbox

------
abraham
Google Wave.

------
icco
Dropplr

------
jmtulloss
Rdio :(

------
endlessvoid94
Rdio

------
gm-conspiracy
Kozmo.com

------
huntermeyer
Screenhero

------
ahoka
Skype

------
rocky1138
Atari

------
dep_b
Commodore

------
Giho
Pebble

------
atesti
Windows 7

------
dminor14
HyperCard

------
gbrindisi
Olivetti.

------
superzadeh
The zune.

------
kgc
Mouseflow

------
znpy
\- MSN Messenger

\- KDE 3

------
samstave
Cuecat::

------
time_is_scary
screenhero

~~~
Kpourdeilami
It was such a well engineered piece of software. It worked so effortlessly and
without any issues. It was so good that I had it installed on my family
members’ laptops as well and used it instead of FaceTime for simple calls

------
wglb
HP 200 LX

~~~
tonyedgecombe
The Gemini looks interesting:
[https://www.planetcom.co.uk](https://www.planetcom.co.uk)

~~~
wglb
Would love to try this.

The thing about the Hp was that I could open it up and make a note within
seconds. Faster than any other known method. Including pencil and paper.

------
timkofu
ep.io and PiCloud

------
mrbill
google reader

------
icco
what.cd

------
oropolo
iPod nano.

------
natch
del.ico.us

------
lowry
Thinkpad T60 series. 4:3 screen, great keyboard, thinklight and trackpoint.

~~~
cimmanom
4:3 monitors in general

------
aviv
17" macbook pro matte.

------
lsr_ssri
Yahoo Messenger Google Reader

~~~
client4
I would have though ICQ or MSN messenger would have been the first one
mentioned. Did you end up on Yahoo because all of your friends/contacts were
on it?

------
the_cat_kittles
kozmo.com

~~~
blinkengus
Kozmo was two full evolutionary cycles ahead of its time, and pretty much
defined peak optimism for what the internet could weave together. Things since
have been [much] bigger in effect, but the ambitions for tacking non-existant
infrastructure seem petite in comparison.

