
Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect? - geff82
Hi all!
Sometimes the best days seem to be behind us, even in software development.<p>What closed-source, proprietary software that you once loved is not being developed&#x2F;enhanced any more? What more features would you like to have it in the future? Would you pay for it to be resurrected?
======
bhauer
* Windows Phone. We need a third viable option in the mobile space. This week we are concerned about the loss of a browser engine, recognizing this is unhealthy for the market. Windows Phone was terrific in many ways and recent concepts by fans such as @boxnwhisker (Harry Dohyun Kim) [1] show how beautiful the Metro design could be today.

* Microsoft Image Composer. A little known sprite-oriented graphic arts program. Combining its sprite model with the necessary several years of modernization it would have enjoyed had it not been abandoned would be impressive and easy to use.

* High-performance lightweight desktop email clients. I was especially fond of one named AK-Mail in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Blisteringly fast on PCs of its era, a modern incarnation would seem incomprehensibly fast compared to today's bloated apps that have difficulty keeping up with keystrokes on 8-core 3.5 GHz monsters. Of course, back in the day, desktop apps were built in systems languages and not in JavaScript.

* As a broader concept, a return to prevailing use of on-device processing and computation. Today the too-facile argument that data must be shipped off-network to a third-party cloud in order to be processed efficiently means this happens all the time without users paying it any attention.

[1] [https://twitter.com/boxnwhisker/](https://twitter.com/boxnwhisker/)
(scroll down to see a bunch of examples)

~~~
culot
Windyws Phone's tile setup is still the best home screen setup for mobile. As
I peep at my Android home with pretty wallpaper with acres of bhank space and
uninformative icons, I pine for the informative, intelligent WP tiles.

Ms Image Composer was unbeatable for digital and web stuff back then.
Photoshop was rather clumsy in comparison.

As for email clients, I do keep wondering how Thunderbird can be _so slow_ ,
how its rendering system can be so shite.

~~~
Tharkun
> I do keep wondering how Thunderbird can be so slow

This is a frequently heard complaint, but I can't imagine under what
circumstances this would happen. I have hundreds of thousands of mails in
tbird, in various accounts and folders. It's _never_ struck me as slow. And
its search (one of the features i use most) is simply fast.

~~~
naasking
> This is a frequently heard complaint, but I can't imagine under what
> circumstances this would happen.

I see it both fast and slow. Ironically it's absurdly slow on my 8-core
desktop and just fine on my older dual core laptop (both with SSDs and same
accounts, etc). Definitely weird, but this behaviour has peristed for years,
so much that I had to disable TB features on my desktop just so I could _type_
without stalling.

~~~
mixmastamyk
> first thoughts would be to compact your folders and if that doesn't help,
> vacuum the sqlite files.

Might also recommend a disk check, perhaps FS needs fixing.

~~~
naasking
At one point I cleared out all TB folders and started from scratch, problem
reappeared, so I don't think that's it. Very strange indeed.

~~~
mixmastamyk
The items mentioned above should be done periodically, not just once. Perhaps
there are some giant files in there too?

~~~
ajdlinux
> The items mentioned above should be done periodically, not just once

While helpful advice - if you need to do this manual maintenance regularly,
the application is broken.

~~~
mixmastamyk
Possibly, hard to know over this medium. I’ve never encountered the problem,
but added the tasks to my cleanup command.

~~~
ajdlinux
Not to denigrate the hard work of developers (particularly open source
developers) who work on very complex application software like Thunderbird,
but software designed for regular users needs to cope without cleanup scripts.
(Yes, yes, I know that reinstalling Windows from scratch is a time honoured
tradition...)

~~~
mixmastamyk
Sure. My cleanup script however does multiple things, tbird maintenance is
only a tiny part.

------
dcminter
Picasa (desktop app). It hit a sweet spot for me - linux compatible, very easy
to do the majority of simple edits (crop, rotate, colour tweaks), and a few
other nice features.

The only significant failing was that it couldn't handle removable media at
all well.

Shotwell is the best I've found so far, but it's not quite the right feature
balance for me.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picasa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picasa)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shotwell_(software)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shotwell_\(software\))

~~~
iscrewyou
I used picass for one thing and one thing only: image organization.

I could point it to a directory and it would read all the images. It wouldn’t
copy them to it’s database, it wouldn’t try to change their format. It would
simply read them as fast as I’ve ever seen and show me what’s in that
directory. Then it would keep the directory hierarchy in place. I haven’t been
able to find anything similar. I search for a similar piece of software every
now and then but nothing shows up. Lightroom is close but it’s god awfully
slow. I just loved how fast Picasa.

I actually did some cleaning on my computer last night and found the last
Picasa dmg. Maybe I run it and see if it still works.

~~~
extractly
Picasa was definitely a state of the art app. Image controls, overall speed
and smoothness of the user interface! I still cannot find anything close to
it. I ended up using ImageRanger for browsing my pictures and it seems to be
quite fast and non intrusive. It looks like these days almost every device and
app is trying to force you to use their subscription based cloud storage or
service.

------
lucideer
The Opera 12 browser, for umpteen reasons:

\- UX-wise, it solved many issues browsers today are still struggling with.
Vivaldi is working in a similar direction, but they've basically started from
scratch again so aren't close to the point of development Opera had achieved
by version 12.

\- These HN posts from today's frontpage [0] [1] give some idea of why we
really need Presto today. Not only would it just be good to have more
competitors in the space, but also, for most of its existence Presto was ahead
of its competitors in every detail (except for the one important, and very
political, issue of "site compatibility", a.k.a. making badly written websites
work). It also, similarly, got many UX points working at an engine level that
modern browsers still get wrong, like text selection of html content and link
text, responsiveness of scroll and of page links during navigation, etc.

\- M2 will never be surpassed by Thunderbird, and quite possibly will never be
surpassed full stop (though I really hope I'm wrong about that).

... so many other things

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18626316](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18626316)

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18622516](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18622516)

~~~
aasasd
Just FYI, you can select link text in Firefox and, I think, Chrome if you hold
Alt.

Learned that rather recently even though I'm practically living on the web.

~~~
anotherevan
And if that doesn't work for you, for Firefox there's
[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/drag-
select-l...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/drag-select-link-
text/) which is awesome. It is one of the first add-ons I always add.

------
ioman
Microsoft MapPoint. This was a phenomenal piece of mapping software and had
features I haven’t been able to find in any of the online map replacements.

When getting directions, you could designate a number of areas on the map as
“avoid area”.

You could map all sorts of census data. Want to colorize the map based on
crime rate divided by median home price? No problem.

You could import lots of data from a spreadsheet and do useful things with it.
I used this when looking for my first house. I scraped the data from
realtor.com and made maps where the icon changed on the number of bedrooms and
the color changed based on the price.

You could make drivetime zones. Want to see how far you can drive in 30
minutes from your office? No problem.

You can probably do a lot of this with ArcGIS, but I don’t know since its way
out of my price range.

I keep hoping that Microsoft will bring some of this to Bing Maps. I would pay
to use these features again and adding them to Azure would definitely
differentiate them from Google Maps.

~~~
hackerman12345
Won't happen. Apps with those features get accused of being racist.

[https://www.npr.org/2012/01/25/145337346/this-app-was-
made-f...](https://www.npr.org/2012/01/25/145337346/this-app-was-made-for-
walking-but-is-it-racist)

~~~
untog
The OP appears to be talking about just mapping demographic datasets, plenty
of software does that today and isn't accused of being racist.

The issue you linked to seems different. I agree that the headline is
hysterical, but the patent mentions, among other sensible ideas, that it would
plot paths factoring in demographic data. Which is just plain weird when you
already have crime data available.

------
cpcallen
Aperture

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture_(software)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture_\(software\))

I would happily pay for an update that fixed outstanding bugs and ensured
compatibility with future versions of macOS. It would be nice to have some new
features, too, but it is basically "good enough" as it is and I dread the day
I can no longer run it. I'm really not sure what I will do.

The claim that Photos was going to be a meaningful replacement for Aperture
was obviously a lie at the time it was released and even nearly five years
later it is still not true.

I'd have moved to Lightroom had Adobe not moved to a subscription model.

~~~
michaelflux
Oh man, so much this.

When Photos just came out and Apple was making the claims about how they've
taken everything good from Aperture and stuck it into Photos I was pretty
optimistic considering how solid of an app Aperture became over the years.

Now, few days down the road, pretty clear that Photos is just a marginally
better iPhoto with the vast majority of features that were useful for
professionals such as Stacks, never coming back.

The dumbification of professional apps to the lowest common denominator
continues ...

~~~
geerlingguy
Stacks, 2-up and 4-up comparison, the Loupe, star ratings, fast browsing of
raw files... so much missing functionality. Lightroom IMO was never as good as
Aperture, I really wish Apple would’ve spun it off instead of just letting it
wither.

------
sheepybloke
Is no one going to mention Pebble? It's the only smartwatch I've ever wanted,
and I was so sad that it got bought and died right when I had enough money to
spend some on a smart watch. It just had the perfect combo of good design,
long battery life, and usability.

~~~
mvkel
I have one sitting in my drawer; happy to send to you for free if you're
interested in owning one. Just drop me a line.

~~~
jopro
I too have a Pebble that I'm happy to provide to anyone as well. OG
Kickstarter edition. Free to a good home.

~~~
elvispt
if the offer is still available, I'll take it. I'll pay shipping (I'm in
europe, assume you are in the US).

------
Noumenon72
Microsoft Money. I didn't have to give access to all my accounts to some
website, or pay an annual subscription for upgrades. I got keyboard shortcuts
and reports and I could search for things to find out how old my computer is
or when I went to Vegas.

It seems like in the physical economy, if you create something of value and
you aren't making money off it, you will sell it and someone else can make
money off it. With software like Picasa, it's just gone. Some programs release
a sunset version, but you never know how long it will work and you can't
promote it because they might take it down.

~~~
napsterbr
The interface may not be the same, but I highly recommend
[http://plaintextaccounting.org](http://plaintextaccounting.org). I've used
ledger and currently am using beancount. Both are great!

There's also gnucash, never used but its interface may be similar to Microsoft
Money (which I also never used).

~~~
sleavey
I've found Beancount [1] to be a nicer version of Ledger. It is similar syntax
but it enforces rigid rules to ensure you don't make as many mistakes. You can
also use Fava [2] as a nice local web-based account browser.

[1] [http://furius.ca/beancount/](http://furius.ca/beancount/)

[2] [https://beancount.github.io/fava/](https://beancount.github.io/fava/)

------
linguae
I have a few software packages in mind:

1\. The Genera operating system for Symbolics Lisp machines. Ever since I've
gotten bitten by the Smalltalk and Lisp machine bugs, I've been wanting to use
Genera, but I was born at the beginning of the last AI winter, and
unfortunately the operating system is still proprietary, with no word about
whether or not it will become open sourced. It's regrettable that the
proverbial baby was thrown out with the bathwater when Lisp machines lost out
in the marketplace to RISC workstations and the x86 running Lisp on other
OSes; there are a lot of interesting lessons we can learn from Genera in
today's operating systems and programming environments, and an entire
generation of computer scientists and software engineers are unfortunately
completely unfamiliar with Lisp machines.

2\. I've heard wonderful things about the productivity software developed by
Lighthouse Design for NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP. I haven't used them myself, but
I've read that many NeXTSTEP users were devoted fans of Lighthouse Design
software, and the presentation tool that the company designed influenced the
design of Apple's Keynote.app. Unfortunately when Sun acquired Lighthouse
Design, Sun hasn't done much with the Lighthouse Design codebase. It would
have been nice had these programs been updated and further refined for Mac OS
X.

3\. I would love for someone to resurrect the ideas of Apple's OpenDoc
platform, which allows for component-based development of GUI applications,
much like how pipes and redirection in Unix allows for different command-line
utilities to be used together.

My dream is an operating system where all objects can be inspected (like
Smalltalk or a Lisp machine OS), where there is a component framework similar
to OpenDoc that allows for component-based GUI application development, and
where there's a REPL that allows power users to have complete control over
their applications (both command-line and GUI). All applications would adhere
to some type of well-designed usability guideline (I'm thinking about the
classic Apple Human Interface Guidelines from the pre-OS X days), and the
interface would be reminiscent of Mac OS 8.

~~~
mietek
I share your sentiments. With regards to Genera, have you seen this?

[https://static.loomcom.com/genera/genera-
install.html](https://static.loomcom.com/genera/genera-install.html)

~~~
armitron
This runs off of an unofficial emulator that is a monstrous hack. There are
lots of gotchas, bugs and so on.

On the other hand, an official emulator is in the works and should be released
at some point.

~~~
mepian
Wait, what do you mean? The current owner of Symbolics authorized the
development of a new I-Machine emulator? Who is working on it, Kalman Reti and
Brad Parker? This is very interesting news, please elaborate.

~~~
armitron
I don’t think Brad Parker is involved. You can email Reti for more
information.

~~~
mepian
What is his current email address? The one at symbolics-dks.com?

------
ilmiont
Windows Phone.

To this day no Android phone I've used ever as fast, reliable or plain refined
as WP8 was.

Unique design and many genuinely useful features, and it reflected a time when
smartphones could have been vibrant and diverse, not our current two mega-
platforms or nothing.

~~~
stamina67
Why doesn't Microsoft just open-source the windows phone OS as an android
alternative ?

~~~
toast0
I don't think open sourcing it would help much at this point. It's not as if
it's impossible to find a Windows phone to use, but the ecosystem is falling
apart too.

The biggest problems in my mind for using a Windows phone today are really
that what apps there were are going away (which open sourcing the os isn't
going to help), and the browser is bad. On Windows phone 8, the browser is bad
because the rendering engine of mobile IE isn't very good / workable with
modern web; on Windows mobile 10, the browser is bad because Edge frequently
delays responding to user input and it's uterly unusable at times. Plus or
minus when the browser locks up the phone and the watchdog timer reboots it.

------
rmprescott
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Improv](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Improv)

n-dimensional spreadsheet with a logical data model (including hierarchies)
rather than rows and columns:

Net Worth := Assets - Liabilities

~~~
dfee
> Conventional spreadsheets used on-screen cells to store all data, formulas,
> and notes. Improv separated these concepts and used the cells only for input
> and output data. Formulas, macros and other objects existed outside the
> cells, to simplify editing and reduce errors. Improv used named ranges for
> all formulas, as opposed to cell addresses.

Amazing.

~~~
brotherjerky
Sounds very similar to how Coda works: [https://coda.io](https://coda.io)

------
skrebbel
Jasc Paint Shop Pro - before Corel picked them up and gave the software a
horrible identity crisis.

It had all the right features for graphics editing targeted at the web. Mixing
vector layers with raster layers, both fully featured, is still something many
modern programs either don't have, or half-ass.

And it was dirt cheap, compared to the competition.

~~~
mappu
Fireworks (Adobe/Macromedia) was in this category of mixed vector/raster
editors. I'd love to see it return, but a 2019 version would have to be
somewhat different to survive.

Krita is making serious moves in this direction.

~~~
wwweston
It'd need to be somewhat different, yes, but... the biggest problem Fireworks
faced in its last years at Adobe was basically who it was owned by. And what
else they owned. Photoshop is the rare application with language warping
household mindshare. It didn't matter that Fireworks was a better screen
design tool on several level, Adobe almost constitutionally couldn't ever have
really done enough with Fireworks without pitting it against their flagship
title.

------
LeoPanthera
HyperCard.

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

~~~
bane
It's an absolute mystery to me why this hasn't happened even through the open
source community.

For a tour down memory lane: [https://blog.archive.org/2017/08/11/hypercard-
on-the-archive...](https://blog.archive.org/2017/08/11/hypercard-on-the-
archive-celebrating-30-years-of-hypercard/)

~~~
erikpukinskis
Simple point and click programming tools are not a stable state.

The problem is people start using them. Then they have collective needs. Then
the tool adds complexity to make those needs go away. Thus begins the slow
process towards the tool no longer being simple and/or maintainable.

You could do it, but you’d need a Craigslist-like “we’re not adding anything,
it seems to work ok” attitude.

That attitude is totally incompatible with VCs, who generally set the tone in
this industry.

------
walterbell
_Ecco Pro_ for Windows and its predecessor, _Lotus Agenda_ for DOS, which
inspired a multimillion dollar open-source software debacle that inspired the
book, "Dreaming in Code".

Ecco is still being used 20 years later and has been binary patched to support
Lua extensions. Written by a four person team in Seattle.

 _doogiePIM_ has been resuscitated by its founder, hopefully it will carry a
torch for some of the ideas in Ecco and Agenda,
[https://bitespire.com/details_doogiepim.php](https://bitespire.com/details_doogiepim.php)

~~~
Joeri
I loved Ecco's outliner features. Give me cross-platform ecco pro with cloud
syncing and I'll never use onenote again.

~~~
walterbell
Yes, I've bought every alleged outliner since and nothing compares. What's
amazing is that Ecco had 100% reliable cross-device syncing in 1990s, both PC-
PC and PC-PalmPilot. So it has enough metadata in the database.

TreeSheets ([http://strlen.com/treesheets/](http://strlen.com/treesheets/)) is
an open-source cross-platform codebase (wxWidgets) with fast graphics, since
it was designed by a game developer. That's one possible starting point for
cloning Ecco.

NoteLynx on Android has the ability for an item to be in two places within the
outline, [https://www.appbrain.com/app/notelynx-pro-outliner-
mindmap-w...](https://www.appbrain.com/app/notelynx-pro-outliner-mindmap-
wiki/com.astrodean.notelynxpro), as does Mindscope on iOS,
[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mindscope-thought-
organizer/...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mindscope-thought-
organizer/id901513028)

------
tyoma
Visual Basic 6. Fantastically easy to learn and let you make extremely useful
GUI apps quickly. And the edit and continue debugger is still a dream compared
to some of today’s debugging setups.

~~~
ransom1538
Wow.

 _To this day._ I can only find IDE's that do 1/2 of the features VB6 had. But
yeah. After .NET hit, all the VB6 devs I know, bailed.

~~~
petepete
I'd say exactly the same for Delphi 5 and 6.

~~~
scottlocklin
Out of curiosity what happened to Delphi? It always seemed quite good to me.

~~~
clouddrover
This is what happened to it:

[https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi](https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi)

I'd say the Delphi of today is better than ever. It's a shame it isn't more
widely used. I really like it.

------
lewiscollard
WinAmp 2. I still use Audacity in "classic" mode to make it feel like WinAmp..
Old habits die hard :)

Going further back, I think Symantec JustWrite was an extremely fine piece of
software; I remember it being blazingly fast on the 486 monster I had at work.
But my glasses may be rose-tinted :)

~~~
noitsnot
The big thing I liked about Winamp was the equalizer. It should be built into
streaming apps. I think Spotify has one, but it's not advanced enough. It
would help my car's mediocre settings and speakers, also.

------
EamonnMR
Mostly game engines I enjoyed. The Escape Velocity Engine for one, though
clones exist. The Tiberian Sun/Red Alert 2 engine is this crazy mix of voxels,
dynamic lighting, height-mapped terrain all in a fundamentally 2d environment
which is really cool. I would have loved to read Starcraft's source code, but
I imagine that'll never happen now with Remastered.

~~~
laaph
You should check out Endless Sky for a good open source remake of Escape
Velocity.

[http://endless-sky.github.io](http://endless-sky.github.io)

~~~
EamonnMR
I have put many hours into that fine game. There's also NAEV

[https://github.com/naev/naev](https://github.com/naev/naev)

------
80386
Flash. The transition to JS + canvas wasn't too bad for games, although JS
games can't be distributed as single files, but for animation I don't think
there's anything like it anymore. And we forget how much of early internet
culture was driven by 4chan's Flash board, which you can only have with things
like .swf files - relatively small single files that can contain an entire
game/animation.

~~~
Eridrus
Flash still exists as an authoring tool that exports JS/HTML5, does it not
work well for animation?

~~~
GauntletWizard
No. Many of the things that made flash interesting just don't work when you're
disturbing as HTML5, not the least of which is distribution - flash animations
are _one file_ , whereas HTML5 has at least a HTML file and a JavaScript
object, but in practice doesn't ever get distributed that way at all. More
often it's simply turned into a movie and distributed through YouTube... Which
ruins much of the charm. Not just from resolution/compression issues. Flash
animations, being vector based, scaled to any monitor, and even YouTube's
1080p just doesn't look nearly as good, because of compression algorithms
optimized for live action video - if they actually compressed properly, they
could get similar quality, but the price would still be way higher. Flash
animations were typically sized mostly for their audio track - 3-4 MB of mp3
and 400k of animation code.

Then there's the whole thing about interactivity. Many of flashes best moments
were Easter eggs. Most SBEmails have two or more. There's something about the
hunt and realizing you "discovered" the extra bit that makes it so much more
fun than a stinger.

Last but not least: flash is now much more... Hard to pirate. Much of flash
animation was created by students and kids who were working with a tool they
wanted to learn and with zero budget. It was an act of creative rebellion.
It's hardly impossible, but it's not the same as it was.

The other large part is that flash is no longer as new and impressive and
pioneering as it was. That bit can't be reclaimed, no matter what, but is also
a shame. Exploration and boundary pushing was a huge part of all of what made
flash so amazing - people realized that it could do "anything" and so did.
That pioneering spirit lasted for a very long time, considering - the indie
game scene is still riding the wave that flash started - but for animations,
that hump is past and not least of which because it ran into the brick wall of
iOS Safari.

------
beefman
Firefox that ran Tree Style Tab properly

Excel for Mac before it became a cartoon

Google Reader so there would still be blogs to read

Eudora so e-mail wouldn't suck

a dozen or so iOS apps that stopped working after iOS 10

a dozen or so niche Windows apps that haven't been updated

Reddit's redesign is probably the most destructive redesign of anything I've
ever seen, and that is saying a lot. But kudos to them for (so far) supporting
the old version with a sticky setting you can choose.

~~~
nsm
I'd be curious to know what about the new webextensions based Tree Style Tab
doesn't work for you? I use it all the time.

For Google Reader, I am using BazQux and really like it. No ads, no smart
"suggestions", just a very simple UI and reading experience.

~~~
acemarke
Agreed. BazQux is worth every penny of the $20 annual subscription, and a lot
more.

The current TreeStyleTabs extension mostly works, although it occasionally
exhibits weird behavior (dropped tabs ending up under other tabs instead,
etc). Still, I can't live without it.

------
drinchev
I’ve been a heavy user of FoxPro [1] back in time. I would really love someone
to make a better version of it.

Although these days you have Airtable [2] and Ninox [3] they are having
different user base than good old FoxPro.

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

2: [https://airtable.com](https://airtable.com)

3: [https://ninoxdb.de/en/](https://ninoxdb.de/en/)

~~~
ericcholis
I currently maintain a "legacy" VFP application that is actually quite robust.
Not as modern as most languages, but desktop apps can be quite robust. The
access to HTTP libraries and WebView controls can bridge some gaps.

What's really missing is a better IDE with better type hinting, autocomplete,
tabs, etc... VS Code would be a great base for an updated IDE. I know that
Rick Strahl's West Wind has support for Visual Studio, but there's still some
functionality missing.

~~~
gavinpc
I ported a FoxPro app to VFP in 2012. I had worked on the original one in DOS
and ported it to FP for Windows around '96-97, so I knew the IDE's pretty
well. But by that point I couldn't stand anything but Emacs. So I got xbase-
mode (and patched it a bit), and just automated the project build.

There was 100+ screens so I had to do some bulk processing on those SPR's. But
I used WebViews for any new stuff, and that was much better (though it was
basically IE7).

Yeah I owe Rick Strahl so many beers for his blog.

[http://www.budgetbuilder.com/](http://www.budgetbuilder.com/)

Second time this has come up this morning.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18635799](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18635799)

------
kevindong
Mailbox.

The cross platform email client bought and abandoned by Dropbox. To date, I
have not found a cross platform (or really __any __single platform) app that
's as fast as Mailbox. I don't know how they did it, but everything felt truly
instant. All of my devices would simultaneously ring when an email arrived.
Archiving/deleting/snoozing emails instantly synced across all platforms
(including the web Gmail client).

The aesthetics of Mailbox remains unmatched by any email client available
today.

------
epeus
Hypercard - specifically the version that was combined with QuickTime so that
it understood audio and video media too, and ran on every OS.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
I was also going to say HyperCard, or a successor like HyperLook. For a brief
moment in the 90s users were able to make their own tools in GUI form and the
future of computing was bright. Then the programmers of the world abandoned
the idea of enabling users with computing in favor of locking them into stores
and subscriptions to line their pockets. Ok so the sales people and Steve Jobs
in particular had a lot to do with it too.

------
strayamaaate
Norton Commander.

[https://bit.ly/2SBnriS](https://bit.ly/2SBnriS)

Nothing since has ever made me feel so in control of my file system.

There have been a few clones, but never quite hit the spot.

~~~
bdz
I think Total Commander is pretty nice and much better than NC ever was.
Obviously that comes from the different platforms

[https://www.ghisler.com/](https://www.ghisler.com/)

~~~
mtarnovan
I second this. Total Commander is excellent.

------
phaedrus
VALDOCS. I had an Epson QX-10 with a Z-80 processor, 256K, and green
monochrome screen when 486's were out and the 1st gen Pentium was coming out,
but with VALDOCS I was able to do all of my homework the same as anyone using
the Microsoft Office Suite. (VALDOCS could do word processing, spreadsheets,
and charts and graphs.) It was more responsive on an 8-bit computer than
modern bloated Office software, and so much easier to use.

We also used WordPerfect for DOS at my high school. In my opinion, VALDOCS >
WordPerfect > Microsoft Word, but guess which one won out in the market - I've
despised having to use Office software for that reason ever since.

Looking this up again caused me to find this very nice article about the
people who made VALDOCS: [https://www.electronicdesign.com/blog/rising-
star](https://www.electronicdesign.com/blog/rising-star)

~~~
copperx
The video in that article is great!

~~~
aasasd
I'm only five minutes in, and the vid has everything: vague sense of hype
typical for television and supported with random imagery, nonspecific
glorification of tech, first-rate new-agey babble mixed with self-righteous
entrepreneurship, confusion of the two sorts of magic, padded shoulders that
make a businesswoman look like a bouncer.

My brain is additionally confused by the appearance of one of Nino Rota's
themes from “Amarcord.” For the circusey feel, you know.

------
chongli
MacOS classic, preferably system 7.6. I would love to see it resurrected with
modern features (protected memory, preemptive multitasking, a decent network
stack) but without all the complexity that comes with OS X.

I really miss the spatial desktop, the icons designed by Susan Kare, the way
the whole system felt intuitive and understandable for a single person.

I don't think I would pay for it. I'd rather take a shot at developing it
myself.

~~~
oldmancoyote
BasiliskII can run System 7.6 . I don't know wether it meets all of your
requirements though.

------
karmakaze
NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP

Everything about the operating system, application platform and tools were
simultaneously rich in features and minimal in surface area without being
dumbed down. It would have been great to have seen this evolve on its own
rather than get rolled in with Apple. Xcode is so extra compared to the
original Interface Builder.

------
ArtWomb
This is a great thread!

Am currently porting some old school gamedev techniques used in classic Sega
games such as Hang-On, Turbo Outrun and Space Harrier to modern WebGL.
Specifically, super scaler "billboarding" of 2D sprites and pseudo-3D terrain
projections. It will be interesting to see if accurate physical simulations
are possible ;)

Internet Archive's Arcade is preserving a museum's worth of retro games via
Emularity and Emscripten

[https://archive.org/search.php?query=emulator%3A%2A+collecti...](https://archive.org/search.php?query=emulator%3A%2A+collection%3Ainternetarcade+addeddate%3A2018%2A)

------
pgrote
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(word_processor)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_\(word_processor\))

Sprint was a powerful, capable word processor. It was lightning fast and darn
near impossible to lose files.

Alas, it lost out to WordPerfect and was quickly dropped by Borland.

~~~
stevoski
Sprint was so far ahead of its time. It took many years for Sprint’s “always
be saving” technique to be widely adopted by other word processors.

------
vram22
Turbo Delphi Explorer. It was a free version of Delphi 6. They still do have a
Starter Edition, of course, with some restrictions, which TDE had too. But
IIRC, TDE was available in both Win 32 and .NET versions.

Borland Sidekick, a pop-up TSR productivity utility.

Turbo C 2.x

MS QuickC

Probably a few others I need to remember.

~~~
Mister_Snuggles
Have you tried FreePascal/Lazarus[0]? It seems like a spiritual successor to
Delphi.

[0] [https://www.lazarus-ide.org/](https://www.lazarus-ide.org/)

~~~
vram22
Yes, I have, thank you. I like both of them (I was a heavy Turbo Pascal user
many years earlier, and have used Delphi some, too), and have written some
small programs in them (FPC [1]/Laz). (Commented earlier on HN in some
relevant thread, about relative binary sizes of a few langs' EXEs, like C, D,
Go, FPC, etc., too - FPC's are quite small.) Mean to do more with both over
time.

[1] I call Free Pascal FPC for short (for Free Pascal Compiler) to distinguish
it from the common use of FP to mean Functional Programming).

Here's a digital clock I created with Lazarus:

Digital Clock created in FreePascal / Lazarus:

[https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2017/04/digital-clock-created-
in...](https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2017/04/digital-clock-created-in-
freepascal.html)

Also feel free to check out these other clocks I created earlier, both in
Python:

A simple alarm clock in Python (command-line) - this one has a good real-life
use, see the post for details:

[https://jugad2.blogspot.in/2013/11/a-simple-alarm-clock-
in-p...](https://jugad2.blogspot.in/2013/11/a-simple-alarm-clock-in-python-
command.html)

Jal-Tarang, and a musical alarm clock in Python:

[https://jugad2.blogspot.in/2016/12/jal-tarang-and-musical-
al...](https://jugad2.blogspot.in/2016/12/jal-tarang-and-musical-alarm-clock-
in.html)

Here are two more I created earlier:

Digital Clock v1.0 - in 3 lines of Delphi code:

[https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2010/08/digital-
clock-v10-in-3-l...](https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2010/08/digital-
clock-v10-in-3-lines-of-delphi.html)

A digital clock for Windows:

[https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2013/11/a-digital-clock-for-
wind...](https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2013/11/a-digital-clock-for-windows.html)

------
lettergram
Pebble - still the best smart watch at the moment. I don't want my watch
tracking me, I want a long battery life and I want it to be subtle.

This is one of the few times I actually watched better technology fail.
Crushed by a few poor business decisions.

~~~
mr-ron
Amazfit bip

------
ToFab123
Kai's Power Goo [https://youtu.be/xt06OSIQ0PE](https://youtu.be/xt06OSIQ0PE)

~~~
jvagner
i never would've remember this. thank you.

------
y4mi
YNAB4 (you need a budget 4)

It wouldve been perfect if they'd just added an API so that users can create
and share ways to get the data from various banks.

And a refactor was necessary to a native library (or even electron)

But this cloud native follow-up version is just not an option.

~~~
noahdesu
Been using the cloud native version for about a year now, and I'm debating if
I should renew. What are you using now if not YNAB?

~~~
slartibardfast0
Not original commenter, but I reluctantly switched to the cloud version and
have found the improved credit card logic to be more than worthy of the
increased price.

I'm hoping they can add support for the EU's second Payment Services Directive
(PSD2) open banking APIs when they open up to third parities sometime in 2019
too!

------
twic
Acta, an "outliner", which means a hierarchical text editor:

[http://a-sharp.com/acta/](http://a-sharp.com/acta/)

I ended up writing most of my school essays in it. You could start with a
high-level outline and recursively flesh it out until you had a complete
document. The tree structure made it really easy to reorder sections at any
scale.

There is a successor called Opal - the last version of Acta was in 1993, and
the last version of Opal was no later than 2007, so it's dead too.

~~~
Lukasa
Have you considered OmniOutliner for this use case?

~~~
Veen
OmniOutliner is one of my favorite applications. I use it every day as a
planner/outliner. OmniFocus grew out of OmniOutliner, and I used to be an
OmniFocus user. But since I started using OmniOutliner I've completed the
circle and use it for just about everything, including todolists.

Only big limitation is that it's Mac and iOS only. No web or Windows version
(also, the Pro version is a bit expensive)

------
henry_flower
Presto browser engine (from Opera 12) for a lightweight Electron alternative

~~~
superkuh
I couldn't agree more. On this subject, I'm still seeding the leaked Opera 12
source w/presto. [http://superkuh.com/opera12v15presto-
source.torrent](http://superkuh.com/opera12v15presto-source.torrent) (full
torrent dl'd is 222.6 MB)

But... browser engines are no longer browsers like they were in Opera's prime.
They are operating systems with all the complexity that brings. I don't think
presto could fill that role. That said, it'd make a great actual browser.

------
mattkevan
Magic Cap from General Magic. What a lovely, odd little operating system.

I read an article saying there was an effort to get it open sourced after
General Magic folded, but unfortunately all their IP fell into the Sarlacc-
like maw of Intellectual Ventures.

While we’re on the topic of failed, over-ambitious mobile OS’s, Newton OS
would be great too.

~~~
blacksqr
Handwriting recognition on the last iteration of Newton was pretty fantastic.
Is there anything comparable for phones today?

~~~
mattkevan
MyScript Nebo [0] on an iPad with an Apple Pencil is astonishingly good. I
have a Newton and Nebo beats it hands down. (With almost infinitely more
processing power and 20 years one should hope so, but it’s not always the
case.)

[0] [https://www.myscript.com/nebo](https://www.myscript.com/nebo)

------
rpeden
Microsoft Bob.

Not because it was great, but because I think we need more exploration into
alternate ways to interact with computing devices.

I've seen plenty of people - even young people - doing things wrong because
their mental model of how their devices are supposed to work is inadequate or
incomplete.

I've seen more than one person with hundreds and hundreds of browser tabs open
on their iPads and smartphones, because they just don't seem to be able to
incorporate the "tab" concept into their model of how their web browser works.
And so they're constantly clicking and opening new ones without realizing they
can switch back to ones that were previously open.

------
mitchtbaum
Kapow Robomaker [https://www.cmswire.com/cms/enterprise-20/kapow-
technologies...](https://www.cmswire.com/cms/enterprise-20/kapow-technologies-
releases-ondemand-saas-web-data-services-005677.php)

Dapper [http://blog.pansapiens.com/2007/03/19/dapper-the-screen-
scra...](http://blog.pansapiens.com/2007/03/19/dapper-the-screen-scraper-for-
everyone/)

Yahoo Pipes
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Pipes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Pipes)

------
mcv
Choo Choo Steam Trains, for iOS ([http://www.apptism.com/lifestyle/chillingo-
ltd/choo-choo-ste...](http://www.apptism.com/lifestyle/chillingo-ltd/choo-
choo-steam-trains/))

This was a brilliant train game that vanished from the Earth. We used to have
the paid version on an iPad, but I think it vanished after an iOS update. My
dad has the limited free version on his old iPad that he doesn't update to
preserve this game.

I think it's a shame that this game disappeared (also because I paid for it),
and I've considered whether I might be able to make a clone of the game.

~~~
freehunter
Speaking of railroad simulation games, Sid Meier's Railroads! is still one of
my favorite games of all time, even though it doesn't work on any system with
more than 2GB of RAM. Everything about that game was perfect. Nothing has
matched it since.

~~~
froindt
How does Sid Meier's Railroads compare to Railroad Tycoon? Growing up I played
Railroad Tycoon II and Monopoly Tycoon a lot, which actually gave pretty good
lessons in business. Issuing bonds at 7% are annoying to pay back,
understanding overhead costs, etc.

Also, for what it's worth, Railroads seems to be on Steam for $9.99. Pretty
sure it'd work with more than 2 GB of RAM. There's also a bundle with Railroad
Tycoon II and 3 for $14.99.

~~~
freehunter
Railroad Tycoon is a more advanced game. Railroads was very easy to get into
and more fun-oriented than Railroad Tycoon. I could never get into Railroad
Tycoon. It's also a nicer looking game, being newer than any of the Railroad
Tycoon games.

Before you fork out any money for Railroads, make sure you research the
crashing [1]. This link is from 2015 with the latest update being two months
ago with people still discussing crashing and (IMO) some sketchy ways to fix
it. The game just flat out doesn't work well on newer systems. Being
distributed by Steam doesn't mean it will actually run, my library is full of
games that I've never gotten to open.

[1]
[https://steamcommunity.com/app/7600/discussions/0/6229540234...](https://steamcommunity.com/app/7600/discussions/0/622954023416871417/)

~~~
mcv
I first thought you were talking about trains crashing, which is part of what
Choo Choo Steam Trains is about, rather than about the game crashing.

------
sterlind
Midori, the secret operating system incubation from Microsoft. Midori was
based on Singularity (written entirely in M#), but went so much farther. It
was twice as fast as Windows, had capability security, Rust-style borrow
checking, a full GUI, browser and even Windows compatibility. But there was no
future - the OS wars were settled - and now the code languishes inside rather
than being open-sourced.

------
yoshyosh
Google Wave, really wish they just had it as a toggle mode for gmail as they
built up adoption

------
jvagner
Qmodem

Not really, except:

I was thinking the other day that massive communities like Facebook and Reddit
suffer because EVERYONE's allowed in, to an unlimited degree. Everything
reverts to the newbie state and every sh*t post can define the threads.

Remember dial-up? BBSes had limited lines and you'd have to set your (non-
multi-tasking) computer to redial so you could visit your BBS. Moderators,
paying members would get a smidge more time, but rarely unlimited.

Then you had 10/20/30 minutes and the BBS would hang up on you.

It might have been a civilizing force for communities, the sort we still could
use in social...

~~~
armitron
I think what you describe has more to do with the population in general than
the artificial limits of the various mediums.

In BBS and early Internet days (pre-95 or so), people who were using computers
were highly intelligent. Certainly above average.

These days, everyone and their dog is on the Internet. The masses have moved
in and thus the medium shifted to accommodate them, by dumbing itself down to
the lowest common denominator. With the shift away from a knowledge repository
to advertising and consumerism ("the spectacle") the SnR has dropped
significantly.

In cybernetic terms, during the early years of the Internet, the space acted
upon you, by programming you. Thus, if you lacked knowledge, you had to put in
the time and educate yourself in order to explore and learn to use this new
space efficiently. _Cyberspace forced you to get better_.

These days, the opposite happens. The masses act upon the space and dictate
its evolution, downwards.

Looking back, I can't help but mourn what could have been but I also feel
enormously lucky to have lived through it all.

~~~
jvagner
To this degree I definitely agree with you: NextDoor is unbearable. The
internet has trained everyone, and they carry that into their micro-local
communities. Early days had a qualification element.

------
iamcreasy
Norton GoBack [1]

I remember this software runs before the OS and allows you to revert the enter
HDD in a different time. It can even fix the OS if it stopped working for some
reason. I thought it was pretty cool. Anybody know if similar tools exists?

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

~~~
__michaelg
ZFS, Btrfs, etc. essentially provide that with filesystem snapshots; LVM
snapshots probably also works for that. Not sure whether any easy tooling
around it exists though.

------
ThinkBeat
Blackberry.

I have never had a more efficient handheld for doing what I need to do most,
emali and chat/text messages.

The version with the thumbwheel, enabled me to race through messages. I would
expect slack to do great on it as well.

It was not very good for web, apps, games, like my current smartphone is, but
I think my current smartphone is clumsy and slow when it comes to message and
email.

~~~
anonu
Old school. I don't think theres enough demand out there to bring it back tbh.
Even though there are still many passionate ex-users - and maybe current
users. Touch screens have proven to be far superior as they serve both input
and output purposes.

~~~
cgsmith
I agree that touchscreens are more prevalent but disagree that they are
superior. Having something tactile for a phone is useful and should be brought
back. I was discussing the same thing with how cars are moving to only
touchscreens.

The problem ends up being you don't know where to touch without looking at it.
Imagine having a touchscreen keyboard on your laptop. You'd have to look down
to verify where you were.

~~~
lostgame
If you’re as unlucky as me to use a Touch Bar MacBook Pro, you already at
least partially have this problem.

------
linuxlizard
Brief, the text editor, from Underware. It's still the best code editor I've
ever used. Super fast, underpins written in a Lisp-y dialect (later C-ish).
The ^G feature would pop up a list box listing all functions in the file and I
could select where I wanted to jump to. It's still a feature I wish I had in
any modern editor.

~~~
mikerg87
Man I miss Brief. I even used it on OS/2\. I wish Embarcadero would bring it
back. The way you could split Windows amazing. And fast. The column based
operations were great when maniplulating input files. VSCODE et al are OK but
it can’t compete with character mode.

------
zapzupnz
ZZT. I think a modern ZZT would make for a great educational tool to teach
coding. A lot of existing, popular tools exist at either end of the spectrum
of difficulty: too easy or too hard. ZZT was simple to design, fun to draw in,
and the coding wasn't too complex.

Megazeux, a spiritual sequel by another lot of people, I always found far too
complicated. It's not that different to ZZT, it just manages to be fiddly
without a good enough pay-off in my view.

~~~
DanBC
I posted a link about ZZT a while ago, and I learned some stuff from people:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17656822](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17656822)

And a friendly person emailed me this link:
[https://github.com/jdque/char](https://github.com/jdque/char)

~~~
zapzupnz
Neat to see how many fellow coders cut their teeth on ZZT.

------
bsenftner
Shake: the first accelerated graphics compositing software; Fuck the Apple
Shake travesty, the PC & Linux versions rocked. Cool factor 12: your
compositing node "scripts" were C disguised by macros, and gcc would hot
compile them into so/dlls and hot link them in. Meeting the developer of this
software was a major inspiration to my software to follow.

~~~
dahart
I almost added this comment, I wasn’t expecting anyone else to say it. Shake
was so awesome before Apple killed it. I clung to my old working copy for many
many years, until it wouldn’t run anymore.

I never ever understood what the plan for Shake was supposed to be, did you? I
remember hearing rumors it would turn into something bigger and better in a
different Apple product, but it doensn’t seem like anything ever materialized.

------
talonx
* Windows Phone. Fantastic UI, and coupled with the Lumia, it was an awesome user experience.

* The old Winamp, with all the intricate shortcuts that I had memorized.

* Windows XP itself. I have been on Linux for years, and XP was the last Windows I used alongside it (for MSOffice). XP had reached the peak in terms of being able to control the desktop using the keyboard. And then the downslide started.

~~~
freehunter
I know a lot of people who loved Windows XP, but I always hated it. Especially
compared to Ubuntu, it felt like the past. Having to hunt down drivers and
install them before any hardware started working was a pain, and after I tried
Ubuntu and it auto-detected my wifi card and sound card, that was the end of
any respect I had for Windows XP. And that's not even mentioning the number of
times I had to call the phone number and read my license key to the robot to
get my activation to work.

It wasn't until Vista came out before I could go back to Windows and not feel
like I was taking a step backwards in time.

~~~
badsectoracula
Well, people who like XP and older versions of Windows in general tend to like
the UI, not the kernel :-P. I know many who would love a version of Windows
2000, XP or 7 (depends on the taste) with the Windows 10 kernel.

It is a problem with Windows that you have to take all of it or nothing. At
least on Linux you can use whatever UI you want with the latest kernel.

------
scottlocklin
I'd pay for a copy of Macsyma. Not the open source Maxima version, which is
based on its development stage in 1982. The latter is all right, but Macsyma
was extremely good.

I can still buy a copy ... for WinXP... [http://www.symbolics-
dks.com/Macsyma-1.htm](http://www.symbolics-dks.com/Macsyma-1.htm)

For a while you couldn't even get that. Macsyma was one of those things where
proprietary software can end tragically.

Otherwise, I'd pay for a J compiler that could make fast tree structures, but
that never existed, and the market is probably 1.

~~~
mepian
You can also get the version of Macsyma that runs on Lisp machines, and it's
possible to run it without owning a Lisp machine.

------
JdeBP
Both of the ones that spring immediately to mind have reservations.

Interix, the second POSIX subsystem for Windows NT, already had all of the
things that the Windows Subsystem for Linux is gradually reinventing, and
Microsoft already owns it.

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17773681](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17773681)

Some of the softwares involved were in fact open-source. Unfortunately, the
SUA Community disappeared years ago, and there is no trace of the software
packages that it used to provide.

I haven't kept up to date with Blue Lion (ArcaOS) and eComstation; so it is
tricky to nominate OS/2.

------
iscrewyou
Oh geez. I can’t remember the name of the browser. It was portable/usb based.
I think it actually came with my usb back in 2008 or 2009?

Any page you went to, it would show you the media of the page on the right
hand side in a column and you could simply click and download it. It
essentially kept a running tally of media elements on the right side.

~~~
lostgame
The Web Inspector in Safari or Chrome can do this - it’s not a simple feature
as it takes a couple clicks to get to, but it works a treat!

------
brightball
Privateer. It’s an older game that I always thought could be a great MMO game
these days.

~~~
bloopernova
Which one, the bitmap-based-ships version, or the later 3D-based-ships with
the Clive Owen acted videos?

I know what you mean, though. Elite: Dangerous is good, gorgeous looking, and
utterly massive, but very light on RPG elements. EVE is/was too full of people
whose enjoyment of the game was predicated on spoiling yours. I haven't played
Star Citizen, really not sure if I ever will.

(Elite is something I will be going back to when I can afford a good VR
headset. That game screams out for VR, and by all accounts looks and feels
sublime with a headset.)

~~~
ehnto
Star Citizen is going to be interesting. I used to think the holy grail of
gaming was going to be in-depth RPG elements with crisp and visceral first
person experiences. Now it's finally happening in many games, the granularity
of gameplay mechanics and detail of real world representations coupled with
the need to manage RPG elements and economy and maintainence of your bank
account, character loadout and vehicles and all the minute details. It's all
just a bit much.

What I have found so far with SC Alpha, which has no RPG elements yet, is that
by the time I run around the stores to get my character geared up, requested
my ship from it's hangar, boarded and prepared it's loadout, got my
destination waypointed, begun and completed the travel to my mission... I am
out of time or no longer engaged in the game and I tap out.

------
tnsittpsif
BBOS 7 and 10.

I just want a BlackBerry Passport with modern internals and a business and
developer friendly OS.

I can't stop fantasizing about a BlackBerry Passport with Pure OS / Postmarket
OS and all the modern hardware specifications. That would make for an awesome
portable developer computer.

------
cyberferret
Back in the late 80s, early 90s, there was an integrated package called
"Smart" by SmartWare Inc, which was a competitor to Lotus Symphony (pile of
junk) and other 'integrated packages' (i.e. all in one word processing,
spreadsheets and database).

Smart was the first system I saw that had the concept of different levels,
i.e. you could set the system to be Basic, Standard or Advanced, which would
change the menus and complexity of the package accordingly. It was also the
first database system I saw that had the option of variable sized data records
(remember, this was in the days of dBase III/IV).

But the killer feature of Smart for me was the absolutely powerful
macro/scripting language, which let you customise the system to be almost
anything you wanted it to be. I wrote a lot of custom 'apps' with it, with the
crowning glory being a Constituent Management System for our local government
which let member of parliament record data against their constituents and
communicate with them (a bit like a CRM) plus plan walk lists when they went
out doorknocking and campaigning.

I was sad that Smart never made the marketshare that other lesser featured
competitors did, and eventually faded away. Would love to see such an
integrated system online these days.

------
dcooper8
The ICAD System. Common Lisp based knowledge based engineering platform,
including solid modeling kernel. Started on Symbolics machines and ended up on
Allegro Common Lisp. Purchased by Dassault Systemes (800 lb gorilla of the CAD
world) and shut down.

------
magnat
Windows 7

~~~
eponeponepon
Strikes me that you meant this as a joke - but whether you did or not, it is
not such a bad call.

~~~
ioman
Windows XP. I still miss XP.

------
davidgould
Battlezone. This was a great game on Windows 9x, but never got updated to work
on the NT based Windows. Of course, a Linux port would be even better.

~~~
VLM
My advice is the PS4VR "Battlezone" game is more of a re-imagining of "Arctic
Fox" than a faithful remake of battlezone.

Luckily I really enjoyed both games the first time around.

I find it hilarious that the main difference in experience over 30 years apart
is the resolution is a bit higher and the game is un-necessarily over
complicated.

Un-necessary overcomplication "because its possible" is a likely outcome of
every suggestion in this entire discussion, unfortunately. "Lets do a cool new
CP/M" turns into "Windows 11", unfortunately.

~~~
egypturnash
The PS4VR Battlezone is a reimagining of the original 1980 Atari arcade game
that the 1998 Activision game was based on.

------
covercash
Starseige:Tribes - the slightly broken physics in that first of the franchise
really made for a fast paced and fun game. Update the models and textures and
it could be a great modern day esports game to play and spectate.

------
justaaron
Orion Platinum (a virtual synthesis studio app Richard Hoffman designed and
released as Synapse Audio, who only make VST plugins these days.)

Cool Edit Pro (win-only audio editor with some interesting effects and
processes.)

~~~
dep_b
I know a lot of people that used Cool Edit Pro until it just fell apart on
later version of Windows. I loved it too. It...just worked? But it's still
being developed by Adobe under the name of Audition.

------
iscrewyou
Truecrypt.

But even if it comes back now, I would have a hard time trusting it.

~~~
krylon
There is a fork, VeraCrypt -
[https://www.veracrypt.fr/en/Home.html](https://www.veracrypt.fr/en/Home.html)

------
jccalhoun
Startup monitor is a program that I still install on every windows computer I
own and it mostly still works but it hasn't been updated in years and years.
[https://web.archive.org/web/20131113154828/http://www.mlin.n...](https://web.archive.org/web/20131113154828/http://www.mlin.net:80/StartupMonitor.shtml)
Basically, when you install a program that tries to have something run at
startup it Startup Monitor pops up a window saying "this program wants to run
at startup. Do you want to allow it?" Startup Monitor has no settings or icon
or anything. It just works. Unfortunately, because it is so old, I worry that
each update to windows will break it. Additionally, because it is so old, it
doesn't catch everything that tries to set itself to run at startup so I have
to run Autoruns from time to time to turn shit off.

------
coredog64
Irix. I often have this fantasy that if I were to hit one of those monster
PowerBall jackpots I’d see about buying the IP behind Irix to open source it.

For a while there was a guy who was replacing the CPU on r5k O2 workstations.
These days, pretty much everyone has a super fast MIPS cpu in their
router/WAP. I’d love to see 4dwm running on that level of CPU.

------
anon1q2w
Google reader

~~~
SamWhited
I've been using [https://www.inoreader.com](https://www.inoreader.com) and am
pretty happy with it as an alternative. It has a lot of the same keyboard
shortcuts, which is really all I want.

~~~
iscrewyou
I miss google reader because it was simply lists and lists of news. Not these
new readers that love to extract an image from the article and use it to cover
quarter of the screen(exaggerating here). Then 4 more articles on the next
page. Then so on. Google reader was perfect for skimming through 100 pieces of
news in a short amount of time and just click the articles you want to read in
a new tab and done.

Any new reader I’ve tried fails to understand this. They go for complexity and
glamour. They need a mode for just simple long list of headlines and not waste
any screen space.

Edit: context

~~~
detaro
I can't think of a modern reader which _doesn 't_ have a view like this. Just
a few examples: The Old Reader, Inoreader, Feedly all do.

~~~
iscrewyou
Inoreader looks like flipboard or Feedly.

I didn’t know about The Old Reader and I will give it a try.

~~~
detaro
> _Inoreader looks like flipboard_

How is this (random screenshot found via image search) not basically the same
as Google Reader?

[http://kingofgng.com/media/20150116_inoreader.png](http://kingofgng.com/media/20150116_inoreader.png)

And that's not even the densest display option.

~~~
iscrewyou
I looked at their App Store page and saw this:
[https://imgur.com/a/GJQ4hEu](https://imgur.com/a/GJQ4hEu)

~~~
detaro
Yeah, maybe not use one or two screenshots to decide if a product has or
hasn't a feature that's not shown in the screenshots.

------
bredren
Carmen Sandiego

~~~
afturner
I've always wanted to write an grown-ups disney musical about her. A few years
ago I even called up the IPO and said that if I had the money and the right
team, he'd consider it. I have neither. Alas.

~~~
bredren
That would be a smash hit.

------
vram22
Opera Mini browser 2.x for Android, so that I could use one of my older
Android phones, of a lower OS version. It is the Samsung Galaxy 551 and had a
hardware keyboard.

------
Kye
_So_ many old 32 bit VST instruments trapped on Windows. Most 64 bit DAWs will
bridge them, but they're never going to see a port with the new Linux SDK. You
can run Windows VSTs on Linux with various WINE-based solutions, but they take
a huge performance and stability hit.

------
BerislavLopac
Hypercard

~~~
soapdog
You might enjoy LiveCode from [https://livecode.com](https://livecode.com)
(GPL version at [https://livecode.org](https://livecode.org)), it is like
hypercard for the 21st century

~~~
BerislavLopac
I've been looking for something that could import existing Hypercard stacks
and make it possible to keep working on them, even in a different format.

------
apapli
MS Access. It was still easier to build quite powerful apps covering the UX,
controller and model than the commercial alternatives today. In many aspects
cloud application development is only just catching up with 20 year old
declarative frameworks of yesteryear.

~~~
will_pseudonym
MS Access is still around. Did it change for the worse from previous versions?

~~~
benjohnson
It's been stagnent or arguably losing features over the last ten years.

------
PuffinBlue
I'd resurrect Headway Theme for Wordpress. It was kinda open source but had
some proprietary bits in I think. And there is a fork somewhere apparently.
But the software is effectively dead and not getting updated any more.

But that theme builder was absolutely amazing. Literally just drag and drop
design for the entire theme, not just pages or whatever. Plus control over the
loop and just some awesome stuff that really let you build very very cool
sites really really quickly.

Elementor Pro now does some of what Headway was doing and I think Beaver
Builder is moving that way, but they aren't really anywhere close to as good.
Headway had graphical theme design absolutely nailed.

It's a big shame it went under and I wish it came back.

~~~
halfastack
Isn't Wordpress 5 kinda focusing on this? The drag-and-drop way of designing
your webpage, similar to something like Wix...

~~~
PuffinBlue
No and that's the difference Headway made. Wordpress 5 is concerned with the
output of the 'content' part of the page. It lets you do what you could with a
page builder, but more limited.

Headway is literally like creating the theme without coding anything. You
build it out of blocks still but you literally just drew boxes onto the page
where you wanted boxes to go (based on column system but CSS grid/Flexbox
would be better now) and it would output the theme files for you.

And I'm not talking the page, I'm talking the entire theme. So headers,
footers, custom pages, custom loops with custom queries, custom blocks mixed
in with content blocks on the same page template to allow users to output
content in the right places, same with custom fields etc.

It was incredibly powerful and let you effectively WYSIWYG the _function_ of
the site as well as then being able to switch over to the design module and
WYSIWYG the design too. Plus managing custom CSS was easy.

Later versions let you draw/build and design in the same step like Elementor
and Pagelines do, but those don't give you the same control over the
functionality of the theme like Headway did.

As I mentioned, you can get most of the same functions Headway provided
through something like Elementor Pro and combining it with something like the
Toolset plugins. But those rely on integrating and there are issues
(dynamically showing content generated by shortcodes currently broken for
instance) which make the whole process much more of a chore.

Headway really was great.

------
renaudg
Timeful. An amazing iPhone todo / calendaring app that was bought by Google
and shut down.

~~~
harryf
Also Sunrise Calendar. Bought by Microsoft and shutdown.

------
adambyrtek
Sunrise Calendar was so much better than anything else on mobile.
Unfortunately it got acquired by Microsoft and sunsetted (no pun intended).

------
ptbello
Interesting how the top comments are about Microsoft products discontinued
years ago. Nowadays google's the one shutting down products people love
(reader, inbox...). Looks like an inevitable phase in the unicorn lifecycle.

~~~
lucb1e
It is an awful lot of Microsoft stuff, now that you mention it. Kind of
surprising on hacker news, but then I guess the open source stuff can't ever
be called discontinued.

------
Finnucane
I’d still like to have FrameMaker for OS X and/or Linux.

~~~
dahart
Oh man I loved FrameMaker, I used it to write my thesis after spending a
couple weeks fretting over and trying various features in Word and LaTeX.
FrameMaker blew both of them away in terms of ease and ability to manage
styles and table of contents, bibliography, equation editing, everything that
normally makes writing a book hard.

I just went and read the history, and hadn’t realized that FrameMaker used to
be UNIX and Mac only. Windows support was the last platform to be added, and
after that UNIX and Mac support faded out.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_FrameMaker#History](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_FrameMaker#History)

------
wenc
* The Borland Turbo IDEs, but modified for modern languages.

* Paradox for DOS (with PAL = Paradox Application Language), but with SQL backends.

~~~
dleslie
Do you mean the TUI interfaces?

I love those, still. If you can get setedit or RHIDE working then you can
revisit the experience on Linux.

~~~
wenc
Yep, that's what I meant. Thanks for the RHIDE and setedit recommendations.

------
leetrout
IRIX

The desktop experience was fantastic for its time.

~~~
jvagner
I had an SGI Indy on my desk for a while... yes.

------
protogenes
PalmOS (the original one)

~~~
vram22
Ha ha, good one. I had a Palm V and a Palm Zire. Both were very good devices.
One of the best features was the instant-on and you're back in the app you
were last using, after power-on. No booting period of even a few seconds. And
of course, the Graffiti handwriting system (with the stylus) was great too. I
even tried using Pippy, a port of Python to the Palm. Would have been great
for writing small snippets of code on the go, at a restaurant, bus stop, train
station, beach, etc. Unfortunately it was buggy and crashed a lot.

~~~
foreigner
I still use Palm Graffiti as shorthand when playing Boggle.

~~~
vram22
TIL about Boggle. Seems like an interesting game, thanks. Must check it out.

For anyone else interested:

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

------
jslabovitz
MacDraw and Freehand.

I know there are modern vector/bezier-drawing alternatives, like OmniGraffle
and Sketch and Affinity Designer. But both MacDraw and Freehand balanced
functionality and simplicity and directness so well. In MacDraw, I could make
technical drawings really quickly. In Freehand, I could do everything I could
do in Illustrator, but with much better grid-snapping and typography. And I
loved its 'morphing' tool (it wasn't called that), where you could take two
objects (even type) and it would interpolate them and make these beautiful
shapes.

------
nicoburns
Adobe fireworks. There's still nothing that comes close to it's ergonomics and
power for working with both vector and bitmap graphics while also allowing you
to do layout reasonably effectively.

~~~
gibatronic
Same for me, it had many killer features: * Shared symbols * 9-Slice scaling
tool * GIF * Bitmap tools * Batch scripts

------
fuball63
Lots of old video games come to mind, especially the online ones that had
proprietary servers that were shut down (medal of Honor heroes 2, halo 3).

I was going to say BlitzPlus but that's open source already.

~~~
patrickk
If you're not aware, a modded version of Halo 3 was released by a mod team on
PC, although Microsoft is not happy about it:

[https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/04/21/halo-online-
retu...](https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/04/21/halo-online-returns-with-
a-bang-as-the-fan-run-eldewrito/)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1sxYvpNNlY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1sxYvpNNlY)

~~~
fuball63
Thanks for the links I will definitely check this out.

------
anonlawyer
Tweetie. Then again, with the way Twitter is today, I don't miss Tweetie as
much as I used to.

Sparrow.

Aperture.

Picasa.

------
cagey
Keyboard-driven DOS Outliner Software:

* Borland Sidekick Plus[1] (not to be confused with the earlier Sidekick) OUTLINER applet(?). I loved the features (and key-bindings) of this more than ...

* Grandview 2.0 by Symantec (before it became a purveyor of software I despise) [2]

The closest I have come to finding a replacement for the following is Outlook
email (which isn't saying much). Seemingly viable alternatives fail to meet my
needs most immediately due to ineffective key bindings.

A hardy soul did yeoman work using vDos to allow Grandview 2.0 to be run on
any recent Windows version with more than expected amounts of integration with
Windows (clipboard)[3]. I used this for a few months at work but the relative
inability to share my work led to me discontinuing it's use, though I never
found a satisfactory replacement; I use plain text files today.

[1]
[http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/borland/sidekick/Sidekick_Plus_...](http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/borland/sidekick/Sidekick_Plus_Owners_Handbook_1988.pdf)
[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GrandView_(software)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GrandView_\(software\))
[3]
[https://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/6291](https://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/6291)

------
joe-collins
Google Inbox. It's really a task management/reminder tool that just happens to
pull in and bundle your new emails, too. Not sure where I'm going when the axe
falls next year.

------
bitcrusher
BeOS... but modernized. Haiku doesn’t hit the right notes and BeOS was so
freaking amazing for its time.

~~~
artificial
Completely agree, I'd dive in with both feet. The lame hardware support still
bothers me. I remember being amazed at being able to restart servers, like say
if the sound died. I've been watching Haiku and the progress...

------
ryancnelson
I really miss the simple, powerful feature set of Cricket Graph, Mac data
graphing software from ~1988

~~~
jeffreportmill1
I am trying to revive a free version of this for the web, but I only vaguely
remember it - I just remember I really liked it. Give it a try and send me
suggestions at jeff@reportmill.com if you remember more:

[http://reportmill.com/rmc/](http://reportmill.com/rmc/)

I've only been working on it for a month, and I particularly don't have the
data entry working well yet, but it's coming along.

------
coleifer
Old-school visual basic, but maybe powered by python or another modern
scripting language.

~~~
api
Agreed. Best visual GUI editor ever made. A modern reboot of similar concepts
with modern look and feel would be something I would pay for, especially if
you could target both desktop and mobile.

~~~
hsitz
The VB GUI editor and IDE generally were a fair ways behind that of Delphi,
back in the 90's. With current Lazarus/FreePascal open source Delphi clone you
can get a feel for it

------
yourapostasy
Newton's soup data structure implementation [1], inside a phone OS, with
Pimlico's DateBk from PalmOS [2] taking advantage of that soup data structure.
DateBk isn't abandoned yet even though PalmOS _effectively_ is. That is,
DateBk is still actively sold for an essentially abandoned OS, which gives you
an idea of how incredibly effective that app is.

DateBk has a linking feature that would be ideal for soups interoperating with
other applications on the device, without explicit coordination between
different app developers. DateBk is the result of a responsive developer
listening to lots of users [3], and the kind of PIM that I've yet to find in
modern phone OS's. The massive 130-page user manual [4] covers a UI that is
relatively discoverable for new users and highly customizable for expert
users. Some teams have tried to reproduce the functionality on iOS, but no one
has yet to come even faintly close to the smooth workflow I experienced on it.
It seems PIMs in general are still stuck in some innovation black hole; there
is still so much left unimplemented.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soup_(Apple)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soup_\(Apple\))

[2]
[http://www.pimlicosoftware.com/datebk6.htm](http://www.pimlicosoftware.com/datebk6.htm)

[3]
[http://www.pimlicosoftware.com/datebk6details.htm](http://www.pimlicosoftware.com/datebk6details.htm)

[4]
[https://www.pimlicosoftware.com/datebk6-v61a-manual.zip](https://www.pimlicosoftware.com/datebk6-v61a-manual.zip)

------
Doctor_Fegg
MacWrite Pro. Intuitive UI, just-right feature set. Best word-processor I ever
used, but sadly Word had the market sewn up before its (much delayed) release.

------
wtmt
Games on iOS: Flight Control, Flight Control HD and Flight Control Rocket, all
by Firemint (later Firemonkeys after being bought by EA). I have an old device
on which I can play a couple of these until those devices die.

Features to add: I wouldn’t really add anything more than what they had.

Pay for resurrection: Yes, I’d certainly be willing to pay for their
resurrection. But EA is a lousy company for games. So I have no hopes of this
happening.

~~~
bdz
Flight Control was ported to Mac and PC. Yeah I know touch controls are
different but it still works great

[https://store.steampowered.com/app/62000/Flight_Control_HD/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/62000/Flight_Control_HD/)

------
swlkr
1password before the cloud only version

~~~
LeoPanthera
You can still buy it. The cloud version is optional.

~~~
newscracker
It’s almost impossible to buy the standalone (non-subscription) version. When
I (re)checked a few months ago, there (still) was no link or support article
about how to buy this. AgileBits follows a dark pattern of keeping this
hidden. If it wants money from people who like the standalone version, it
shouldn’t make it next to impossible to figure out how and where to buy it or
upgrade to it.

As far as I’m concerned, this version might not as well exist.

------
submeta
Netmanage's EccoPro. That was/is a Personal Information Manager (PIM),
outliner, database that was abandoned in 1997 after MS gave Outlook for free.
- I haven't seen a better information manager ever since (outliners like
OmniOutline or task managers like OmniFocus are good, but don't even come
close to EccoPro)

~~~
gmfawcett
You beat me to it. :) EccoPro was an incredible tool. I loved it the way that
people slightly older than me loved Lotus Agenda, another legendary PIM.

These days I get by just fine with Emacs + org-mode, but Ecco had some amazing
usability features that I've never seen matched in another product.

~~~
submeta
Isn't it crazy? Twenty years later there ain't no product that has all the
capabilities of EccoPro. I used Emacs/Org several years myself. And several
other tools (Toodledo, Todoist,...)

------
steveeq1
Hypercard. A much, much better implementation of programmable hypertext than
our current browser/javascript paradigm.

------
macintux
Microsoft Musical Instruments was a delightful application that used to grace
my local Children’s Museum. It allowed you to browse and listen to musical
samples of instruments from around the world.

I believe it was eventually absorbed by Encarta.

It shouldn’t be difficult to create similar software, but assembling quality
samples would take a fair bit of work.

------
alexis_fr
After 5 years with no upgrade, software should become public domain.

~~~
gus_massa
Latest TeX (not LaTeX) update was in January 2014, and the change was in a
quite obscure tiny corner case of an advanced feature.
[https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb35-1/tb109knut.pdf](https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb35-1/tb109knut.pdf)

> _The new version of TEX diﬀers from the old only with respect to the “null
> control sequence” \csname\endcsname, which has been a legal construct since
> version 0.8 (November 1982) although almost nobody uses it._

Why must all software be constantly updated and bloated with new buggy
features including the capacity to send emails?

Also, what about books series like Harry Potter?

~~~
AsyncAwait
> Why must all software be constantly updated and bloated with new buggy
> features including the capacity to send emails?

I think the point was not that updates are required, but that it is unlikely
that they're a major source of revenue for the authors if they haven't been
touched for so long.

------
raarts
Wordperfect. The speed of working with it was unparalleled, even compared to
current Word. The 'reveal codes' or 'underwater' key was the superfast option
to fix layout problems (who hasn't wrestled with tabs and indenting in Word),
and it even worked on very large documents. Would pay for it.

------
bradnickel
ClarisWorks/AppleWorks - Thought the integration of all office suite
functionality in one pallet was brilliant.

------
BugsJustFindMe
Microsoft Excel for Mac. I know, I know, but I'm only half joking. I wish
Microsoft had even a tenth of the bug reporting options for their proprietary
offerings that they have for VSCode. Without being able to get any kind of
engineer eyes on serious performance regressions it may as well be abandoned.

------
cylinder714
Windows 2000. That was the last version of Windows I used seriously, and it
ran Firefox, Dreamweaver, Photoshop and Pine (email) just fine with just 512
megabytes of RAM. Upgrading the machine to one gigabyte of memory made no
difference I can remember. When XP was released, I felt no need to upgrade.

------
ern0
Cakewalk 3.0 - it's the only MIDI sequencer which represents MIDI tracks as a
grid, not as bars.

I can draw it! Now, all sequencers (rather: DAWs) paints MIDI this way:

ch [======] [===========]

\- bar may contain empty regions, so the bar does not really represents notes

\- if you want to copy only one beat, you have to split the beginning of the
beat, split at the end of the beat, copy the beat, and paste as many time as
you want, then you probably want to join them together

\- it even worse, when you want to copy more than one track (channel)

Cakewalk 3.x style grid:

OOOOO...OOOOOOOOOOO...

You can select notes on beat boundaries, even more tracks. Then paste it to
anywhere: there are merge-paste (pasted notes will be added to existing ones)
and replace-paste (affected beats will contain only pasted notes).

Anyway, handling upbeats in this grid-style editing is not comfortable, but
still better than using bars.

------
donarb
DabbleDB, this YouTube video gives a great introduction to this online
spreadsheet-like database. Sadly they were bought out by Twitter, never to be
seen again.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCVj5RZOqwY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCVj5RZOqwY)

~~~
jpswade
Sounds a bit like airtable

------
dawnerd
Zune. Yeah technically hardware too but it was an amazing music player with
some good software too.

------
snarfy
Numega Soft-ICE.

~~~
Fnoord
IDA Pro

~~~
selimthegrim
It’s not still a thing?

~~~
lytedev
I think he was recommending it as a modern alternative?

~~~
Fnoord
Both kinda.

Yes, it is still a thing.

It is amazing software yet also amazingly expensive [1] for those trying to
get into the field, or not from a first world country.

[1] [https://www.hex-rays.com/cgi-bin/quote.cgi](https://www.hex-rays.com/cgi-
bin/quote.cgi)

------
bitwize
Framework. Technically still maintained, but a shadow of its former self. In a
word, it was more or less Emacs for the office -- built around a unifying
metaphor of "frames" rather than buffers. A frame could contain anything:
text, graphics, numbers, even other frames, and on this basis was built a word
processor, spreadsheet, database, graphing facility, and a powerful outliner
that was as close as an 80s PC got to org-mode. Tying it all together was a
sort of mouseless GUI that let you open and manipulate documents visually, and
a scripting language that was essentially Lisp disguised to resemble Lotus
1-2-3 macros for familiarity.

------
brassattax
Courier (formerly Calypso) Email, a Windows email client.

I loved the way it handled multiple accounts, filtering, and auto-replies.
Worked with POP3 and IMAP and had features that other clients lack such as
blind send, configurable notifications per account, and export (which put any
emails selected into a single text file, and dumped attachments to the file
system and foldered them according to email ID.) Also, all account settings,
filters, etc. and emails were stored in a ".box" file, so you could move or
copy that single file from system to system.

It lacked SSL/TLS which was the final death knell for it I think, as most
email providers started requiring it.

------
mistrial9
Mac OS 9 Finder

~~~
twic
I'd say System 7, maybe 7.5, but i think it went downhill consistently after
that!

------
elbybasolis
Fallout 1&2\. These games are classic, and without GOG, basically relics of
the past. The isometric turn-based gameplay would be perfect for a mobile
port. It would be great to add new assets and content. It would be quite fun
to design sprites in the 90’s style the games have. I’d be happy if Bethesda
made a mobile edition, assuming they had the publishing rights to it. I’d pay
whatever the going rate for a good mobile game is now adays (without micro
transaction). The trademark of Fallout is probably too valuable for anyone to
be able to get away with making a ground-up port to a modern system in an open
source fashion.

------
vladivstok
No one's gonna mention Bloackberry 10? In my opinion it was years ahead of the
competition with its gesture based UI and Hub. Also, it felt like something
that was truly different from the ios and android phones everywhere.

------
api
Old Windows 3.1 era MathCAD before the company ruined the UI. Extremely easy
to use and powerful symbolic math engine and helped me learn calculus. My dad
used to model a lot of analog signal processing and acoustic stuff.

------
bobak
I've used a few later versions of rule-based tools like
[https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/knowledge-
engineerin...](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/knowledge-engineering-
review/article/comparative-evaluation-of-three-expert-system-development-
tools-kee-knowledge-craft-art/008CC6CCEE4436E18688B26647753423) but never got
to try the original Lisp ones. Merging ART or one of the other ones in Common-
Lisp with some semantic-web tools like allegrograph would be interesting.

------
baumgarn
Macromedia/Adobe Director (1985-2013) was a really cool authoring environment.
You could drag and drop animations and interactive experience together really
fast. It was an animation software first but had its own scripting language.
Even kids could create complex experiences and games with it. Today I need to
code everything first before I am able to see anything. I miss this easy
direct wysiwyg way of doing things. I think the development processes for the
modern web platform are very limiting creatively. The end of Flash is also a
huge loss in that regard.

~~~
ohiovr
I miss that for the times of easy money authoring cdrom titles with it. Lingo
was an incredibly easy language to learn and satisfying to use. It just had no
place in the web era. Adobe just didn’t know what to do with it besides
shockwave.

------
Bayart
Opera's Presto engine. I quite miss it.

------
danilocesar
MeeGo. While most part of it was opensource, the UI/UX wasn't. And it was
GREAT. I turn on my N950 from time to time to see if still works and I get a
bit sad that I'm not able to use it anymore.

------
zoom6628
VMCS Manufacturing solution from NCR. It was an entirely que based solution
that ran on VRX (mainframe environment). Blisteringly fast. Why? Intelligent
use of queues, single programs that read a que, did something, put results on
a que, is how bank software was done, retail software, and many more. Its a
simple model that predates OOP but actually entirely consistent with OOP
principles. I had privilege to see this in 80s with NCRs manufacturing and
retail software, at NCR (my first job) and at there biggest user in NZ
(Farmers Trading Co.).

------
pharaohgeek
I'd have to say OS/2\. I remember vividly asking -- BEGGING! -- my parents to
buy me a copy of OS/2 2.1 for Windows for Christmas when I was a teenager. (It
was OS/2 that used a copy of Windows you provided, rather than its own
internal Windows runtime) I thoroughly enjoyed running it on my PC, much more
than I did Windows itself. A modern version of OS/2 -- one that focused
heavily on user experience, security, and integrating cloud-based services --
could really give Windows, macOS, et al a run for their money.

------
jmartrican
TacWarrior. It's a strategy turn based tactical RPG for IOS. Like Fire Emblem.
I think it's my favorite game. My kid deleted it from my old iPad 1 and now
it's not available for download.

Would love to port this to Steam.

[http://tacwarrior.wikia.com/wiki/Tacwarrior_Wiki](http://tacwarrior.wikia.com/wiki/Tacwarrior_Wiki)

It was so well balanced and just hard enough to keep you hooked. Also, so much
variety in ways you can win, by having different warrior types. Also, various
weapons. IMHO a masterpiece.

------
mevile
Textmate. It was such a great native OS X editor, I don't know what happened
to it, but although VS Code is very nice and what I use now, it's not a native
mac editor and I miss that.

~~~
gregoriol
I think TextMate is a little bit alive: it had 3 releases in 2018 ("rc" for
v2.0), but it indeed is not as amazing as it was and could be.

------
WillPostForFood
Norton Commander - I use Mac and PC daily, and managing files has never been
as fast and powerful as it was with NC. Windows Explorer and Finder are pretty
weak file managers.

~~~
Sillzen
You may be interested in fman[0]. Dual pane file manager, actively developed.
I don't believe it has feature parity with Norton Commander, but it's a good
modern alternative. The developer is also active on HN.

[0] [https://fman.io](https://fman.io)

------
wprapido
\- FreeHand \- QuarkXPress \- Delphi \- HyperCard \- Clipper \- Aperture \-
DeLuxe Paint \- WordPerfect \- Access \- Picasa \- Google Talk \- Eudora

Mind you, not all of them are officially abandoned.

------
jagger27
Eudora

~~~
wanderr
Yeah! It's not closed source anymore (finally!) but as far as I can tell
nobody is working on it.

------
starik36
Professional Write for DOS
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfs:Write](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfs:Write))
was such an efficient little world processing program. It also had an internal
contacts application so that you could mail merge your documents.

Another one is QBasic/QuickBasic. I have yet to see a modern programming
language that lets you get started that easy.

------
JacobiX
Softimage|XSI : 3D animation, modeling and rendering. It was used in the film,
video game and advertising industries as a tool to generate digital
characters, environments and visual effects. It has a unique user interface
with some pretty awesome features. Autodesk acquired the Softimage brand and
3D animation assets from Avid for approximately $35 million just to kill it
some years later. Edit: add info about Autodesk

------
fb03
SkiFree, which unfortunately and tragically, is not free.

~~~
jasonjayr
[https://ski.ihoc.net/](https://ski.ihoc.net/)

That's the "most official" page for the product. No source, but updated for
32bit/64bit environments.

------
prepend
Front page and iWeb (or even bbedit/homepage).

Trying to teach kids simple html site design with core principles (you own the
html, you put it where you want) is harder because you have to plunge them
into code and file transfer and what not.

Earlier kid had a much easier way with iWeb basically making word docs and
pushing them out to any web server.

The web based kits are great if you want a web site, but terrible for learning
how to build web sites.

~~~
jonahss
Have you looked at neocities.org

------
nuxi
Electropaint, the SGI IRIX screensaver. And yes, I'd pay for it, _iff_ it were
a complete experience - not just the dancing squares/triangles, it would have
to include the script recorder/player and the configuration panels built into
the original.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StA81MNuqB8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StA81MNuqB8)

------
drivingmenuts
Microsoft Word 5 Mac edition. Just redevelop it, no additions or changes,
except a conforming UI.

That was the last good word processor before it all went to hell.

~~~
copperx
As noted in another comment, AbiWord is pretty close.

------
gooseyard
Microsoft Comic Chat

------
agentultra
Workbench or the Turbo * IDEs.

~~~
linuxlizard
Turbo Pascal was my first. You never forget your first. Turbo C then Turbo C++
were also amazing. My fingers still remember the copy/paste ^KB ^KC.

~~~
linker3000
Oh boy - I've literally just come out of Turbo Pascal 3.0A on a Z80 retro
rebuild - I've hacked together some code to run a 7-segment clock/timer board
I made for my Commodore 64 in about 1984.

[https://twitter.com/linker3000/status/1071459121210290178](https://twitter.com/linker3000/status/1071459121210290178)

------
wirrbel
I heard a lot of good things about FrameMaker for text processing.

For development environments I am deeply sorry that smalltalks are not a thing
anymore. I know we have pharo, and that's great, but nothing with traction
like let's say Lua or ruby or scala.

Next thing I miss would be Dylan as it was planned for the Newton. We have
opendylan now, but I would like to have it at the heart of a OS/platform.

~~~
MrMorden
FrameMaker is still a thing, but it's very targeted now (and no longer cross-
platform).

------
dvtrn
The original Crimson Skies games, great story, great voice acting, really fun
dogfights, and stunning graphics for the time.

------
zadkielmodeler
Wakan - an free Chinese and Japanese editor and dictionary. I strongly
preferred it over the windows IME. And honestly I don't know why it was shut
down either. It was freeware to begin with. They should have just open-sourced
it. I would pay $20 maybe even $30 as a one time payment for software that
does what it does.

------
unoti
Lotus Notes. Easy to put together multi user databases with multiple views,
security levels, authorization, and signatures.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
Notes is great as long as you don't use it for email.

------
2bitencryption
The Zune desktop software music player was, hands down, the best desktop music
playing experience I've ever had.

------
anotheryou
* usable, flash-like animation editing tools for the web. (could work great with the material design guidelines)

~~~
ohiovr
This might be what we’re after

[https://proandroiddev.com/how-to-flare-a-flutter-app-
part-1-...](https://proandroiddev.com/how-to-flare-a-flutter-app-
part-1-create-animation-3829fb2ed72a)

------
charlesism
"SoundMaker" by Alberto Ricci

[http://www.riccisoft.com/soundeffects](http://www.riccisoft.com/soundeffects)

Every audio editor I've used since then makes the user click too many times
when dealing with multiple tracks.

As far as being full featured, it wasn't. I still miss it.

------
vax425
Yahoo Pipes

------
zadkielmodeler
City of Heroes' an MMORPG by NCsoft. It was really good. Unfortunately, they
made it a fremium game, whcih then tanked and then closed the whole thing down
a few months later.

I wish they had open sourced it and gave it to the community instead of just
shutting down and doing nothing with it.

------
itsyogesh
With all the comments regarding the resurrection of Windows Phone, I really
want to know the developer experience that came with developing WP apps. I
haven't had a chance to work on it, but was there any way something like
flutter or react-native could have saved the ecosystem.

------
rcarmo
The Psion S3a application suite. I've yet to come across anything as simple,
useful and unfettered.

~~~
LeoPanthera
Three of them, Agenda, Data, and Notes, are currently being ported to Android:

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Planet+Compu...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Planet+Computers+Limited)

They're designed for use with the Planet Gemini and/or Cosmo, the spiritual
successors to the Psion, but I _think_ they work with any Android device.

------
coreyp_1
If I could buy a good Windows phone today (e.g., current technology level, not
used), I would immediately. I refuse to own an Apple product, and I don't like
Google knowing so much about me (I've had multiple bad experiences with
romhacking, so that's a no-go).

~~~
mirceal
how is Microsoft different? just curios.

also, why not Apple?

------
snaky
OneNote (PC version).

[https://onenote.uservoice.com/forums/327186-onenote-for-
wind...](https://onenote.uservoice.com/forums/327186-onenote-for-
windows/suggestions/32737648-include-onenote-for-desktop-in-office-2019)

~~~
marcoperaza
I wonder if this is still the case following
[https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/09/microsoft-
suspends-d...](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/09/microsoft-suspends-
development-of-touch-friendly-office-apps-for-windows/)

------
mitchbob
I loved Dave Winer's MORE outlining app for the Macintosh. It was such an
amazing tool for organizing ideas and plans.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MORE_(application)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MORE_\(application\))

------
peach
Interestingly enough I haven't read anyone suggesting this: Macromedia
Freehand. Before Adobe acquired Macromedia and killed it in favour of
Illustrator, it was probably the best vector drawing program you could get at
the time.

I'd love to resurrect it and make it open source.

------
wanda
FreeHand

~~~
gardaani
Many old FreeHand users have moved to Affinity Designer. You should try it, it
is available for Mac and Windows.

~~~
latexr
I’m one such user. I’ve been using Affinity Designer since the first public
betas, and I curse it every time I use it. If you do any kind of precision
work, it’s an abomination.

It can’t expand strokes correctly; it’s imprecise as hell when using boolean
operations; it can’t do vector patterns (nor are they planned); it can’t even
correctly join two specific points from different shapes!

I stick with it for the price point and because I ethically dislike Adobe, but
the software as is is utter junk if you care about precision in your work.

------
Zelphyr
I’m not a Windows user anymore but for nostalgia sake I’d love Macromedia (née
Allaire) HomeSite.

------
armitron
* Symbolics Genera. Nothing like it today. I hope it happens some day since it's not exactly dead and abandoned.

* NuMega SoftICE. Those that used it know.

* Nextstep as it was before Rhapsody. Revolutionary.

* Lost Treasures of Infocom for IOS. Abandoned since Activision won't recompile it for 64bit.

------
shurcooL
Re-Volt Classic on iOS. It was a very high quality and authentic port of one
of my all time favorite childhood games.

They released it in 2012 as a 32-bit iOS app. By the time 64-bit became a
requirement for iOS apps, the publisher abandoned it and it never got updated.
:(

------
sli
Do games count? I would love to bring an old OS 9 game called Barrack to
modern machines.

------
sgoel
3D Movie Maker by Microsoft:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_Movie_Maker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_Movie_Maker)

I had a blast making cartoons as a kid with this program.

~~~
mr-ron
As with all things like this there is still a vibrant community at 3dmm.com

------
suyash
Apple's Quartz Composer: This is the best tool to do different types of
creative coding projects such as VJ'ing, IOT Prototyping, Music MIDI
Controller etc. It's sad that development stopped on this years ago.

------
fwguru
Edit.com - Windows command promt text editor I also wish linux had such an
editor.

~~~
badsectoracula
It isn't exactly the same, but mcedit tends to be very dos editor-like (and as
a sidenote, i always find it weird that Linux/Unix console programs look so
primitive compared to similar programs for DOS).

~~~
fwguru
Thanks I'll check it out, when I get back to my Linux machine. I agree with
you that linux file editors look very primitive compared to what was available
on DOS.

------
epc
MS Word 3.2 for DOS. Only word processor which could keep up with my typing
speed.

------
sbhn
Microsoft Encarta

------
joao
Macromedia/Adobe Director

~~~
ohiovr
Adobe gobbled up macromedia and went on a product killing spree.

------
rsync
mondomouse from
[http://www.atomicbird.com/mondomouse](http://www.atomicbird.com/mondomouse)
...

It was a simple, but working and well-done "focus follows mouse" add-on for
OSX. It is not maintained and will not work on modern versions of OSX,
unfortunately.

AFAICT, there is _no option_ for focus follows mouse on recent OSX, such as El
Cap, which I am running.

It appears, however, that High Sierra has an interesting option hidden deep in
the accessibility preferences pane that achieves FFM, but I am not running
High Sierra anywhere and cannot test that out ...

------
nlstitch
Mediachance Multi Media Builder 4.9.7 : Its an IDE meant to build dvd menus
and simple programs in, but I actualy made my first (distributed) software
with it. (Was a quiz program for school, served on a floppy)

------
geff82
I personally would really like the game LHX back again, with slightly upgraded
graphics, but without the bloat most modern games come with. Also, Stunts 4D
driving was really a time killer for me and my friends.

~~~
drivingmenuts
Jet Moto. All it needed was a track editor.

------
zzo38computer
There are many abandoned software projects that I would be interested in,
although I would like such abandoned proprietary software to be released as
FOSS in order that they can be developed/enhanced more.

~~~
zzo38computer
One such thing would be the "Pharaoh's Tomb" and "Arctic Adventure" games from
Apogee. If there would be a FOSS version of that, even with the original
graphics and keyboard controls and so on, but possibly also with added stuff
such as time limits and new pieces, that can be good.

------
benologist
Adobe Fireworks

Jagged Alliance 2

Settlers 2

Heroes of Might and Magic

~~~
Fnoord
Game-wise, Warcraft 2, 3 and Dune 2 remakes. Tho I also loved C&C. I guess
nostalgia or not yet feeling burned out by the RTS genre (which nowadays is
irrelevant due to MOBA).

(Oh, and yeah, Settlers 2 was amazing.)

~~~
benologist
WC3, C&C and RA are getting 4K-resolution remakes soon -

[https://www.inquisitr.com/5163752/ea-to-remake-the-first-
two...](https://www.inquisitr.com/5163752/ea-to-remake-the-first-two-command-
conquer-games-in-4k/)

[https://www.denofgeek.com/us/games/warcraft/277402/warcraft-...](https://www.denofgeek.com/us/games/warcraft/277402/warcraft-3-reforged-
remaster-2019)

------
rurban
Singularity

The only OS and language (Sing#) for the future. Everything else is severely
limited and broken, and not scalable. Pony took over some features,
Distributed Pascal was also nice, but Singularity had so much more.

------
mv4
MS Money.

------
travisgriggs
Interleaf word processor. It was like LaTex met a (zany) UI written in Lisp.
Only word processor I’ve ever used that had a great balance between WYSIWYG
and all the structure of the document.

------
anotherevan
Xmarks

Being able to pretty seamlessly synchronise bookmarks across browsers was
awesome.

Its shuttering was the final impetus that made me move away from the decaying
mess that is Lastpass. (Hello BitWarden!)

~~~
hrez
[https://www.xbrowsersync.org/](https://www.xbrowsersync.org/)

Optionally you can host your own server.

~~~
anotherevan
Yes, I am using xbrowsersync now. It is the next best option, however there's
a lot of rough edges to it compared to Xmarks.

Thanks.

------
anonu
Surprised to see so much longing for Microsoft products on here!

~~~
ohiovr
Window 2000 4ever!

------
elygre
Lotus improv:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Improv](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Improv)

------
valeg
Final Cut Express and Color

IBM Lotus Symphony (pleasant and convenient GUI)

and ofc Google Reader

~~~
freehunter
I never used Google Reader, but iGoogle was my homepage for more than 5 years
before it was ripped from me. I still miss it.

------
eb0la
Ldap Browser/Editor by Jarek Gawor.

Small tool with all you needed to manage your LDAP servers.

Much better than the bloated GUI from Sun, Netscape, Redhat...

Now it is almost unusable on a high DPI screen :-(

------
kazinator
Apollo Domain/OS.

~~~
trimbo
How come?

------
vishalsharma
I missed LiberKey , there has been no active development going on it.

Its a kind of portable application provider that gives all sorts of small/big
apps to your catalog.

------
lostmsu
I actually did it for GridMove -> Stack.

[https://losttech.software/Stack.html](https://losttech.software/Stack.html)

~~~
lostmsu
Casing error:
[https://losttech.software/stack.html](https://losttech.software/stack.html)

------
tomp
Liero. Fun game. Apparently the source code has been lost.

~~~
rincebrain
Anything you particularly don't like about the open source remakes/successors
people have made?

------
projektfu
Word 5.1 for the Mac but multiplatform. AbiWord is close.

------
quickben
Macromedia Fireworks.

~~~
misterkolaz
Fireworks is still in my heart. I use a very old version from time to time,
but i really wishes adobe released it as open source instead of killing it

------
apapli
In terms of games - Mechwarrior and Spyhunter are still my favourites. I’d
love them to be resurrected. (I can’t wait for MW to come out next year)

------
lkdjjdjjjdskjd
WeeWar - I thought it was very well done and the user generated maps were a
great feature. Still can't believe they simply switched it off.

------
rzr
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canoma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canoma)

------
oblib
Avid Videoshop. I never understood why they quit making it, but it had the
easiest to use interface of any video editing app I've used.

------
the1andonldave
NewtonOS

OneNote is ok. Windows is a terrible touch OS.

android and iOS are ok touch OSs but terrible with a stylus.

Newton was the only OS that was handwriting and touch from the ground up

------
zephyrfalcon
The Miranda programming language:
[http://miranda.org.uk/](http://miranda.org.uk/)

------
Myrmornis
80 or 160 Gb 5th/6th gen iPod w/ Rockbox!

------
jroid
Google Desktop. I haven't yet seen a good, cross-platform alternative to
search within documents on my PC, with a browser interface.

------
stblack
Tornado Notes. A TSR program that I once used to organize my life. It got me
through university and the first few years of my career.

------
dsirola
I'm surprised that nobody mentioned Winamp yet. It is amazing that it was
possible to build such a customizable GUI back then...

~~~
insign
it was mentioned.

------
tptacek
Knox, the macOS menu-bar encrypted DMG manager.

~~~
markonen
Hey–the original maker of Knox here. Thank you for this trip down the memory
lane. We launched the app in 2005 and sold it to AgileBits (makers of
1Password) in 2010. I just had a look and people are still discussing Knox on
the AgileBits forums today!

Here's what has changed since 2010:

– Apple introduced FileVault 2 in late 2010, making full disk encryption of
both internal and external drives simple and straightforward. Knox was always
about convenience over the built-in tools in the OS, and for the simplest
cases, the OS finally caught up.

\- It was a time when a small menu bar utility could go for $34.99…

Before the AgileBits sale we were exploring some cool new stuff for Knox:

\- App Vaults: swizzle some NSFileManager calls and have apps such as Mail or
Safari direct all their reads and writes (including for preferences and
Keychain access) to a vault. Multiple independent, encrypted, secret app
instances.

\- Online Backups: Knox Vaults were already encrypted and block-based, so many
of the hard parts of backups were already taken care of. Backing up
incremental Vault changes to an online block storage seemed straightforward
enough, but in 2010 we just couldn't make the math work. (for example, in
early 2010, S3 was $0.15/GB/mo and AWS still charged for inbound data transfer
at $0.10/GB.)

In the end, it just wasn't sustainable. 2010 saw the launch of iPad and iPhone
4, and demand for Cocoa devs was becoming red hot. The opportunity cost of
working on a niche Mac product like Knox was just too high.

~~~
tptacek
Full disk encryption and individual encrypted DMGs ("vaults") have radically
different use cases! Most encrypted DMGs aren't mounted (or "unlocked"), most
of the time. They address a threat model where an attacker might have file
read access to your running machine.

At Matasano, standard operating procedure was just to have the whole Mail.app
library directory inside a Knox vault, "locking" mail cryptographically until
you explicitly unlocked it.

Apple's existing tooling for encrypted DMGs is very cumbersome. I script
around it, and that's OK, but Knox had a much better UX.

------
markdown
Adobe Fireworks. The perfect marriage of vector and bitmap design tool.
There's never been a better tool for web design.

------
faizshah
Nitrous.io they had the best online IDE I have used.

They were going to put a standalone version up as open source but never did.

------
IloveHN84
Windows Phone above all, then Symbian and some nice closed source games such
as Fallout, to port them on Linux

------
eitland
Google Desktop Search and the plugins.

~~~
pcunite
Give FileSearchEX a look

------
stevenicr
MusicMatch Jukebox 7.5

Awesome before yahoo bought it and added their drm like stuff to it and it
disappeared later.

------
MildlySerious
I would love something like Apophysis 7x that is fully capable of utilizing
modern hardware setups

------
CosmicShadow
MSN Messenger

~~~
jagger27
With Messenger Plus

------
tezza
* SmartDraw 6.5

nothing quicker for prototyping GUIs

* Adobe Illustrator without Creative Cloud subscription.

Occasional use just too expensive now

------
sm01
I would love to use KBMS and IQ again, from AICorp. I also loved developing
software for OS2.

------
projectramo
Google docs but private. (So back when it was private which I assume it was at
some point)

~~~
csdreamer7
Look at Libreoffice Online

[https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-
online/](https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/)

~~~
projectramo
It’s funny that right after my post I was experimenting with Microsoft one
drive with libre office locally. Thanks for the tip.

This looks selfhosted. I need to convince a like minded friend to host it for
a split of the fee.

Edit: found this [https://civihosting.com/collabora-online-
hosting/](https://civihosting.com/collabora-online-hosting/)

------
CarolineW
RiscOS !Draw

Vector drawing package that was neat, clean, fast, versatile, user-friendly,
and powerful.

------
tylerscott
Macromedia/Adobe FireWorks. Still miss that despite how rad Sketch has become.

------
samblr
Good old google talk or gmail chat.

gmail is yuck these days - such a shame after all these years.

------
sumnole
Jasc Paint Shop Pro. I've always found it incredibly intuitive to use.

~~~
cgsmith
It takes a bit of time to get used to but GIMP replaced JASC for me.

------
amelius
It would be cool if the UX designs of old software were archived somewhere.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
[https://guidebookgallery.org/](https://guidebookgallery.org/)

------
alanh
Meat Gone Bad, an old Mac game. For nostalgia. Would pay a modest amount.

------
furicane
Windows XP

------
badrabbit
Solaris

~~~
SamWhited
Solaris was mostly open source; there are plenty of derivatives. Look up
"illumos". I use Joyent's SmartOS pretty regularly and it's pretty solid.

 _EDIT:_ unless you meant the video game, which someone just told me is a
thing… oops.

~~~
badrabbit
I meant the OS. Afaik,opensolaris was open source but solaris itself had
closed source components,illumos and the rest ate forks not maintained and
supported versions of solaris

~~~
SamWhited
Oracle effectively started to close source Solaris with 10, I think and then
completely closed sourced it with 11. Illumos is definitely a fork, but given
that Oracle effectively doesn't work on Solaris anymore it's more or less
picked up where Solaris left off, it's probably superior to the commercial
Oracle version at this point.

------
n0n
I‘d love to have Haxials KDX back. Spend endless nights lurking trough

------
interesthrow2
Emagic Logic on Windows.

All features added on Mac since it's cancellation on PC.

------
MrMorden
Bryce.

The Ambrosia Software games (Handsome Harry, the Escape Velocity series, ...).

------
acrophiliac
WordPerfect. Loved the simple typewriter model for a document.

------
pmarin
edit.exe

I think Windows 10 needs to have a standard text editor in the console.

~~~
Marc_Bryan
PFE - Programmers File Editor.

Was way more advanced then any of the editors available now. Could handle GB
sized files easily. Had macro that can record your operations and playback.
Was very nifty and virtually consumed no memory and was simply superb. I still
use it though as it is available in 32 Bit version.

[https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/staff/steveb/cpaap/pfe/pfefiles....](https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/staff/steveb/cpaap/pfe/pfefiles.htm)

Would love to see a 64 bit version and with some more advanced features.

Still loving it and it's one of my main stream editor which just works with
just one executable and part of my big list of portable apps collection which
mostly consists of single executable based tools for almost any task!!!

------
maxxxxx
The game Lunatic Fringe

~~~
salgernon
[http://www.sealiesoftware.com/fringe/](http://www.sealiesoftware.com/fringe/)

~~~
maxxxxx
This needs the orginal module. How would you get that?

------
sm01
One tool that has not been surpassed yet is KBMS from AICorp.

------
croisillon
Zenbe, the email system that made me using email again.

------
lunchables
AOL. No, seriously.

------
mhh__
Richard Burns Rally!

------
coffeefirst
Sparrow. Yes, still.

------
Jemm
Old flight sim dogfighting game called Flying Circus.

------
hampo
Softimage XSI. The best ever 3D Animation Software.

------
lkrubner
HyperCard , and the whole eco-system around it.

------
nemoniac
After scanning the answer here I have to wonder, would we have been that much
worse off if all of the closed-source, proprietary software suggested here had
never existed?

------
gesman
Norton commander

------
serialjoy
A desktop app for Jira - I want a global hotkey that allows me to add an issue
and one that allows me to search an issue - just like 1Password.

------
kozmonaut
Google Reader or the Microsoft Courier

------
8bitsrule
Opcode's _Studio Vision_.

------
thesunisonfire
Lotus Improv

------
ImprovedSilence
Winamp. It kicks the lamas ass.

------
augbot
Aldus/Macromedia Freehand

------
soroso
sidekick - the TSR app for DOS

~~~
jtoledo
That was great!

------
HNY1
Aardvark Chat by Google Labs.

------
TsomArp
Lotus SmartSuite + Organizer

------
anoother
\- Amapi 3D

\- trueSpace

------
cm2187
Skype.

------
omg_ketchup
Flash.

------
Quequau
Sim Earth

------
rrggrr
Hypercard

Harpoon (game)

Drop.io

Quickkeys

~~~
twic
Request nuclear release! Request nuclear release! Request nuclear release!

------
marmot777
Archie.

~~~
trimbo
Such simpler times, back then.

~~~
marmot777
How about Veronica. :-)

I first started using the Internet just after these weren't in use anymore but
I worked for a local ISP/web host (remember those), and the boss and others
had used things like Archie.

The ISP still ran a BBS at the time I started working there (and people were
quickly switching to the Internet). We offered dial-up Internet access for
people with Mac, Windows, and NT who wanted to use a Netscape, Eudora,
Pegasus, et al. :-)

There was a service called Unix Internet where you could get an inexpensive
account to dial in and explore the Internet from the command prompt, which was
surprisingly fun.

These were the services I recall: BBS, dial-up Internet, dial-up Unix
Internet, web hosting, co-location (i.e., we'd put your server in the
basement/server room), ISDN, and T1.

------
hybridwebtech
Project Gotham Racing 1-4

------
codewritinfool
Microsoft Image Composer

~~~
copperx
What a brilliant piece of software. I had an artist friend who used it years
after its discontinuation. I need to investigate whether it runs under Wine.

------
shubidubi
Blockchain (too early?)

------
viburnum
The old Byline iOS app

------
Fnoord
macOS (aka Mac OS X).

------
kgwxd
Resurrected as closed-source and proprietary, destin to be abandoned again?

------
transfire
Display PostScript

------
lacoolj
Total Annihilation

------
erikpukinskis
Caligari trueSpace

~~~
ohiovr
My first real 3d program was impulse Imagine 2.0.

Was intrigued by the caligari ads though.

------
rkagerer
CircuitMaker 2000

------
coolgoose
Windows Live Mail

------
robodale
Microsoft Money.

------
zerr
Visual FoxPro.

------
cimmanom
Eudora mail.

------
wotwot42
dBaseIV modernised for webapps.

------
the1andonldave
NewtonOS

------
n2dasun
AlertBear

------
sambeau
\- iChat

\- Garageband

\- iPhoto

\- iTunes

\- Microsoft Expression Design

------
aj7
HyperCard.

------
anticensor
Google+.

------
iamgopal
Picasa.

------
mhd
MacOS 9

------
InGodsName
I want an app which let's me design webscrapping workflows visually.

Then once workflow is completed, upload it to cloud and run N instances of
this workflow.

There was a software called SpiderClimber for this. Unfortunately, the author
disappeared and software too.

 _Edit: i want to extract ad banners from websites, think Google ads or any
other ad network ads. Pop ads etc... Including redirect sequence and page 's
screenshot and source.

This task is not simple as extracting a table as CSV from a webpage._

I've struggled to find anything which is flexible enough to:

1\. Visit porn/torrent and other shady websites

2\. Save the banner image

3\. Click the banner link and save the redirect sequence

4\. Screenshot the page which appears after clicking the banner and save its
HTML source.

Why i want to do this? To extract scam ads run by scammers. I want to create a
directory of all ads which can be queried to see what ads are running. If
anyone is running fake news ads or spreading hate speech, they'll caught using
this method.

Not for adfraud.

My profile contains my email, if you want to discuss, just email me.

~~~
robbiemitchell
You can build this with scrapinghub.com — IIRC it’s a portia project.

Kimono was the best for this until it went through a quiet exit to Palantir.

~~~
InGodsName
I've tried scrappinghub i think in past. Extracting a redirect sequence was
not possible at that time.

Also, it didn't handle popup windows. And you couldn't select which popup
window to switch to.

------
paradoxparalax
First of All, The living-dead waiting impatiently to get out of the grave
named - Myth , The Fallen Lords - or TFL, and the Myth family, if possible,
except for the not-suicidal dwarf, let it in the grave and bring the suicidal
on. And then maybe Brice4, was fun to make the landscapes, if it could export
to Unity3d's skyboxes then it would be even useful. The Basic Programming
language's chatbots were magic, with so limited resources, if one want to get
nostalgic.

------
vtesucks
Roadrash

Airfix dogfighter

~~~
anotheryou
I don't know if it's any good, but maybe you like this one:
[https://store.steampowered.com/app/300380/Road_Redemption/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/300380/Road_Redemption/)

~~~
esaysimyan
It's quite nice.

------
trollian
macOS

------
blowski
Best days of software development seem to be behind us? I’m really not sure
what that means or why someone would say it, other than typical nostalgia.

~~~
John_KZ
To be fair SaaS destroyed the previous financial model of the software
industry, which was much better for the end user imo. Back then, software
companies tried to make good, comprehensive products that respected user
privacy, were meant to run locally, provide a complete solution to the
problem, and were supposed to be a permanent solution. Better software meant
more sales and more money. Unfortunately excessive piracy broke this model.

Sure, today's software capabilities are much more advanced, but you no longer
get a physical disk that you can load on you computer and be confident it'll
just keep working for years on end without any external dependencies etc.

~~~
petra
Looking at the best software, the sass world has created, Google - it's orders
of magnitude more valuable than any PC based software.

So maybe it isn't fair to say the user for a bad deal.

~~~
John_KZ
Google is a jumbled mess of multiple pieces of software, and you get access to
none of them, only a search service, and it is loosely defined. Also Google
isn't particularly good at anything nowdays, except maybe NLP. Their ability
to deliver good results is only a result of massive spying. Many researchers
would be able to provide software 10x as useful as that of Google given access
to the same data.

Imagine a pre-SaaS Google: You get a few of LTO tapes delivered to your
doorstep. They include an index of every website in existence, it's
owner/creator, a short description of what it is, and a number of semantic
flags.

Moreover, you'd probably get a list of all identified businesses there are in
every country, region and industry with their contact information and website
addresses.

Imagine what you could do with that...

~~~
petra
>> Many researchers would be able to provide software 10x as useful as that of
Google given access to the same data.

That's interesting. Can you share more about this ?

As for your pre-sass search engine idea:it's great. Very useful indeed.

But how do I get from that , to finding the bunch of separate webpages that
describe how to solve my personal, niche problem( in a really good way ? Most
problems are like that. Context is always different.

And yes Google is far from ideal. And SEO sucks.

But still, that problem solving capability is now available to many.

