
Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore? - mod50ack
It&#x27;s sad that a lot of things have been orphaned and obsoleted or were web-based and no longer work... What&#x27;s something that <i>you</i> used to use that isn&#x27;t around these days?
======
skrebbel
Jasc Paint Shop Pro. This tool had the useful half of Illustrator's features
and the useful half of Photoshop's, it was blazing fast, and it combined them
in a single program so you could mix vector and raster layers. This made it
absolutely perfect for web-targeted graphics work. It was the first software I
legally bought because it was so good and still affordable (a fraction of the
price of Adobe's stuff - something like $200 if i recall correctly).

Corel bought it and turned it into a bloated mess of a photo management tool.
IMO they should've just killed Draw and rebranded Paint Shop Pro as the new
Draw, it was that much better.

~~~
degenerate
I still use Paint Shop Pro 6.0 every single day. It runs flawlessly in Windows
7 if you set compatability mode on the EXE to "Windows 2000".

Version 6 was the last good version before Corel muddled up the interface and
made it bloated. I can still do some things in 2 clicks that my coworker needs
5-15 clicks to get done in Photoshop. It surprises me to know some things are
still so "complicated" in photoshop, just by how many clicks/steps are needed.
I'm sure PSP 6 is borderline abandonware at this point, released 16 years ago
in 2000! I upped the full version here (15mb):
[http://www.filedropper.com/psp6](http://www.filedropper.com/psp6)

~~~
apahwa
was there a mac version?

~~~
samstave
Can I ask a question: is there a way to run a Windows container on Mac just to
run such programs?

Rather than a full Windows VM on whatever?

~~~
some-guy
Wine! For older programs it works especially well. I've had a legal copy of
Photoshop 7.0 for Windows since middle school and I have been running it
without any problems since then.

------
Grue3
Google Reader. There are no replacements that a) update fast enough, and b)
allow search for free. I know, I tried all of them.

Firefox had an amazing plugin called "Ubiquity", which was basically like
command line for your browser and you could write custom scripts for it. It
was seriously better than anything that exists today. They stopped developing
it for some reason. Tab Groups is another feature that's now abandoned,
despite being superior to everything else that exists.

Forte Agent (free version) - great text Usenet reader, now abandonware.

~~~
akerro
After removing tab groups I see literally zero reasons why anyone should use
firefox. It's slower, more buggy copy of Opera and Chromium ;/

~~~
rmchugh
I use it for the history search in the address bar, it seems to remember far
more history than Chrome which is really useful when I'm looking for that
StackOverflow thread I read the other day.

~~~
atrudeau
My was one issue with Chrome: it didn't have the magic history search in the
URL bar that Firefox.

UNTIL I discovered that if you disable "Use a prediction service to help
complete searches and URLs" option for the Omnibar it works PERFECTLY, just
like Firefox. Type in any part of the URL or title of the page and bingo.

~~~
sakisv
YES! Thank you!

------
figushki
Free time. I used to use it to sleep, read books, listen to music, watch
movies, play video games, do laundry, exercise, talk to my family, and cook my
own food. I can do some of those things on the commute to and from work with
apps, but it's not the same as when I had free time. I think google or
facebook bought it and quietly obsoleted it in 2006. I'm still looking for a
replacement. Someone suggested Activity Blocks or HabitRPG, but they don't
work the same.

~~~
figushki
Someone else suggested Timely and Toggl, but you have to buy a subscription to
really get the most out of them. One of the best things about free time was
that it was free for the full version.

~~~
adyus
Time is never free, even when it's free :) There's opportunity costs.

------
avar
A few things:

Everything not being 4:3 screens. I found it better for programming than
everything being cinematic screens.

Back when monitor manufacturers were racing to make better / higher resolution
monitors, instead of just leaving it at 1080p / 4k / whatever the current
standard good enough for movies is.

The GMail interface before it started auto-converting the textarea to HTML
when edited externally.

Console gaming when it Just Worked. Nowadays when I pop in a game it's update
this and update that, long loading times etc.

E-Mail before we lost the "text should be text and not goddamn HTML" war.

~~~
kome
> E-Mail before we lost the "text should be text and not goddamn HTML" war.

I am still fighting, and the war is not over.

~~~
bitwize
You're pretty much the equivalent of the Japanese soldier who got stranded in
the Philippines and kept fighting WWII until the 1970s.

HTML mail _won_. If you work in an office they will use either Exchange or
Google Apps; Exchange's default configuration is a fuck you to text-based mail
clients.

<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p><font size=2 face="Arial"><span
style="font-size: 10.0pt; font-family: Arial">Hope you like <i></i><i>all</i>
your email looking like this, because the only response you&#8217;ll get from
your sysadmin should you decide to complain is a snippy remark along the lines
of &#8220;try using an email client from this century&#8221;. Don&#8217;t
worry, with enough practice you won&#8217;t even see the code &#8212; just
blonde, brunette, redhead&#8320; <font size=2 face="Wingdings"><span
style="font-size: 10.0pt; font-family:
Wingdings">J</span></font></span></font></p>

The war is over, friend. Come on home.

~~~
tremendo
Perhaps, but why give up if you're not missing any benefit? I still pretty
much can rely on something not being readable as plain text also not being
worth my time.

~~~
bitwize
Failure to read emails from your boss or coworkers, irrespective of whether
they've been turned into HTML hash, might get you disciplined or fired. So
there's not _no_ benefit.

------
jasim
The xBase family of languages/development environments. They are still around
- Harbour (open-source multi-platform Clipper implementation) and Ashton-Tate
dBase which changed many hands and is now dBase LLC.

They were one of the fastest environments to build business software in till
the early 90s. Then Client/Server and Windows happened. Visual Basic and
Delphi occupied the niche with support for SQL based databases. xBase tried
playing catch-up but by the time they caught up clunkily to GUI programming,
the effort was wasted and the Web came around.

This is how xBase was loved:

    
    
        This isn't a question or a bug or a complaint. This is just to say
        that using your prg files from Foxapp, modifying the startup,
        creating a database, compiling and debugging I created an
        beautiful working application in 45 minutes today, including the
        time it took for the client to explain what they wanted in the
        database. The client was duly impressed, and I marvelled at just
        how much 2.0 had made programming fun and had increased my
        potential income. I am now taking on programming jobs that would
        have been painful in the past, and find that I can afford to do
        some pro bono work knowing that with Foxpro 2.0 and my
        distribution package I can whip up a quick database for the church
        or the school or anybody who just can't afford custom programming.
    
        I've been hacking PCs since I bought an Apple at Homebrew Computer
        Club in Palo Alto from a couple of kids who were building them in
        a garage. (In those days they were talking about marketing them as
        a multilevel, like Amway). I've played with a lot of software,
        ranging from user-hostile to stuff that curls up on your lap and
        talks dirty in your ear.
    
        But Foxpro 2.0 is something special. What you folks have created
        is an elegant solution. When you finaly go public, may you all
        cash out as rich as Bill Gates.
    
        Please thank all the Fox folks for me.
    
        Charles
    
        -- "Letter from a FoxPro admirer". FoxTales: Behind the Scenes at Fox Software, Kerry Nietz.

~~~
hyperpallium
I've heard the love for foxpro before. I thought microsoft bought it and
killed it?

~~~
ak39
Look at this concept of dynamic forms in FoxPro with full databinding
capabilities:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_rCtxf1zBo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_rCtxf1zBo)

Always felt FoxPro's concept was light years ahead of XAML's ito clarity of
implementation.

~~~
lj3
Where has this been all my life?

------
hoof_marks
Windows XP and its search feature- Win7 above does not have it.

Yahoo Geocities- simply miss it. and also Yahoo in general. My current yahoo
mail is chock a block with spam mails. plus their ads.

Xerox Ventura desktop publishing software- that was cool when book publishing
was required.

Motorola T90/91 basic mobile phone. superb and handiest phone used. Current
Moto is smart but not unbeatable.

Most importantly old BSNL (India) Landline tariffs- you could talk for hours
and still the billing would come per call-wise. Simple unbeatable !!

Non- Microsoft Keyboards- here they are out of market. THe MS keyboards go out
of tune/get stuck over time.

Softwares that would never needed to update- These days it is a harassment to
see every software on my PC requiring to update. Now its gone to mobile
phones. God knows what is it that they do in updates.

Tap water- 2 decades ago we would drink water straight from the tap or just
plain filtered. Its impossible now. The water is too contaminated and needs
added filtration devices at home/work. or bottled water.

Paper bags at the grocery shop. They've vanished giving place to cheap plastic
bags. And many products are now using plastic wrappings that would come with
paper ones.

A more silent neighbourhood- these days its high intensity horn blaring.

~~~
anexprogrammer
What's wrong with your tap water? Don't they have the same safety standards to
meet?

UK tap water is great (Well, outside of Greater London where it's basically
limestone slurry). I've never bought bottled or filtered aside from the brief
time I was in London.

At least two brands of UK bottled water were bottling northern tap water and
selling it. Business idea I wish I had thought of!

~~~
david-given
Tap water in the UK is heavily chlorinated. If you go to a country which
doesn't chlorinate tap water it's like night and day.

(I live in Zurich. The water company here say that comparing Zurich tap water
with bottled mineral water is unfair --- their tap water is considerably
better.)

~~~
anexprogrammer
Not sure if it's down to how hard the water is in each area, but here (NW
England), a fairly soft water area, you never notice the chlorination. You
notice the chlorine quite a bit in London, along with the free limestone in
every glass.

------
lettercarrier
The Telephone with Dial Tone and associated Busy Signal. A busy signal meant
nobody could contact me; Also, by either not answering the phone or by simply
taking the receiver off the hook I controlled interruptions. And, nobody
became concerned if they did not hear from me in an hour, 1/2 day, day or even
week. And I had no concern if I did not hear from others either in that
timeframe.

So the "tool" to maintain privacy was very controllable by me and nobody would
think otherwise.

Any Norton product dBase III

~~~
rhizome31
Maybe it's just me but I feel that it was also much easier to get to actually
speak to someone on the phone back then. We usually knew when we could reach
someone and call during those timeframes. If we didn't get a reply we knew
they were out and call the next day. Nowadays it's much more rare to get an
answer when calling a mobile phone. Either the person has left it in the next
room or it's out of battery, it's in silent mode and the person doesn't hear
it, etc. So people usually tend to resort to text messages, which is a highly
ineffective way to communicate in many situations.

Also old telephones never took the initiative to call someone from their
owner's pocket ;)

~~~
samstave
I recall being reprimanded by my grandmother for attempting to call a friend
after 8pm.

"You never call anyone after 8pm, they are on private time"

------
uola
Nokia N9.

The "more linuxy" Nokia Android competitor that was released late and dead on
arrival (in terms of ecosystem), but was still years ahead of Android in many
ways and fundamentally better in others.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3rgAV1a2kg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3rgAV1a2kg)
[http://www.theverge.com/2011/10/22/2506376/nokia-n9-review](http://www.theverge.com/2011/10/22/2506376/nokia-n9-review)

~~~
digi_owl
And seeded the crap fest that is making its way through the larger Linux
ecosystem right now.

I had a N800, and i loved it. But come the N900 Nokia had done too many
"pivots" too fast, fatally fragmenting the community the 770 to N810 lineage
had built up. And once Elop came in and torched the platform, things were
sinking fast.

~~~
uola
I paid attention at the time, but has since repressed most of it. While
torching the platform made me bitter about the tech industry, it was also that
very few people even cared. It even gave the iPhone a match [0]. The
industrial design was great, had sleek UI and clever UX. And that's not even
the more technical features. Yet people mostly went on about how great Android
was.

When Ubuntu then went on to argue over desktop icons (or whatever) while there
was a huge hole left by the mac pro, I pretty much gave up on user facing
Linux (in the broader sense). Switched all my desktop os and development to
windows and haven't looked back since.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cP-
SSg_zZ1M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cP-SSg_zZ1M)

------
DonHopkins
Woz's 6502 disassembler built into the Apple ][ monitor ROM.

[http://www.applefritter.com/files/Apple1WozDrDobbsDisasm.pdf](http://www.applefritter.com/files/Apple1WozDrDobbsDisasm.pdf)

This early Apple ][ ad actually mentions it:

[http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-L3axV02_CrE/UijSowMHAfI/AAAAAAAAV5...](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-L3axV02_CrE/UijSowMHAfI/AAAAAAAAV5g/0-GWleyWmOw/s1600/pg.+2.png)

Check out pretty APPLE COMPUTER CO logo designed by Ronald Wayne, on this
APPLE-I OPERATION MANUAL:

[http://simonowen.com/sam/apple1emu/a1man.pdf](http://simonowen.com/sam/apple1emu/a1man.pdf)

I think I'll print that out and stick it on the back of my MacBook Pro!

Newton --- "A Mind Forever Voyaging Through Strange Seas of Thought ---
Alone."

[http://www.perfectlyintune.com/page34/page35/page35.html](http://www.perfectlyintune.com/page34/page35/page35.html)

------
rcarmo
The Psion Series 3 handhelds:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_3)

A (tiny, but) usable, physical keyboard on a device that lasted _ages_, fit
into a suit pocket and was eminently practical. The age of the PDA is long
gone (heck, I'm typing this on an iPad mini), but we still haven't caught up
with some of its best bits.

~~~
jakobdabo
Try the Pyra mini computer.

[https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/pages/pyra/](https://pyra-
handheld.com/boards/pages/pyra/)

~~~
infodroid
I have similarly been looking for a modern Sharp Zaurus replacement. But the
Pyra (and the Pandora before it) does not make a good PDA.

For one thing the dimensions: it is a real brick and I don't understand why
that is in 2016. All the flip-top Sharp Zaurii SL-Cxxxx were at least 5mm
slimmer, and they were made a good ten years ago.

Then there is the keyboard, which is pushed all the way to the bottom edge,
which makes it difficult type when handheld. It is clearly optimized for
gaming, with prominent space given over to joystick controls. It lacks a
bottom row containing a spacebar, which makes for awkward typing.

~~~
digi_owl
Ports and battery?

~~~
infodroid
To put this into context. The Sharp Zaurus SL-C3000 was released in Japan in
2004. It was a Linux computer with a 3.7" touch display, 4GB hard drive, USB
port, SD and CF card slots, 3.5mm jack, infra-red port, built-in speaker that
fit in a case with dimensions 124x87x25mm.

Even though the Pyra has a 5" display, its dimensions are no less bulkier at
140x84x29mm. I would have expected a lot more progress given the hardware
advances made in the last 10+ years.

Heck you could put something like the Intel Compute Stick or the Zotac ZBOX
PI220 in a case, add an LCD and battery, and end up with something more
compact and powerful than the Pyra.

~~~
digi_owl
Looking into it some more, it is indeed mostly the battery.

It is 3x the capacity of the C3000, and runs the full width of the Pyra.

Never mind that they also made use of the thickness to fit 4 shoulder buttons
for gaming (or other things), and two full size USB-A ports (one of them
claimed to support ESATA as well via an adapter).

~~~
infodroid
There is no doubt the Pyra is much more capable than early 2000's palmtops. It
has built-in wifi, bluetooth, HDMI output, sensors, etc.

Nevertheless, I am sure we can all agree that its design does not make
efficient use of internal space. There is a lot of room for improvement to
make the device more compact. Yet this does not seem to be a priority for the
creators or many of the end users.

For comparison take a modern device that is comparable in dimensions like the
Sony Xperia Z5 Compact at 127x65x8.9 mm. Sony fit an LCD and 2700mAh battery
in just 9mm of thickness.

As for the large battery, it seems gratuitously huge. Do we really need
6000mAh in such a device? This is like 2.5x a typical phone with a comparable
processor.

This is a great device for some use cases. But it is not practical as a PDA.

------
rsoto
I'm gonna echo on Winamp. Now a Linux user, I really miss a real good mp3
player.

Winamp was light, aesthetic and very good on its design. One feature I still
miss is the global hotkeys, you could map Ctrl+Shift+Z to go back one song, on
any window you were (hence the 'global'). I used to map the Z-X-C-V-B (the
default bindings for Previous/Play/Pause/Stop/Next) to the CTRL+Shift+$key
binding, and I felt like a wizard. Then there was a search function, with J,
that you could also remap to a global hotkey.

Winamp was so good we should have paid for it to prevent a sale to AOL.

~~~
sparkie
I'd recommend taking the full unix dive and ditch your GUI centred apps for
MPD. You can any of dozens of GUI clients to interact with the daemon
([http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Clients](http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Clients)).

Keyboard shortcuts can be done via your DE, by shelling out to 'mpc play', and
such.

My concern for music is less playing it (that's easy), but more about
organizing it, for which MusicBrainz Picard wins.

------
Razengan
Deluxe Paint:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deluxe_Paint](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deluxe_Paint)

ArtGem was a nice spiritual successor but sadly it's gone too:
[http://www.rlvision.com/artgem_about.asp](http://www.rlvision.com/artgem_about.asp)

~~~
ZenoArrow
GrafX2 is an open-source paint program inspired by Deluxe Paint:

[https://code.google.com/archive/p/grafx2/](https://code.google.com/archive/p/grafx2/)

It's harder than it should be to find the latest code, I don't know what the
main developer is playing at, would seemingly rather comment on clone
repositories than fix the project homepage:

[https://github.com/xyproto/grafx2/issues/561](https://github.com/xyproto/grafx2/issues/561)

------
RobertKerans
Macromedia Freehand, in particular deleting bezier points but keeping the
shape intact (ie simplifying).

Illustrator _still_ hasn't quite caught up. For any illustration, it's useful
to have as few control points as possible. This is particularly useful when
making SVGs for the web; it renders faster, and an ability to hand edit the
SVG is useful for animation etc. Every font design package has this feature;
Illustrator, even now, has nothing that does anything close to the same degree
of accuracy. Occasionally they'll roll out an improvement in 'simplify', but I
find it staggering that they can't just implement what is a fairly simple
feature.

~~~
owenversteeg
Have you tried Inkscape? I find it does a good job of this.

~~~
RobertKerans
I've played around with it; problem is, I've used Adobe products for ~18
years, and use almost every piece of Creative Suite. I don't _think_ the
context shifting is worth it, unfortunately. I'm using SVG on every new
project now, so that might change

------
cperciva
Chrome, the fast, stable, and lightweight alternative to Firefox.

I don't know quite where it went off the rails...

~~~
avar
Chrome's still fast, but other browsers caught up, and more importantly web
developers took advantage of the increase in performance and started getting
away with writing more bloated websites, resulting in much of the speed gains
being nullified.

Just try to use Chrome or Firefox to browse relatively lightweight websites
(e.g. GNU.org), they're amazingly fast compared to what browsers used to be
like before Chrome came out.

~~~
dclowd9901
Just try to interview as a front end engineer these days. Someone at Airbnb
laughed at me because I used a for loop instead of lodash on an array. He said
"wow, you write it old school."

Why write fast code when you can write triple transpiled bloats bullshit vis a
vis Babel, flow and jsx.

~~~
geuis
Come check us out at [https://massdrop.com](https://massdrop.com)

~~~
ThePaco
I'm still sad Massdrop removed the vaping section, got a good deal on a
keyboard though!

------
rcarmo
Graffiti on Palm handhelds. I owned the original PalmPilot and a couple of
other models up to the Vx, and can still write Graffiti faster than I can type
on a touch screen.

Discounting the Newton (which I tested but didn't own), there still isn't
anything else that even came close in terms of practical "handwriting", and
even though there's an Android keyboard that does Graffiti, ACCESS is sitting
on the IP and has done nothing with it.

I'd forego a non-critical bit of my anatomy to have Graffiti on iOS with a
decent stylus. Not even the MyScript keyboards come close.

~~~
digi_owl
While over at Android there already is.

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.access_com...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.access_company.graffiti_pro)

~~~
rcarmo
Yeah, I did point that out on my post. They let it languish for a good while
and recently started updating it.

~~~
digi_owl
Gah, my bad.

------
Sanddancer
Crossties. It was a relational desktop for Windows 3.1 which could replace
progman and allow you to set up associations with projects, contacts, etc --
for example, opening up someone's contact info would pull up the documents you
were working on for them, etc. 20 years later, we still really don't have
anything that can provide that sort of context on the desktop, or even worse,
we don't have those kinds of relationships available for our phones.

~~~
fzn
That spiked my curiosity. If anybody has more on this, I believe it should be
shared somewhere.

Besides a PC Mag excerpts and a listing on some russian utilities compilation
CD page, the interwebs look devoid.

[https://books.google.com/books?id=LYp7r6OrMdIC&pg=RA1-PA172&...](https://books.google.com/books?id=LYp7r6OrMdIC&pg=RA1-PA172&lpg=RA1-PA172&dq=%22Cross+Ties+Software%22&source=bl&ots=YXh7kvJdcV&sig=H8ISzPG0el7k_42n8_Kiulew_yI&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=Cross%20Ties%20Software%22&f=X)

~~~
j_s
Not sure this would focus much on the OP's favorite features but this sounds
like the same software (starts around 11:20):

[https://archive.org/details/VirtualM](https://archive.org/details/VirtualM)

 _This program looks at several early examples of virtul meeting technology.
Demonstrations include Cross Ties for Workgroups_

Much better luck searching for the software company:
[https://www.google.com/#q=crossties+software+corp](https://www.google.com/#q=crossties+software+corp)

Buy Crossties today for $55:
[http://www.amzn.com/dp/B000LUXSH6](http://www.amzn.com/dp/B000LUXSH6)

An expired patent, cited 26 times:
[http://www.patentbuddy.com/Patent/5787440](http://www.patentbuddy.com/Patent/5787440)

------
kriro
Borland stuff.

Some websites (author died, they faded away/are not the bleeding edge any more
etc.). A good example would be the old Searchlores website
([http://search.lores.eu/indexo.htm](http://search.lores.eu/indexo.htm))...apparently
the original domain is now owned by some marketing company. Yikes.

~~~
RantyDave
Turbo Pascal was "boom" fast on a 286. Presumably on modern hardware it would
finish compiling before the key came all the way back up.

------
kschua
Norton Utilities 8.0 and Norton Commander.

I loved the DiskEditor which enabled me to recover lost files by manipulating
the FAT table, hack byte codes to bypass copy protection in the days when copy
protection was done by reading in bad sectors in floppy disks.

Norton Commander for the ease of use to navigate file system in DOS days. I
use TotalCommander now which is the best $40 I ever spent.

~~~
agsamek
Far manager is great replacement for Norton commander and is free. Works in
console, so ctrl+o works fine. Ctrl+f is also handy.

~~~
patates
exactly. also, it is perfectly integrated with conemu, which also is a strong
recommendation.

------
ishanr
Web pages without javascript. Even now I try to use the web without it as much
as I can. So smooth and nice everything is.

~~~
tard
+1

i tried turning off scripts a while back

i could refresh any page and it would near-instantly return me to the same
scroll position without jumping around as scripts load

i didn't have to feel so cautious about sites abusing my browser to show me
popups, subscription forms or ads

it felt really empowering for some reason

~~~
peteretep
So why did you turn it back on? NoScript allows you to have it off by default
and turn it back on on sites it's actually needed on.

------
rcarmo
XMPP. Yeah, I know technically it still exists, but having 8 different chat
clients installed on my phone is ridiculous.

~~~
damian2000
By chat clients you mean like WhatsApp for example?
[https://www.quora.com/What-is-WhatsApps-server-
architecture](https://www.quora.com/What-is-WhatsApps-server-architecture)

~~~
wlesieutre
SMS+Messages or SMS+Hangouts, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Kik, WeChat,
Viber, LINE, BBM, Telegram, Signal, Sicher, and I'm sure I'm missing some.
Used to just install a multi-protocol chat client and be done with it, but now
everything's a fancy service with special clients to sync state across devices
and whatever else they do.

~~~
krick
> and I'm sure I'm missing some

Skype?

~~~
wlesieutre
Do people use it for messaging? I know it has it, but it's always seemed
secondary to the voice/video.

------
zevv
A phone with a proper SSH client and a real keyboard; I have owned and loved
(in this order) the Nokia E71 and N900, HTC Desire Z, Motorola Droid 4 and
Photon Q. But now I am out of options, as there are no worthy successors to
any of these devices. Modern phones and tablets are not about production, but
only about consuming. A lot of thought goes into the output devices, but the
only input device - the touchscreen - is not enough to get real work done.

I still find typing on a touchscreen cumbersome, especially entry of special
characters is a hassle. This makes managing remote systems or programming very
hard to do.

~~~
tomkinstinch
Prompt for iOS works very well:

[https://panic.com/prompt/](https://panic.com/prompt/)

~~~
tonyarkles
Yup, having that has definitely saved my ass more than once.

------
mrlyc
PC Outline. It's a DOS-based outliner. In 1986, my manager said "Here, you're
organised. You'll like this" and he was right - I did. So much so that I
bought my own copy. I still use it every day in a DOSBox DOS emulator on
Windows 7 and Linux. I use it for passwords, todo and done lists, keeping
track of work done for clients, functional decomposition, shopping lists and
the steps for configuring and compiling the Linux kernel.

~~~
akavel
From quick googling, there's some discussion where people are suggesting
alternatives:
[http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/2200/5](http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/2200/5)

Personally, I haven't ever used PC Outline, so I don't know its features, but
from many free outliners I tried I liked the Noteliner. Unfortunately I
couldn't find a replacement on Linux (and I don't have time to learn Emacs +
org-mode)

~~~
sparkie
Give Leo ([http://leoeditor.com/](http://leoeditor.com/)) a try on Linux.

Also, there's not much learning to do for just emacs + org mode. By default
there are context menus to help which also inform you what keyboard shortcuts
are available. You might need to get used to some "odd" keyboard shortcuts, or
turn on cua-mode to make it behave like you're used to, but otherwise, you
don't need any advanced knowledge to get started.

------
anexprogrammer
Logitech Mouseman+

([http://2a.zol-
img.com.cn/product/117_500x2000/44/cepKXmRt1Cs...](http://2a.zol-
img.com.cn/product/117_500x2000/44/cepKXmRt1Cso.jpg))

Best ergonomic mouse ever made. Fitted my hand perfectly. The extreme slant
_looks_ terrible but works far better than every handed mouse I've used in the
20 years since. There was a matching trackball if you preferred that.

Unlike _every_ modern Logitech mouse made it did not break after a short life.
It was thrown away because it was old school marble instead of laser. Lasted
years in great condition.

Use that design with modern sensor, sell me one for £150, I'd buy it.

~~~
starquake
Have you tried the Logitech M500?
[https://i.ytimg.com/vi/6qYHapP52IA/maxresdefault.jpg](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/6qYHapP52IA/maxresdefault.jpg)

~~~
anexprogrammer
I haven't. That looks quite close, but still fairly flat.

The mouseman had the left mouse button perhaps an inch higher than the right.
Net effect is your hand, wrist and forearm settled at a 30-45 degree angle,
pretty close to the natural rest position. That;s the bit I miss - it was
really comfortable for long use.

------
reitanqild
The internet when it was all web sites and I just learned about google.

Just before everyone and their dog got a "blog" and way before Facebook and
Twitter.

~~~
eksemplar
I actually see blogs as remnants of what the Internet used to be. Especially
in an age where click bait headlines, copy-paste and memes seems to be what
drives most "media" outside of big dogs like the NYT.

Some of the most interesting sites I visit these days are blogs, written by
people with a passion for what they do.

~~~
clydethefrog
I am slowly on that track again, visiting Kottke and Daring Fireball like I
used to. Got any recommendations?

------
purerandomness
Lopster, a GTK+ file sharing client using the OpenNap protocol (which was
built after the original Napster (which has nothing to do with today's
Napster) protocol)

You could download songs in 320kbps mp3 quality, you actually owned the
tracks.

You could discover home-made remixes of completely unknown artists, which
could happen to be truly amazing, and which then got lost forever after the
downfall of the OpenNap servers.

You had an insta-search feature where you typed something in a search box, and
the track list actually _filtered immediately_.

I miss all of this and I would pay so much money (even monthly) if something
like that came up again.

Yes, it was illegal, and you have streaming services like Deezer and Spotify
today, but try searching for Adele. There's no point if you have to have 2-3
sources to listen to your favourite music. The movie industry is repeating the
same fragmentation faults of the music industry. There's still no legal way to
stream or download your favourite music and movies.

You have music communities like Soundcloud, but artists need to pay money to
make their work public (laughably unaffordable if you're, say, in Romania) and
the sheer amount of work went forever extinct, just like what happened to
Grooveshark.

You could search your library, and the library would filter your results
_instantly_ by the letter you've just typed. This is impossible with today's
SPA platforms. Not a single competitor does sub strig filtering, and by the
time your AJAX request hits the server, you're already 20ms over the time the
results would have been shown in Lopster.

There was a golden time when those Napszter clones were alive, anyone
remembering WinMX? I'm delighted Soulseek survived until today, i'll see
what's left from the legacy.

------
ge0rg
Turbo Vision. It was the most sophisticated text mode UI ever created, with a
stunning love to the little details (at least in Turbo Pascal 7).

Today it would still make sense for server applications, but the C++ port was
rather horrible and nobody is still using Pascal :(

~~~
jgilm
> nobody is still using Pascal While certainly Pascal is not a cool language
> anymore, I beg to differ about nobody using pascal. I use it to maintain a
> 1MM LoC for several medical devices. Some state agencies still use it for
> their software.

------
rcarmo
PageMaker:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_PageMaker](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_PageMaker)

I used it to typeset nearly all of my academic work until I was forced to
switch to Word by peer pressure. Adobe made a complete hash of it, and none of
those files are readable anymore.

~~~
ValentineC
I used PageMaker before, and QuarkXPress after that. InDesign's fairly good
these days. I don't know why Adobe couldn't have retained the PageMaker name
for their layout program though.

------
davidw
Open source guy: pretty much everything I was using in 1996 is still around,
but better.

~~~
wmil
Clearly you weren't a Gnome 2 fan.

~~~
JoshTriplett
I used GNOME 1, then GNOME 2, then GNOME 3. I've enjoyed each, and I've
enjoyed the improvements over time.

~~~
gcb0
enjoyed gnome 3? either you waited several months with an outdated distro, or
you never had to do basic things like shutdown/restart your computer, change
volume, etc, etc... I know I waited months for those luxury. with the added
insult of having contributed lots of accessibility code to gnome 2 settings
that just got under the rug

------
krick
Internet free from government officials and old people. And all other bad
things (like facebook) that did happen to it later.

From more recent times — there was some nice hardware 5-10 years ago. All
netbooks and such. Nokia N900. Simple portable music players, with sole
purpose of playing music stored locally on it.

------
mangeletti
Adobe Fireworks.

Technically, it still exists. But, it's been abandoned for years, so it no
longer "exists" than any more than the bytes of any other defunct program.

Sketch is far superior to Fireworks, so it no longer matters, but the
abandonment of Fireworks actually caused me to completely stop designing
websites, for years. It was too painful to use anything else, so I just gave
up on it and started using Bootstrap to "design" sites.

~~~
imaginology
I still use Fireworks (CS6 on Windows). It does the job.

------
singularity2001
Action Replay

You could freeze the whole system (e.g. game) with the push of a button,
increase your lives and resume ...

[http://ar.c64.org/wiki/Action_Replay](http://ar.c64.org/wiki/Action_Replay)

~~~
singularity2001
was even better than SoftIce

~~~
maremmano
thank you! both was removed from my memory. good old days

------
sgtnasty
A/UX Commando

"A/UX includes a utility called Commando (similar to a tool of the same name
included with Macintosh Programmer's Workshop) to assist users with entering
Unix commands. Opening a Unix executable file from the Finder opens a dialog
box that allows the user to choose command-line options for the program using
standard controls such as radio buttons and check boxes, and display the
resulting command line argument for the user before executing the command or
program."

~~~
Someone
That description doesn't do it justice. You didn't have to open an executable
from the Finder; you could call it from the command line, as in

    
    
      >commando ls
    

That popped up a dialog box with checkboxes for -l, -R, etc., with a text
field for file names, a button that allowed you to pick files, etc.

There were two ways to exit the dialog. One executed the command, the other
entered it in your shell for further editing, copy-pasting in a script (in MPW
shell, that copy-pasting wasn't even needed, as every shell window was a
file), etc.

And even better: the shell (at least in MPW) knew about commando, so typing

    
    
      >ls…
    

or just typing _ls_ and hitting command-option-return (or some other magic
incantation) opened the dialog, too.

I may misremembered it, but IIRC, commando even parsed partial inputs to
populate the dialog box when you opened it.

Thinking of MPW and the early Mac, I also miss the consistent distinction
between return (the key to the right of the letter 'l' that starts a new line)
and command-return or enter (on the numeric keypad, starts a command) that
made it possible to enter multi-line text in input dialogs without living in
the constant fear of dismissing the dialog early.

~~~
hobs
Your comment reminds me of the show-command verb in powershell, which
automatically infers all the options available and maps them to a gui, and
then has a run or copy option(though it does need a paste.)

Its really nice when you are exploring new stuff or just forgot which flag it
was again and dont feel like reading the get-help.

eg [http://i.imgur.com/xOrLdYS.png](http://i.imgur.com/xOrLdYS.png)

~~~
Someone
Didn't know about that, but that is similar to commando, yes. The GUI seems to
be generated, though. The dialog in MPW shell were human-designed, as in
[http://school.anhb.uwa.edu.au/personalpages/kwessen/web/soft...](http://school.anhb.uwa.edu.au/personalpages/kwessen/web/software/mac/mpw.gif)

(commando invocation in the bottom left)

Edit:
[http://web.uvic.ca/~ncs/406/HTML/Targeting_MacOS/IDE140_Tool...](http://web.uvic.ca/~ncs/406/HTML/Targeting_MacOS/IDE140_ToolServer.fm.html#486420)
has a few more examples, including the commando dialog for commando, which is
a lot more spartan.

------
4ad
Film cameras, they certainly still exist, but very few people use them
anymore. And the ones still manufactured are either marketed as jewellery, or
are crazy expensive.

My 100-50 year old family photos are sharper and better than pictures taken
today with phones and cheap cameras. And expensive cameras are expensive and
heavy.

At first I was very happy when the so called mirrorless camera appeared, but I
was just too optimistic; the good ones are more expensive than an average
DSLR, and lenses are still too big. Not to mention that they are full of
bullshit software that will stop working in the future and batteries last a
day or less. My DSLR battery lasts weeks/months and my film cameras (the ones
that need a battery, most don't) last for many years.

Laptops with 4:3 (or 5:4) screens. For large screens (over 27''), I don't care
as much about the aspect ratio, but for small screens is matters a lot. I'm
looking forward to the ThinkPad Retro, but it will probably be a non-
interesting heavy brick. We'll see.

------
elvicherrera
If you consider kazaa a tool, then kazaa. It was like limewire but a little
older. This was one of the best programs ive ever used. It allowed for p2p
transfers also. RIP Kazaa

~~~
anexprogrammer
I did more friends and family free PC support because of Kazaa crapware than
any other cause.

Ended up as "if Kazaa is installed, you're on your own, no matter what
happens".

------
antaviana
The iPad 1. It was great for web browsing but nowadays it dies when opening
most web pages with advertising.

~~~
danieltillett
And it was built like a tank. My kids must have dropped mine a hundred times -
it is covered in dings and scratches and still it works.

------
exDM69
For something completely different... a brace and bit hand drill for
woodworking. It's almost impossible to find new drill bits that would fit the
two jaw chuck, which doesn't have enough force to clamp on to a round bit with
friction only.

A cordless drill is nice but not very accurate, useful for holes and screws,
not for removing waste in joinery.

~~~
8ig8
Jennings Pattern auger bits for braces...

[https://www.toolsforworkingwood.com/store/dept/TD/item/MS-
JB...](https://www.toolsforworkingwood.com/store/dept/TD/item/MS-JB.XX)

~~~
exDM69
Whoa, thanks! The only ones I've found have been new old stock. Although these
are rather expensive and in inch sizes only (I can't get inch-sized dowels
without making them myself).

I need to consider obtaining a few of these.

------
hollander
Writing, with a pen.

I never do it anymore, but it worked great until I got a PC, a Psion 5, and
especially after my first Macbook. Since then I barely write with a pen, and
if I do it's cramped.

~~~
curiousgal
College student here. I wish I could relate. My CS course exams in which you
must write code..with a pen..on paper made me hate writing even more.

~~~
bbody
A good skill to have come whiteboard interview time.

~~~
curiousgal
Algorithms, maybe. Maple 9.05 syntax, Definitely not.

------
simonw
DabbleDB was a truly unique take on a refactorable, easy-to-use webapp
database. It was aqui-hired by Twitter and shut down a few years ago.

I feel like AirTable is a worthy spiritual successor today.

~~~
agsamek
Take a look at instadb.com

~~~
AstroJetson
Interesting, but there are no docs in English, but Google translate does a
good job if you go to the native site.

Sadly it appears hosting with them is the only option, and no inkling of the
price. I don't want to waste their time if it's thousands a month.

~~~
agsamek
It's $150 per 50 users per month. You can use our hosting or get it installed
on your server (Debian) for the same price. We have around a hundred paying
customers in Poland of various size, one in USA. The biggest implementation is
10k users every day, around 200 tables. So it scales well. If interested drop
me a line, agsamek at Gmail.

And BTW - the system works in English and has some documantation inlined in
Schema Editor. We will also do English docs. In the meantime we will provide
you with good human support :)

------
realo
RPN HP calculators: HP29C (my first one) and HP41C (did university with it).

A long time ago, some demon soul from hell decided to kill them product lines.
The world never was the same, afterwards.

~~~
eitally
They're dead? I just gave away my HP48 whilst cleaning house. :(

~~~
realo
HP48GX on eBay : 365$.

Now you may weep...

~~~
msbarnett
Huh. I have a G and a GX sitting in my closet...

~~~
chx
I have a 128kbyte HP 48G in my closet and I will never part with it. It's a
fine bit of hardware hackery from ages long, long gone by: four RAM ICs
stacked on top of each other and a friend of mine did the wizardry soldering
where most of the legs are just kinda ran together like so many tiny
waterfalls and the control legs are soldered separately.

------
Geekette
Yahoo Pipes. Meticulously remixed, filtered, etc RSS feeds rendered useless
with no viable alternative to date. Curses to Yahoo, especially whoever made
the decision to kill it.

~~~
glaberficken
+1 wish they would opensource it.

------
pavanlimo
Google Reader

~~~
Bootvis
I like Newsblur

~~~
p4bl0
I second this. I tried an awefull lot of feed readers when Google announced
the end of Reader, and Newsblur is by far the most usable one, and it is
actually pretty good. I would stay on Newsblur rather than returning to Google
Reader would it come back to life.

------
johnx123-up
1\. Delphi and its community 2\. OptiPerl
[http://www.xarka.com/optiperl/features.html](http://www.xarka.com/optiperl/features.html)

Though both are still available, not in use.

~~~
yoodenvranx
Delphi was awesome for rapid GUI development! It was so easy to get reasonable
nice programs in a short amount of time. I really really miss it.

~~~
lj3
Have you ever used Lazarus? I'm curious how it compares to Delphi specifically
for GUI development. From a rapid GUI development standpoint, they seem to be
the only game in town aside from VisualBasic.

~~~
ziotom78
I used it for a small project where I needed a quick way to plot some lab
data. I chose Lazarus because these data needed to be displayed on all the
computers in our lab, including a few Windows machines.

I was amazed when the program I developed on Linux compiled and ran flawlessly
on Windows _at the first attempt_!

------
danieldk
Turbo Pascal

It had an awesome IDE, debugger, and help.

~~~
xvilka
There is an awesome FreePascal [1]. Along with TurboPascal-like console IDE
called FPIDE, it has Delphi-like GUI IDE - Lazarus. And it very actively
developed, cross-platform and supports modern technologies.

[1] [http://www.freepascal.org/](http://www.freepascal.org/)

[2] [http://www.lazarus-ide.org/](http://www.lazarus-ide.org/)

~~~
danieldk
I know about FreePascal, I even used it quite a lot in the early 2000s.
Unfortunately, the Pascal ship has sailed for me ;).

I could've also mentioned Turbo C(++), which was almost equally nice.

------
mehrzad
I'm worried that DownThemAll and other major add-ons will be abandoned with
Firefox's changes soon.

~~~
patates
what do you mean? are they switching their engine? I can't endure another
tragedy like opera :(

~~~
mehrzad
[http://www.downthemall.net/the-likely-end-of-
downthemall/](http://www.downthemall.net/the-likely-end-of-downthemall/)

------
tedmiston
Attention span

~~~
mod
What I'd give for my 19-year-old-self's attention span.

~~~
purerandomness
Try meditation, it gave me better ability to focus than ever before.

------
ivank
New laptops with a column of [Home] [PgUp] [PgDn] [End] keys on the right side
of the keyboard, instead of nothing (or a numpad).

~~~
pherq
My fairly current ASUS notebook has that keyboard design, and I think it's
fairly standard for their current 13" keyboards, at least.

------
chx
Reveal Codes from WordPerfect. I am just typing text now, thanks god, but if I
needed to format it, just a few years ago I needed to, I am so, so lost.

~~~
bsandert
Yes. This is one of the main reasons I like to do most of my writing (which,
admittedly, is not a whole lot) with Markdown.

------
nirav72
I miss all those old school RTS games like Total Annihilation, Command and
Conquer series, Age of Empires etc. No one really makes decent RTS games now.

Also miss all the pre-bittorrent P2P clients.

~~~
j_s
There are several so-called 'spiritual successors' on Steam; just spend some
time reading the reviews of the official successors to find the negative
reviews suggesting alternatives. One potential qualifier:
[http://store.steampowered.com/app/335940](http://store.steampowered.com/app/335940)

~~~
a_bonobo
I've received Grey Goo with a recent Humble Bundle, it feels very much like an
old school RTS with three different factions (Starcraft-like) with a focus on
base-building and resources

------
aslushnikov
IMO.im

Back in the days, when the service unified different messengers in a single
web interface, also providing a handy history search.

~~~
captn3m0
Once google shut down federated XMPP for gmail accounts and started pushing
Hangouts, that was pretty much the end of the service for me.

------
clarry
I miss my 19" 4:3 CRT monitor that did 1600x1200 @ 85Hz.

I want to play doom with it again. No matter what you do, upscaling a low
resolution game to high resolution flat display just doesn't look good.
Whereas a CRT, even a high end one, could switch to a low resolution mode and
look crisp without turning the pixels into huge squares.

I see that "crt shaders" are popular today, but to me they all look like
they're trying to replicate the look of a NES hooked up to a shitty old
television. It's completely different from a high resolution computer display.

~~~
rangibaby
Every time I miss big CRTs I remember how fat their asses were and how much
fun they were to lug up stairs. No thanks.

Having said that, I rescued my wife's grandfather's early 80s Toshiba TV when
we were cleaning up his house after he died. It is awesome for playing games,
and TV works on it (TV > balun > digital tuner > antenna). Too bad there's
nothing to watch.

------
raverbashing
A tiny DOS era tool called list.com

It was similar to less, but could show hex data, etc

It would eat any file for breakfast and display/page it without a hitch

~~~
hugodahl
Wow, I had _completely_ forgotten about list.com,but as soon as you mentioned
it, I was overcome by a wave of nostalgia. It was an absolutely versatile and
powerful utility without equal in its day.

------
wycx
4DOS. Tab complete in DOS!

Wikipedia says its now open source.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4DOS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4DOS)

~~~
to3m
4NT is still going:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Take_Command_Console](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Take_Command_Console)

I don't know what the newer versions are like, since I still use 4NT
8.something. It's got some missing or inconvenient functionality, such as no
equivalent to `...`, and I've had its DEL commands delete too many files a
couple of times (!!!). But I still rate it above any of the POSIX-style ones
for interactive use, on account of its popups for browsing command history,
working folder history and selecting files.

I am careful to only delete files with `rm' these days though...

------
samwillis
Macrimedia (Adobe) Fireworks

Perfect mix of a bitmap and vector editor for ui and web design. Nothing since
comes close, scetch is trying but isn't there yet...

------
rman666
MacProject and HyperCard

~~~
kerkeslager
I wrote my first program in HyperCard.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
"HyperCard was created by Bill Atkinson following a LSD trip."

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

HyperCard somehow managed to be almost as captivating as the web, with barely
any resources.

~~~
DavidSJ
Fun fact: [http://apple.com/hypercard](http://apple.com/hypercard) redirects
to that page.

------
mindcrime
OS/2 (ok, technically it does kinda-sorta still exist, but for all practical
purposes it's dead)

~~~
i336_
No 'tisn't - [https://www.arcanoae.com/](https://www.arcanoae.com/)

At the very worst they already have a bunch of drivers for relatively-modern
hardware: [https://www.arcanoae.com/shop/os2-ecs-drivers-software-
packa...](https://www.arcanoae.com/shop/os2-ecs-drivers-software-package-
personal/)

However, if their promises to release a semi-modernized OS/2 actually come to
fruition I'll be really happy. :D

~~~
mindcrime
Yeah, I'd love to see an OS/2 comeback on one level. Although since my old
OS/2 days, I've become such an F/OSS ideologue, that I probably wouldn't use a
modern OS/2 unless it were F/OSS.

At this point, I'd settle for a really good implementation of the WPS on
Linux. I don't care _that_ much about the OS/2 API or SOM or any of that
stuff. But the UI experience hit a sweet spot for me.

------
logicuce
Microsoft My Phone
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Phone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Phone)

It would even backup my SMSes and let me search through them in an online
interface. But then MS decided to shut it down within few months of me buying
a phone because of this particular feature.

Well, MS does it often.

~~~
vichu
If you set up Google Voice on your phone, it satisfies that specific feature
that you mention.

------
spriggan3
Google Reader

Fireworks ( a image editor for web designers )

Livemesh ( which was way better than one drive, it could sync your entire
computer in the cloud ).

~~~
andy_ppp
Fireworks was awesome. Such a strange decision to get rid of it, I've never
managed to replace it really... Any ideas of an alternative.

~~~
markdown
[https://gravit.io/](https://gravit.io/)

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

------
Zolomon
I miss Google Talk with the lightweight client for Windows. It was snappy and
it just worked.

------
Alcarinquo
Good old PalmOS handhelds, such as Palm Treo 650 or Palm Centro. I still use
Centro these days, but there is nothing on the market to replace it with.

~~~
cyberferret
I loved my old Treo. We were one of the first companies in this country to set
up ActiveSync to get 'real time' emails on those devices. We would get all
smug showing off to our clients how 'Dick Tracy' we were, getting and
responding to emails while out and about! :)

I was intrigued back then to see in the PalmPilot ActiveSync settings, that
you could specify what times of the day and week you wanted to 'go quiet' and
disable real time syncing. I snorted in derision as I questioned why anyone
would want to stop this glorious flow of emails at any time.

Nowadays, I am staggered that most modern devices do not allow you to turn off
the deluge. I know that there is now a movement among some web service
companies to allow users to specify 'no work time', and I really really hope
that trend catches on and it becomes ubiquitous in all internet connected
devices.

------
colllectorof
PDAs.

\- ASUS MyPal (which I have and it _still works_ ) had much better battery
life than any of the smartphones I ever owned.

\- It had a consistent interface that wasn't a confusing clusterfuck of random
shapes and expectations.

\- The hardware was durable and extensible through compact flash slot.

\- I could install software on it without going to a centralize store or going
through some elaborate jailbreak. And while there wasn't a million free apps
for it, there were good free apps, and finding them was actually easier than
finding something on Google Play.

------
iqonik
Grooveshark

~~~
lucb1e
Fellow Grooveshark refugee here. Spotify doesn't quite come close: small
library (only 'real' artists, and sometimes not even those), no way to put
custom stuff in there and sync it at least with your own devices, Grooveshark
not only had customer support but damn good customer _service_ , and then
there are broadcasts with the chat feature and song voting... Yeah, all the
good bits are gone.

I had a paid subscription and now pay Spotify as the closest thing to it, but
I feel as much a customer of Spotify as I feel a customer of Twitter: neither
listen to me when something is shitty.

~~~
deathtrader666
Grooveshark is still functional right?

I just registered on it after reading you.. playing stuff right now!

~~~
IlPeach
What? I get redirected to Score Big...

------
techbio
Winamp

~~~
enraged_camel
Winamp still exists, I think.

~~~
jlebar
Windows only. :(

~~~
teknopaul
I think audacious is based on winamp code. aptitude install audacious

~~~
DiabloD3
It's not. It's based on, if you go back far enough, XMMS, which was the
original *nix Winamp clone.

------
tomcam
Visual Basic 3.0 Any version of Turbo Pascal or Delphi. dBase II.

~~~
carsongross
Visual Studio's debugger still smokes anything I've used since. You could
literally drag the program counter to the point you wanted, rewrite your code,
and start stepping through it again.

That, and the ability to double click on a damned button and see what it
did... What a golden era.

~~~
sixothree
> drag the program counter to the point you wanted, rewrite your code, and
> start stepping through it again

You can still do that in .Net if you (even temporarily) target x86 instead of
x64.

------
bjelkeman-again
Interleaf, an electronic document application that did (nearly) everything
Word does but better. Repaginate a 2000 page document, according to rules that
you know will not place graphics hanging halfway off the page? Create a table
of contents in seconds across several books? Lisp extension language? It was
very good. All before Windows 2, and on UNIX workstations. The current
document creation tools just make me want to cry.

------
pknerd
Borland's Turbo C and Pascal

~~~
meritt
Borland Turbo C++ was my first "real" programming language after GW-BASIC. Had
some extremely heavy Tandy laptop ('portable computer' might be a better
moniker) with a CGA monitor. Those were the days.

------
codezero
I quite miss webOS and my Palm Pre. The swipe area off screen was a great way
to interact with the UI without reaching up to the touchscreen.

There was a lot to like about webOS in general too. It's too bad they came to
market so late and sold to HP.

~~~
shiftb
I loved my Pre. Wireless charging. WebOS. Swipe gestures. Optional hardware
keyboard. Their notification system is still unsurpassed by iOS/Android today.

Shame that it died.

------
psbon
PageMaker, FreeHand & HyperCard!

------
herval
Eudora! Never got used to any other desktop email client after it.

Also: Google Reader and Google Buzz, the proto-Facebook for me

~~~
kps

      > Eudora!
    

+1 for Eudora. How is it that _no_ other email client can get folders right? I
don't know what I'm going to do when my Snow Leopard box dies… maybe run
SheepShaver.

------
nekitamo
Softice

~~~
daeken
I constantly miss SoftICE. Rasta Ring 0 Debugger was looking like a promising
replacement for a while, but it just seemed to fizzle out and never got where
it should've been. WinDbg isn't awful these days, but that's about the most
praise I can give it.

I really want to build a decent wrapper around the WinDbg protocol and run it
on a Raspberry Pi+display that sits on top of my desktop case. That way I can
just grab that and break in any time I need to debug something.

~~~
xvilka
You can easily do that with radare2 already. As I mentioned already it does
have WinDbg protocol support and is very portable by itself. Along with WinDbg
it has support for GDB protocol. So you can run r2 on your Raspberry Pi and
connect to WinDbg on your desktop and perform debugging from Raspberry Pi.

------
exabrial
Ethernet port on my god damn macbook 'pro'!!!!!

~~~
throwanem
The Thunderbolt adapter is $30. USB adapters are even cheaper. Given how
rarely I find myself actually using Ethernet on my MBP, I'm perfectly happy to
trade off the need for a dongle for a laptop half as thick as it would have to
be to fit an internal Ethernet port.

~~~
exabrial
So what's the distinction between a "Pro" model and the normal model then? I
thought that was the point of having a "pro" lineup, was so serious work could
be done and normal consumers would be steered towards the Air or MacBook
line....

~~~
ChrisLTD
A lot of folks can do serious work without a built in Ethernet port.

~~~
exabrial
Right, at home on a 30mpbs/5uo internet connection? Or in an office with a
business class symmetric fiber at 150mbps with no busting or shaping? There
isn't enough wireless spectrum available in USA for more than 5-10 people in a
50yd radius to get full bandwidth. And the backhaul to wireless APs is 1gig,
so not only are you splitting airtime, you're splitting wiretime.

------
todd8
Javelin comes to mind, but I used it in the 1980's [1]. There must be some
better example; it seems strange to me that I can't think of anything else
more recent.

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

------
outericky
ReplayTV. I was able to record TV, and easily transfer shows to my networked
computer for later consumption. I still have all the Good Eats episodes from
15 years ago.

------
qw
YUI library.

It was a very nice CSS and Javascript framework that was much easier to use
for complex UIs than the competition. It had lots of good UI components with
an integrated event and data source system.

One example is the data table. I haven't found anything better since, and most
are not even comparable

~~~
vladimir-y
I also had a good experience with YUI v2/v3.

------
paralelogram
RSS, Usenet newsgroups, netbooks, 4:3 CRT monitors, GNOME 2.x, non-BitTorrent
file sharing networks.

~~~
Cyph0n
Regarding that last one, there's still Usenet, eMule, and DC++ to consider.
Many anime fansubbing groups use XDCC to distribute releases.

~~~
ZenoArrow
There's also Soulseek for music sharing, but let's not promote it too heavily,
I don't want a repeat of what happened to Napster.

------
programmarchy
Apportable. Amazing tool that compiled Obj-C to Android targets, and had stubs
to bridge iOS frameworks to Android. Sounds impossible but it actually worked,
really well. They had limited support for UIKit, and it worked flawlessly with
Cocos2d so was great for porting games. They were starting to integrate with
SpriteBuilder, a nice open source scene editor for Cocos2d but once Apportable
pulled their support that community disappeared overnight.

Pretty sure they got acquired by Google, who are taking engineering in a new
direction with a new project named Flutter that uses Dart as the source
language, which is totally useless for porting over existing Obj-C code bases.
Too bad, so sad.

------
therealmarv
ACDsee (a fast picture viewer) without any DB or clunky UI attached.

~~~
RantyDave
If you're on a mac, try Sequential. Really, really fast.
[http://sequentialx.com/](http://sequentialx.com/)

------
hartator
I think Macromedia Fireworks is one of most underated software. Since Adobe
bought them, they let the software slowly died.

------
hyperpallium
Java before Oracle.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
How was it different then?

~~~
hyperpallium
It had a non-rapacious future.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
But Java is still as free as it was when SUNW was still a ticker symbol.
Oracle hasn't done anything to kill OpenJDK and start charging for new
versions or anything like that.

I feel that this demonization of Oracle and the concomitant sanctification of
Google in this fight between two profit driven corporations is somewhat
misguided.

~~~
hyperpallium
A little more nuance: it's not only that Oracle is bad, but that Sun was good.

Oracle's business model is about extracting value; whereas Sun was about
building platforms (which they did several times). Oracle has a history of
squeezing open projects and alienating developers. You're right, they've taken
care not to completely chew up the tremendous business value of Java, only
test-nibbling at the edges: projects like Hudson (now Jenkins), changes to
JCP, cutting evangelists.

Many key people left Sun before or soon after the acquisition. Oracle is a
different place to work, being sales-focused. It's not entirely due to Oracle
though; the game had changed and Sun was no longer leading.

It's not specific changes to java, but changes to the philosophy of the java
custodian. These determine its future.

BTW: I can't speak for the other upvoters, but I think Google was clearly in
the wrong. They knew it, Sun knew it - but let them get away with it because a
new platform was good for java (NB cf. Sun litigated MS for fragmenting java).
In contrast, Oracle is suing Google for revenue, not for any platform.

So... although Google is the bad guy, it illustrates the different
philosophies of Sun vs Oracle.

In this sense the old java - its philosophy and its future - "doesn't exist
anymore". :(

~~~
fauigerzigerk
I agree with a lot of what you're saying.

What pisses me off about this whole saga is that now we are left with a legal
precedent that broadly validates all copyrights on APIs.

And my feeling is that it may not have come to this if Google hadn't violated
not just the law but also the spirit of the social contract around APIs in
such a brazen fashion.

Here comes a hugely profitable company with a business model based on
advertising and clones a struggling innovator's entire platform for use on the
up-and-coming class of devices without paying the creator a single cent.

Google didn't just implement an API to make two different pieces of software
compatible so they would work better together. They didn't fight for
everyone's freedom to implement APIs either. The only thing they did was fight
to keep every last cent of their profits to themselves in the most short
sighted, unimaginative and harmful way possible.

I don't have great sympathy for Oracle's business culture. But as I see it,
here are two big corporations, each of them ruthlessly pursuing their own self
interest, neither of them giving a shit about everyone elses freedoms or any
legal precendent they are setting. And neither of them is showing the
slightest hint of creativity in their approach.

Freedoms ultimately cannot be based on the benevolence or charity of
corporations. Sometimes we share common interests with one or other
corporation. And sometimes, as in this case, we don't, and things go to shit
without being in anyone's interest at all. Everyone loses, including Google
and Oracle. Pure stupidity all the way down.

------
thirdreplicator
ICQ

~~~
m-app
ICQ and all it's features and add-ons made IM'ing so much fun. I remember the
feature where you could type and your keypresses (incl. backspace) were
immediately transmitted to the other side. You could also talk to random
strangers and not be scared of frontal male nudity. Of course my IRL friends
(I live in the NL) only discovered IM with MSN Messenger.

------
ScottBurson
The Lisp Machine.

------
matt_morgan
Going way back, the easy answer for me is the Paradox desktop database from
Borland. I used it in DOS in 1990; Windows kind of killed it. It was amazingly
easy to build apps in it.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_%28database%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_%28database%29)

Although reading that page I see that it still exists!? So maybe it doesn't
qualify for this question.

[Edit: I see the dBase/FoxPro family mentioned down below. Same idea, roughly.
Also great.]

------
rosstex
Lazarus Form Recovery.

I suppose it still "exists" in that you can download it from the Chrome store,
but all traces of its development have been wiped and it'll eventually die
away.

~~~
homero
I use it on Firefox and I hope it doesn't break

------
therealmarv
Total Commander (yes it's still available and still great but I'm not using
Windows anymore, now OS X). I even miss Windows Explorer... I will never get
in love with Finder on OS X.. most horrible File Manager ever. Finder is like
a punishment for everybody switching to OS X (I want copy&paste and folders
first everywhere, gosh). Thunar on XFCE was also ok. At least ForkLift
nowadays helps me not to be angry at my Mac ;)

~~~
fit2rule
On Linux and OSX: Midnight Commander!

(apt-get install mc) || (brew install mc)

~~~
xor-xor
...or ranger [1], if you're into vi-like keybindings.

[1] [http://ranger.nongnu.org/](http://ranger.nongnu.org/)

------
tszming
Google Reader, Google Notebook, Google My Track, Delicious

~~~
kevsim
Big +1 on Delicious. I use Pocket now, but I find myself saving things and
never ever going back to them.

------
jeffeld
Microsoft Quick-Help

Circa 1990, a DOS TSR (remember those?) that when you pressed Alt+H (I think)
popped up help for the API call at the cursor (usually OS/2 or Win16).

~~~
jzcoder
Norton Guides. A similar TSR that also included a compiler for building your
own guides. I remember one popular one was the Ralph Brown Interrupt List. I
think about this tool a lot, but I think IDE's with auto completion and
showing parameters has largely replaced the need. But using NG, still seems
faster than having to launch an IDE help system or doing a google search.

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

------
lisper
OS X Snow Leopard.

~~~
paulrpotts
So much this! I use a lot of audio programs, and this was the single most
stable and solid version of MacOS X for my purposes.

I should have just stayed there. Now I'm contemplating whether I want to
migrate my 8-year-old Mac Pro to El Capitan and wondering if it will break
Aperture completely.

------
AlphaGeekZulu
All-purpose disc calculator.

Used it during my time as a typesetter to mass-calculate values based on a
scaling factor. Soo much faster than an electronic calculator! Disc
calculators have not completely vanished, they are still being made for
specific purposes like aviation. But all-purpose disc calculators need to have
a huge diameter and smooth mechanics to work nicely and I only seem to find
them as antiquities on ebay.

------
CapTVK
Turbo/fastloaders for the Commodore C64 Datassette.

[https://www.c64-wiki.com/index.php/Datassette](https://www.c64-wiki.com/index.php/Datassette)

And just be glad you don't have to use these anymore.

Loading programs from cassette was a pain. A game from tape could take 15-30
mins! Fast-loaders that could speed up loading by a factor of 10 were a
godsend in those days.

------
lewisjoe
Gtalk.

Did the job well. Worked amazingly fast with slow internet. Very reliable.

Then Google Hangouts happened.

------
asdf4life
BeOS

~~~
viraptor
Do you know about [https://www.haiku-os.org/](https://www.haiku-os.org/)
already? It's actually quite usable.

------
rch
"Rpad is an interactive, web-based analysis program. Rpad pages are
interactive workbook-type sheets based on R" ~2009

[https://web.archive.org/web/20090524155658/http://www.rpad.o...](https://web.archive.org/web/20090524155658/http://www.rpad.org/Rpad)

------
gerbilly
IMB Model M keyboard [1]

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

~~~
qb45
Unicomp.

------
ChrisDutrow
Cool Edit 96

~~~
purerandomness
Oh my god, yes. It was a fantastic, snappy tool for sound editing. Then Adobe
acquired it, rebranded to "Audition", changed all hot keys and UI, killed lots
of features, and finally added so much bloat (including a slow-as-hell UI
bitmap theme) that it wasn't usable anymore.

What does everyone use for sound editing these days?

~~~
fartface
reaper is popular. it's cheap (or free). i also like tracktion. v4 is free and
it's a powerful, simple, single screen daw. there's always audacity too, but
it's pretty limited. i've also heard good things about wavosaur (free). dumb
name, but simple for quick audio editing.

------
leptoniscool
Windows 7 UI

~~~
viraptor
Have you tried any alternative windows shells yet? (as in full desktop
replacements) I remember being quite happy running bluebox around the win2k
era, but it seems there's still a few that work with recent versions.

Projects like [http://litestep.info/](http://litestep.info/) for example (it
can be reskinned so it doesn't look like early 2000s unix)

------
hackbinary
list, a DOS text file browser by Vernon D. Buerg. Anyone know where I can get
a copy?

~~~
i336_
...Yay, that was fun!

This has the last version of LIST that was released, 9.6y1:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20080704121935/http://www.buerg.c...](http://web.archive.org/web/20080704121935/http://www.buerg.com/download.htm)

The earliest cached copy has 9.6x:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20030104124009/http://buerg.com/d...](http://web.archive.org/web/20030104124009/http://buerg.com/download.htm)

You have to poke around to find earlier versions.

And I found 6.2a from 1987!
[http://ftpmirror.your.org/pub/misc/dos/RbbsInABoxVol1No2_640...](http://ftpmirror.your.org/pub/misc/dos/RbbsInABoxVol1No2_640/files/011Z/VBUERG_1.ZIP-
contents/)

According to this poor version the file I tried to view in DOSBox was created
in the year ";6". (The 9.x versions show "04/15/2016".)

Also, here's what was indexed as "ASM for early V Buerg LIST file viewer", but
it's very rudimentary, at only ~1000 SLOC of ASM. No compiled copy provided so
I can't test it, looks like MASM syntax:
[http://ftp.icm.edu.pl/pub/msdos/coast/textutil/lst60asm.zip](http://ftp.icm.edu.pl/pub/msdos/coast/textutil/lst60asm.zip)

------
Arwill
Sygate Personal Firewall. It had a simple interface, nothing flashy. It was
possible to simply define custom firewall rules. It was a Windows program, yet
it felt like it had so much control as what a Linux firewall would. It just
worked and was quick. Then it got bought up by Symantec and was killed off.

------
acrophiliac
WordPerfect. A wordprocessor that used the user interface metaphor of a
typewriter, and therefore behaved consistent with what people expect when they
perform text formatting operations. Unlike modern word processors that use
some strange object metaphor that never formats things the way I expect.

------
Finnucane
Kodachrome.

~~~
leejo
Fuji Neopan 1600. Fuji Fortia. Kodak Aerochrome. Hasselblad V system (OK, they
do exist but are discontinued and becoming increasingly more expensive to
maintain).

------
mbfg
TMON - Terminal Monitor for early Macintoshes. It was like you were touching
the hardware of the machine. I'm probably one of the few that wrote a set of
plugins for TMON for doing all kinds of crazy stuff to make debugging awesome.
Loved it so much, named my dog after it.

------
logiczero
del.icio.us

~~~
reitanqild
pinboard.in replaced that perfectly for me.

~~~
a3n
Yes, pinboard. I fought the delicious UI but still used it. pinboard is
painless.

------
milesf
I miss my Amiga.

------
mattbee
Zap, the text editor for RISC OS -
[http://zap.tartarus.org/](http://zap.tartarus.org/)

(not that it's not still available, just that I can't justify working on a
RISC OS system for the last ... 16 years :) ).

~~~
new299
Oh my goodness yes. So much to love about !Zap. My first ARM assembly programs
were written using the Zap disassembler/assembler extension. I also really
miss the way it displayed search results, not seen another editor that does it
quite like that.

~~~
spdegabrielle
How did it display search results?

------
bsenftner
I miss MacDraw, and don't see it here. Visio or Gliffy.com is the closest I
know of. Just an object level graphics tool, where items placed on the page
are forever re-editable, groupable, and very easy to make flow charts, and
application diagrams.

------
dcuthbertson
I prefer a trackball to a mouse, and the one I liked best was the Microsoft
Trackball Explorer. I liked that I could control the trackball with my fingers
and use my thumb for the wheel and buttons. Pointing is much more precise that
way.

~~~
mondoshawan
This. I use a Kensington trackball nowadays as a replacement and hope to never
go back to a mouse again.

Putting the ball under the least accurate fingers was so weird.

~~~
rlonstein
+1 for the Kensington Expert Mouse, I have 3. The quality of the scroll ring
is up for debate but the device overall is much better than anything else I've
used.

I also miss the Logitech Trackman Wheel optical. It was cheap, light, and
worked very well. I still have one for occasional use.

~~~
kps
Kensington Slimblade. Scrolls by turning the ball around the Z axis; it sounds
strange and error-prone but actually works perfectly. I now keep a spare in a
box on a shelf beside my spare Kinesis keyboard.

------
mhw
Computer Concepts Impression Publisher. Basically a desktop publishing
application comparable to FrameMaker, in handwritten ARM assembly language and
running in 4Mb of RAM. Word still doesn't approach it's ease of use.

~~~
new299
Artworks was also pretty wonderful. This post has reminded me of so many
awesome RiscOS applications. There were so many neat little applications. Most
things seemed quite solid too. I guess in part because if they crashed the
whole system would go down, so applications were written not to crash. :)

------
lsiebert
Springnote was like evernote but automatically categorized things in a smarter
way from the browser. I could add a page with an isbn and it would let me add
it as a book with all the details looked up, not as a webpage.

~~~
juanscv92
I also used Springboard, not as an Evernote replacement but I would use to do
inventory of my physical belongings, movie and book queue, recipes, and wish
list, because it recognized almost any type of product you threw at it.

Sadly, haven't found any other app as smart as this.

------
oferzelig
HP Deskjet 690c Printer - I think the last ink jet printer of the "old" age,
before printers started to be manufactured using really cheap materials in
order to make the real profit from ink.

------
AdamJacobMuller
RedEye IR controller.

Made by a company called ThinkFlood that unfortunately has since gone out of
business, it was a rack mount box (I had/have the pro) that operates as a
centralized, multi-room, IR+Serial+Relay controller. Really simple to get
started with, but, amazingly powerful with a built-in Lua scripting engine and
an API to remotely control things. Apps on iOS/Android and a fully-featured
web interface.

It has been about 2 years and I've still not found anything that I like more
than this box to automate my home theatre (I'm still using it).

------
jonbaer
Modelworks JPad Pro ...
[https://archive.org/details/tucows_296665_JPad_Pro](https://archive.org/details/tucows_296665_JPad_Pro)

------
a3n
The mail environment in which you could practically run MH
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MH_Message_Handling_System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MH_Message_Handling_System)

The tool is still around, but I long ago knuckled under to rich email, and I
really like imap, at home and at my provider.

But I so loved the MH environment of separate commands that ran in the
terminal, and that you could easily use all the existing unix utilities
because your messages were just text files.

------
ak39
Microsoft:

1\. PhotoDraw:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PhotoDraw](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PhotoDraw)

2\. FoxPro:
[http://www.foxprohistory.org/foxprotimeline.htm](http://www.foxprohistory.org/foxprotimeline.htm)

3\. Full Tilt! Space Cadet Pinball:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_Tilt!_Pinball](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_Tilt!_Pinball)

------
johngossman
CygnusEd editor for Amiga. Thanks Bruce

~~~
anexprogrammer
Great piece of software. Few modern editors are as fast. None have ever done
smooth scrolling since.

------
Glench
Yahoo pipes

~~~
viraptor
I wish something better than yahoo pipes existed in the first place. I mean, I
love the idea, but every time I tried to use it for something more than a toy,
I ran into the same issue - I need to unpack one item into several items and
switch to processing those. I never found a good solution for that and ended
up writing own python/requests/lxml processor instead.

~~~
Glench
I totally agree. I'm working on something better for my research. But it was
amazing, given how bad the UI was, how well it seemed to work for people.

------
atrn
Sabre C aka Centerline C and later Centreline ObjectCenter (C++). Best C
debugging environment I've ever used. I ported the X11R3 server to some custom
h/w using it.

------
vram22
>Turbo Pascal (mentioned by many in this thread).

I'll third or fourth or n'th Turbo Pascal and Turbo C (and a few other Borland
products over time). (I know about their corporate issues and pivots, yes.)

TP 3.x: Under 40 KB .COM size (not MB, not .EXE). Blazingly fast WordStar
compatible editor and true compiler (created .COM files) in that size.

Had a lot of fun working on it, and created one of my first freelance projects
using it (started, somewhat unusually, as a freelancer, and then went on to
jobs).

------
copperx
The 68hc11 microcontroller for teaching/learning assembly language. It was
such a simple architecture and instruction set.

The MSP430 is OK but the instruction set isn't as simple.

------
shade23
This[1].It was one of the best chrome store extensions which would directly
take you to the relevant text while using Google Search.But it was shut down
because of the drain in advertising revenue. Thank you Google!

[1]:[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/quick-
scroll/gkcfk...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/quick-
scroll/gkcfkcppngohfcppeaankeoomkpipglf?hl=en)

~~~
i336_
This extension now makes no mention of the old functionality you're referring
to. How did it work, in detail, for anybody who might want to reimplement the
behavior?

~~~
shade23
I'm sorry,the nuances in the name seemed to have resulted in a wrong
link.There you go: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-quick-
scrol...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-quick-
scroll/okanipcmceoeemlbjnmnbdibhgpbllgc). If you do reimplement the
behaviour,i'd love to know how how!.

~~~
i336_
Oh, thanks!

What a fascinating concept.

Thankfully, the image carousel preserved enough info that I can understand
exactly what this did. And because the image hosting framework the Chrome Web
Store uses is exceptionally user-friendly, it was very easy to grab a full-res
screenshot of the most important image:
[http://imgur.com/L7oWUXH](http://imgur.com/L7oWUXH)

Thanks for mentioning that this once existed. I'm not sure if my tragic dev
skills will be up to figuring out how to reimplement tit, but I'll certainly
let you know if I make any progress!

------
lanestp
Q-BASIC. Just basic programming without any bloat or garbage. I feel sorry for
kids now. Foisted on to Python or Java right away even the modern basics are
bloated.

------
juanscv92
Sunrise. It's the best calendar I've ever used and the only one I tolerate on
Windows, and now Microsoft still hasn't given us decent replacement.

~~~
hurricaneSlider
It's available on Android

------
catwell
Greplin (YC W10). It pivoted to Cue then shut down. I haven't found anything
else to answer "I know I have read about that, but where?" as well.

~~~
tdurden
> It pivoted to Cue then shut down

[http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/03/cue-acquired-for-
over-40m-l...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/03/cue-acquired-for-
over-40m-likely-by-apple-to-compete-with-google-now/)

------
_jomo
HTML5 music streaming websites such as Grooveshark or rdio

~~~
8note
Google music does it nicely

~~~
mikegedelman
My "HTML5 Audio" option under settings has been grayed out fo some time...

------
nik61
PC Outline (PCO) was very good in its day. I was using it under DOS in 1985
and some people are still using it today in a Windows DOS box. It gave me the
opportunity to move over from a long-form prose approach to 'writing things
down' to something far more concise and well-structured. Nowadays the Outliner
functionality space is very full of product but it seems that PCO itself led
nowhere.

------
marczellm
Google Desktop. For the single feature of 'hit Ctrl Ctrl and google search'.

So I kept the installer and I still have it running on my Windows 8 and 10
boxes.

------
sly010
Microsoft Excel 200x on Windows. Everything else (Google Spsheet, Numbers,
etc.) is slower with less features, more bugs, and no keyboard bindings.

~~~
pvdebbe
Yeah, Office 2000 hit the sweet spot on lightweightness and features.

------
tech2
Directory Opus (prior to DOpus 5 when it all got a bit "special"). Two panes,
amazing file recognition, I've missed it ever since.

~~~
TomDavey
I must have adopted Directory Opus after version 5, so maybe I don't know what
I'm missing. DO is at version 11 now, and I absolutely adore it. It's the
first thing I put on a new Windows system.

~~~
tech2
I keep meaning to buy it to give it another go, I lost touch after 5 but kept
revisiting their website for some reason. Like going back to an ex's facebook
page to see what they've been up to.

Windows explorer, the Finder, Gnome/KDE/etc. are all appalling. Maybe I'm
gonna go back and look at that website again... _sigh_

------
based2
Fujaba (without eclipse) - From UML to Java and Back Again

KPT Bryce (Kai Krause)

Apple Newton handwriting recognition

Apple ResEdit

ICQ

Usenet

~~~
gcb0
heh. none of those things ever got close to working. the question was about
things you used and now you miss, not things you wish :)

------
Artoemius
Pre-iOS 7 Notes and the old iOS UI look in general.

------
haroldweber23
Writely. Worked very well to write together. Then Google bought and integrated
into its ecology and changed its name to Google Docs. If you do not like the
Google monopoly, like me, and do not like their collaboration with the NSA and
the US foreign policy, Google Docs is no option. Writely should have stayed
independent. Shame on their founders and the VCs.

------
fabiobruna
Amarok 1.4

~~~
krylon
I use Clementine, which comes close, but on OS X it freezes on me relatively
often.

([https://www.clementine-player.org/](https://www.clementine-player.org/) \-
it's a fork of Amarok 1.4, just in case you did not know about it)

------
brandonmenc
DESQview

------
Joeri
Ecco Pro outliner. Technically it still runs on w10, but the various glitches
forced me to onenote.

I also really miss my nt4 system: office 95, delphi 3, coreldraw 5, photoshop
5, netscape 4. Despite having only a 233 mhz cpu and 128 megs of RAM that
system seemed more responsive and easier to use than my current pc's, and it
did everything i needed it to.

~~~
cJ0th
re: Ecco Pro outliner

Maybe Treeline[0] (a favorite of mine) or BasKet[1] (not sure if a windows
version exists) suit your needs. They're both open source and more responsive
than onenote.

[0] [http://treeline.bellz.org/](http://treeline.bellz.org/)

[1] [http://basket.kde.org/](http://basket.kde.org/)

------
0x4a42
Nothing Real Shake, which was bought (and killed) by Apple. It was the best
video compositing app on the market at that time.

~~~
bsenftner
I loved Shake, and know the author. Apple paid him well, but screwed him
professionally.

------
yeukhon
Turntable.fm... all those college late nights.

------
damian2000
fuckedcompany.com

~~~
bsenftner
Loved reading about my bosses and friends bosses being all fucking stupid and
degenerate during the dotcom boom.

------
MindTwister
Logitech Cordless Optical TrackMan

I have no idea why they made it wireless, it ate batteries like crazy, but its
still the best trackball I've ever owned.

Having the ball at your middle and ring finger gave better control than the
thumb driven ones.

You can still get it on places like amazon, but at a ridiculous price, 10-20
times what it originally retailed for.

------
techdragon
Yahoo Pipes

------
YuriNiyazov
Borland C++

------
coreymaass
There was a music "tracker" called Jeskola Buzz tracker. I used it to write
music for 8 years. It was the perfect mix between DAW and experimental tool.
It technically still exists, but the source had been lost for ages before I
even started using it. It was buggy, and PC-only.

~~~
neotokyo
It has been picked up again, from the latest salvaged source code. Has been
for a number of years - [http://jeskola.net/buzz/](http://jeskola.net/buzz/)

------
sprior
There used to be a disk cloning tool called Ghost which was written by an
independent developer (I think named Ghostsoft) and amazingly useful in the
late 90's. They were bought by Symantec who turned it into more of a backup
tool - useful, but not the same thing.

------
GBond
Stand-alone consumer desktop photo collection apps that aren't a gateway to a
cloud service.

------
id122015
\- parted - used to have a feature to resize partitions, now I only know about
Gparted Live

\- Google Bookmarks (Toolbar for Firefox)

\- " _maps_ " app for OSX that could use offline Google Maps

\- Opera Mini - I used to have a super lightweight and fast opera mini on
Symbian, then something changed

------
RGamma
The GoogleCL command line tools I used to upload large YT videos from my RPi
overnight. With a change in Google's authentication mechanism they stopped
working and were abandoned.

Now that I look for them, apparently there exists a fork. Might test that out.

------
jhallenworld
Old DOS OrCAD- it's a full screen schematic capture program with best mouse
usage. To scroll large schematics you just move past the screen edge. Also the
macro system was excellent. I've not found a more productive capture program.

------
wotwot42
borland turbo pascal/c IDE that does most everything one needs for programming
in one SIMPLE AND SMALL application.

dbaseIV and the possibility to create a db application + its menus/gui in
short time without having to import 100+ kitchen sinks.

------
angry_octet
Cricket Graph. The best graphing programming I've ever used.
[http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/cricket-graph-
iii](http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/cricket-graph-iii)

------
austinjp
Audiogalaxy.

~~~
angvp
IKR!, I liked to share any song (specially from local bands) with friends, and
groups to discover new bands, etc

------
gadders
Google Picasa - not fully gone yet, but abandoned. It's not fancy, but for
importing and storing your photos locally it did a great job.

VB 6 or earlier, before it got .net-ed.

I was never a user myself, but surprised someone hasn't mentioned Lotus
Agenda...

------
thirdusername
Aardvark, you could send it a query on messenger and it would find random
internet strangers to answer. Got bought by Google and killed.

Trunkly, it was indexing all my social media links and made them searchable.
Bought by delicious and killed.

~~~
dimenox
re: "indexing all my social media links" Try ascilos
([http://www.acilos.com/](http://www.acilos.com/)) sounds like it might be
similar to Trunkly

------
covercash
VisualHub - super simple video converter

Songza - they had some great curation and introduced me to a lot of new music

Starsiege: TRIBES - while not a tool, the amount of enjoyment I got from this
game is rivaled only by Goldeneye and MarioKart with friends on n64

------
cholze
I really miss Bump, the app to share contacts/files/photos with a gesture to a
person next to you.

I have never found a similar experience again (Apple has Airdrop, NFC on
Android, etc.) but nothing works platform independent.

------
fishanz
CodeWarrior

~~~
kevsim
Didn't expect to see this one here. I worked for Nokia at the time that they
bought some of the CodeWarrior assets from Metroworks. Coming from Visual
Studio, CodeWarrior felt like a big step down. What do you miss about it?

~~~
paulrpotts
I wrote a lot of code with CodeWarrior. One of the things I miss most is the
PowerPlant framework. Such a nice "forest" design with mix-ins. (Yes, you can
download it, but it isn't the same). I learned a lot about designing usable
class libraries by reading PowerPlant.

I learned a lot about designing usable class libraries by reading Microsoft
Foundation Class libraries, too, but in the sense of "whatever you do, don't
design !@#$% like this..."

------
bitwize
Autodesk Animator. That program was the tits back in the day; and I used it to
re-create scenes from Ren & Stimpy as well as make my own animations.

Yes, I know there was an open-source release. I couldn't get it to work.

~~~
tremendo
[https://github.com/AnimatorPro/Animator-
Pro](https://github.com/AnimatorPro/Animator-Pro) Direct descendant (by Jim
Kent) of Cyber-Paint on the AtariST. Also Tom Hudson of CAD-3D went on to
AutoDesk with 3D Studio.

------
gearoidoc
DragonDrop - miss it on a daily basis :(

[http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/42610/dragondrop](http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/42610/dragondrop)

~~~
wlesieutre
Not an exact replacement, but have you looked at Unclutter?

[http://unclutterapp.com](http://unclutterapp.com)

~~~
gearoidoc
Thank you - purchased!

~~~
wlesieutre
Quicksilver also has a "shelf" area that acts as a temporary holding place for
files. It's not as simple and friendly as Unclutter, but there's a pretty
open-ended shortcut system with a mouse-gestures plugin available.

------
microbie
Norton Commander

~~~
ekr
How about Far Manager?

------
laxatives
Waze before the acquisition.

------
john-foley
Kedit. The 'all' command is unbeatable for looking at large log files and
quickly moving around a file. Many editors have a similar feature but none do
it better or nearly as fast as Kedit.

------
tonteldoos
For anyone who ever used BBSs (which is something else I miss), Terminate
would ring a bell. That was one spectacularly awesome terminal program. Oh,
and requiring 3 HD floppies to install it :p

------
smoyer
ARRL Radio Designer ... it was great for designing complex wideband and
narrowband filters. And it would run Monte-Carlo simulations that let you
estimate yields based on the component tolerances.

------
anaxag0ras
Truecrypt

~~~
krylon
There is VeraCrypt, a fork of TrueCrypt 7.1a. It still works at least on
Windows and OS X (I didn't check GNU/Linux).

[https://veracrypt.codeplex.com/](https://veracrypt.codeplex.com/)

~~~
fao_
Tails uses CryptSetup to replace TrueCrypt[0]. Although I find it easier just
to do

    
    
      sudo cryptsetup open --type tcrypt <file> crypdisk
      sudo mount -t ext4 /dev/mapper/crypdisk <location>
    

[0]:
[https://tails.boum.org/blueprint/replace_truecrypt/](https://tails.boum.org/blueprint/replace_truecrypt/)

------
ungzd
Livejournal. Now completely unusable, servers being down for days, political
propaganda ads covering half of screen, and almost no real people using it
(only spammers and political scam).

------
prawn
CFStudio (big brother of HomeSite). Probably used it for 10+ years without an
update until switching to OS X and having to find an alternative. Eventually
settled on Sublime.

~~~
mnmlme
This! HomeSite's ability to to multi-line find & replace across multiple files
(all open files or all files in specific folder) was a really helpful feature
for many tasks. I have yet to find something that can repliciate that. Can
Sublime?

------
yegle
Cedega

It allowed me to play War3 with my friends in a LAN with decent frame rate.

------
kawera
Powermarks, a brilliantly simple bookmarks manager for Windows, kind of
"Notational Velocity for bookmarks" \- both share basically the same UI/UX.

------
fiatmoney
WinAmp - still around, but basically abandonware. Still haven't found anything
on the Linux side that comes close to it for managing huge media libraries.

------
LeicaLatte
Mechanical apple keyboard.

The new flat ones don't help with RSI at all.

------
joshmarinacci
iTunes. It's become a mess. In the old days it was so simple to manage an MP3
archive. It would even properly export ID3 tags.

These days what I want is an MP3 archive in the cloud. Hold _my_ mp3s, not
your pre-licensed copies with different metadata. Stream _my_ mp3s to any app,
with an API. I don't want your mp3 store. I don't want your crappy Spotify
clone. I just want my mp3s in the cloud.

I'd pay for this. Anyone else?

~~~
joonap
I think Loop for VOX has this, check [http://coppertino.com/loop-for-
vox](http://coppertino.com/loop-for-vox)

------
ghubbard
IWantSandy - An email-based automated personal assistant.

~~~
cyberferret
Oh yes - I really miss IWantSandy - Worked via Twitter as well as email. The
precursor to Siri and a lot of other modern clunky virtual PAs. I loved its
elegant simplicity.

Sad when Twitter hired Rael (the developer) and then killed the project.

------
gaius
VAX/VMS. A joy both to program on and to administer.

------
skaragianis
XTree Gold anyone???

~~~
rsi_oww
Check out the wonderful ZTreeWin -
[http://www.ztree.com/](http://www.ztree.com/)

~~~
basicplus2
does not have all the features surrounding file manipulation Xtree Gold had

------
drelevinge
The recently deceased
[https://www.hashtagtodo.com/](https://www.hashtagtodo.com/) :(

------
tezza
SmartDraw 6 - I have a VMWare Fusion image just to run it.

Later versions were disastrous

Microsoft X6 Keyboard - Fantastic keyboard with removable number pad. Not made
any more

------
anonymoushn
I used to use a multi-protocol IM client with a nice history search feature.
The history search was like Google Instant but actually instant.

------
gggggggg
The touchpad and webos. Both dead on arrival, bit still a mile better that
ios, android and win phone in terms of base ui, ux and os.

------
bufordsharkley
I loved GOOG411 before it was sunsetted (and revealed to be mostly a data-
gathering venture). For when it worked, it was just magic--

------
inanutshellus
Firebug, before FireFox 30.

Developer Tools (and the skin-of-developer-tools that is Firebug 2) are
markedly inferior. From breakpoint- and file-management to the functional
limitations and missing features around dom management... I miss the Firebug
that died in FireFox 29.

...

Here's what I'd like DevTools to do:

* Make a breakpoints view, not one embedded into a massive list of unsorted (or sorted-by-load-date I guess?!) files that changes over time. If that can't be done (or is against the design philosophy of DevTools), letting me choose the sort order would be nice (e.g. recently-viewed files first, or files with breakpoints, etc ..... and uh, remembering those files and/or settings through refreshes would be fantastic... I miss it from Firebug 2). It's nice because after/during refreshes the breakpoint view lets you pull up the file the second it's loaded, instead of scrolling around in the file list until you find it.

* Make it a LOT more obvious when DevTools is stopped at a breakpoint.

* DevTools doesn't handle initial focus the way Firebug does. As in, when you pull up Firebug via the selection icon--oh, DevTools needs that selection icon for the toolbar--it goes straight to the dom node you selected.

* Make DevTools stop crashing. It stops working. Constantly. The console will just stop printing output, and the DOM view just stops displaying HTML, requiring a browser restart. (When this happens, if you, say, pull up the console and type "1" and hit enter, usually the console echos "1" back to you. When you're in this state, it's not echoed back, though, oddly, some script messages still pop in.)

* Make "debugger" start working again. There are some places where--for who knows what reason--both Firebug and DevTools have ignored breakpoints I've put in, and I've been able to get around it in Firebug by explicitly putting in "debugger;" into my code. You definitely know you're in deep kimchi when you need "debugger;".

Also, for one of my websites, it can't load the source. It just shows "eval"
as the filenames over and over with nothing in them. Firebug 2 loads it just
fine.

If I use the browser too long, the Inspector and Console tabs go blank.

Oh, and DevTools often doesn't honor my breakpoints. They "slide" down to the
next line DevTools thinks it can actually stop on. Sometimes, once I restart
my browser they'll work again.

For another, as a time-saver I put breakpoints on lines that /will/ be valid
when I refresh (saves me from having to refresh the file twice), so it'd be
grand if it simply honored the line i clicked rather than "sliding" down to
the next valid one.

~~~
frik
True, the v1 used internal API directly. They ported it to a newer API that is
also used by Developer Tools.

Though even today, I prefer Firebug as I really like the good UI and it has
several features that are nowhere to be found in neither Developer Tools in
Firefox nor DevTools in Chrome nor F12 in IE11.

E.g. the "DOM" tab that let's one to view the DOM state - it's like working
with Smalltalk/Squeak and its object browser window.

------
tkjef
Glad to see so many others liked Adobe Fireworks as much as me.

It was my go to for web image editing. As well as prototyping with clickable
pdfs.

------
mkoryak
Newzbin + sabnzbd Piracy has never been so easy

------
babo
SGI Workstations like Indigo2 or Indy. They were heavy and noisy beasts but
for me it was a flawless experience to work with.

------
clumsysmurf
NCD - Norton Change Directory. Using OSX now.

------
spacemanmatt
Telix.

It was modem/terminal emulation software that Just Worked. It also had a
built-in C-like scripting language. I loved it.

------
Ankaios
The Logitech Trackman Marble FX trackball.

I still use it every day, but I won't be able to replace it when it breaks.

------
cabalamat
Google Search. Sure, Google still do a search engine, but it is nowhere near
as good as it used to be.

------
5555624
Lotus Magellan

------
altmind
i'm missing kde3.5 and dcop. kde3.5 was so fast and snappy and apps there were
so feature rich. and dbus is no match to dcop - you can discover dcop features
straight in console and use right away. but you cant do use dbus without
reading a ton of scattered docs.

------
pbreit
Google Reader

~~~
pbreit
I've moved to Digg Reader which has been a good replacement.

I'm sure by Google standards that reader usage was tiny but I'm guessing the
value of the usage was pretty high. I check reader first thing, last thing and
several times in between.

------
tegeek
I loved the Macromedia Fireworks.

------
ChikkaChiChi
Palm Pre. IMO in was the best mobile tool form factor and the best OS out of
the bunch.

~~~
loeg
I had one of these. Everything using HTML/JS was a poor idea on hardware of
the time (six+ years ago?) and probably still a bad idea today. The hardware
keyboard was pretty crummy. Maybe better than a touchscreen keyboard.

------
p0nce
Turbo Pascal

------
cauthonLuck
pentadactyl add-on for firefox. Allows you to browse like you were using vim
and allows you to script anything you do on the web. Vimperator isn't nearly
as powerful and all the chrome options aren't even worth mentioning.

------
Atwood
Netbus. Full transparency, I did not check nested to see if someone already
said this.

------
SFJulie
norton commander & pctools

~~~
PeterisP
FAR manager is norton commander-style tool for modern windows, it's quite
useful in some use cases.

~~~
SFJulie
Okay I kind of miss DRDOS 6.0 and doing my autoexec.bat by hand trying to
break the 640kb limits that Bill decided would be more than enough for any
use. That's when I installed Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swap (EMACS) to
prove the superiority of Linux

------
snarfy
SoftICE.

~~~
memming
that was some powerful tool...

------
bkmn
The BeBox

------
davidp670
iGoogle

------
starfire
rdio

------
typon
My favourite video transcoder which was also GPU accelerated: Badaboom

------
Moto7451
Ta-da Lists as a stand alone product. Now it's part of Basecamp.

------
fidz
IcoFX. It got its function done right: creating icon.

It was free. Now it isn't.

------
MaysonL
Head-per-track discs, although SSDs are a reasonable approximation.

------
smcguirk
Ready Set Go and MacDraft both were essential tools in the day.

------
freetonik
Picasa and Google Notes

------
smcguirk
Ready Set Go loved this desk top program on Mac and MacDraft

------
waddabadoo
MultiEdit, dos version

------
dpweb
VB6, Microsoft Money.

------
m0rdecai
Bing Travel - specifically the price predictor tool.

------
hudell
Windows Live Writer

~~~
crazysim
Wasn't this open sourced?

~~~
captn3m0
Yup, [http://openlivewriter.org/](http://openlivewriter.org/)

------
skaragianis
XTree Gold anyone?

------
roflchoppa
limewire

------
ianwalter
AOLPress - The best WYSIWYG editor of its time.

------
zorpner
Albert Yale's (RIP) Telnet Scripting Tool.

~~~
viraptor
Was it better than expect? (there's a windows port:
[http://docs.activestate.com/activetcl/8.4/expect4win/](http://docs.activestate.com/activetcl/8.4/expect4win/)
)

------
samstave
Pathminder for DOS 1988

Finder is a joke compared to this tool

~~~
chrisfinne
Agreed, but Finder is joke compared to everything.

~~~
samstave
What should I use instead?

------
cheez
Norton commander

------
sharjeel
MS Paint: I've yet to find a photo tool that'll load instantly and let me crop
or resize with the most minimal clicks.

~~~
Razengan
Preview.app, the default image editor on Mac OS X, is just as convenient. I
think it has fewer clicks; the selection tool is always the default, so you
just drag and Cmd+K. Save-on-quit is the default as well so you just close the
window.

------
sjclemmy
The younger, more attractive me.

------
RP_Joe
Opera browser before Chromium.

------
t482
Nokia N900

FoxPro/Lotus Approach/Delphi

X24 Thinkpad

NeXTcube

AmiPro

Lotus Notes 3.x

------
DiThi
KDE 3.5

------
savrajsingh
Superpaint

------
basicplus2
Xtree Gold

------
austinjp
Freshmeat.

------
vskarine
Songza

------
febed
SnadBoy's Revelation

------
crshults
Iguana labs 8051 burner

------
known
Kernel is my new home

------
bitdiddle
Symbolics workstation

------
intrasight
My teak wood dish drainer. It broke last week after 24 years of use.

------
alok-g
Old Google Maps.

------
shen
Apple Aperture.

------
homero
Xp and thinkpad

------
mkhpalm
Federated XMPP

------
supermanro
Google reader

------
fillskills
Google Hello

------
mirimir
Lotus Agenda

------
CodeWriter23
HP 16c

------
rlonstein
Hypercard.

------
Artoemius
MS-DOS 6.x

------
a_imho
Browsers without bloat.

~~~
RP_Joe
Take a look at palemoon, Vivaldi, kmelon and more.

------
baidoct
Internet Explorer

------
neelkadia
orkut.com

------
frik
Please read it from a consumer perspective about consumer topics: (of course
B2B is very different, where other things matter)

* products/software without DRM, always-online, analytics, tracking and spy "features" \- bad for consumer personal privacy, and prevents second hand market, products cannot be owned anymore, try buying Windows 10, John Deer tractor, Tesla S without that crap

* Cash money: those Davos attendees started a war against consumers - electronic money transfer is useful, yes, but without cash money everything in daily life can be tracked and you can loose everything over night it's just a digital number after all, state wants negative interest rates ... just a matter of a mouse click, a normal consumer would get a kind of a slave, as we learned from cases like "1984" or various real cases like former state East Germany, while wealthy folks have numerous companies in various countries. Some states already started to limit the amount of cash money one is allowed to carry and eliminated entire cash notes like the 500 EURO note. Some probably fall for the propaganda that it's a way to limit criminals - as if those wouldn't use shell companies and electronic money transfer.

* Erosion of the idea of ownership: some like renting things and consume services, fine, but others prefer owning things like a house, a car, a computer device. And with ownership I mean also the possibility to sell the stuff to someone else and using it without an artificial time limit.

~~~
tajen
Like, you miss when you could configure a Cisco router without using the cloud
sysadmin console? I miss when I owned my Mac OS X. I'd use Linux just for the
sake of having a non-cloud system.

Concerning money, I don't understand why we wouldn't track criminals when
using banknotes. There are only 15bn Euro banknotes, all numbered. You could
track them easily in Postgres. 90% banknotes change hands only once before
going through a bank again. It is certainly easy to watch the banknotes'
travel patterns, and they'd be stupid not to do it: If a dealer cashes in
banknotes which were withdrawn from your account, it's a big arrow pointing
towards you. It's even worse in bulk: If a few dozen banknotes are withdrawn
together, go unused for a few months, then all get exchanged in Moscow, it's a
smoking trail. Cash management for mafias is certainly a a job, and banknotes
don't always have the same value, depending on how clean they are (e.g. the
500EUR is worth 520€ on the legal second-hand market in Paris).

~~~
SixSigma
I like the idea of perpetual leases for some items E.g. Washing machine,
fridge etc.

I would take solid construction and reliability of those over planned
obsolescence.

------
frik
* IBM ThinkPad T41p/60.

Lenovo T410/X210 where still somewhat fine. But these newer ultrabooks
nowadays have less powerful specs than 5 year old notebooks. The Lenovo
Thinkpad X1 Carbon isn't bad, but a far cry given it's ultrabook less powerful
specs than an 5 year old high end notebook. And these shitty keyboard
nowadays, give me back the old keyboard layout like grouped F1-F12 key, better
placed Home/PgUp/PgDn/End keys, etc. And an 9 cell battery that stand out on
the back side - I want back my 15 hour battery life.

Please please produce the retro Thinkpad, as shown on the Lenovo blog - I want
to buy one with high end specs, if it is available in 4:3 even better:
[http://blog.lenovo.com/en/blog/retro-thinkpad-time-
machine/](http://blog.lenovo.com/en/blog/retro-thinkpad-time-machine/)

* HP EliteBook 2560p.

Those newer EliteBook 820 have cheap plastic and a very crappy hinge with such
a small angle. And the very thick edge around the display looks like the
designer has gone completely mad. And the specs are lower than a 5 year old
notebook. Bring back the older quality in a smaller form factor, or just offer
the older device with up-to-date high end hardware.

* Microsoft IntelliMouse and Comfort Mouse 6000

Very good computer mice. (yes I am aware the later had a hardware bug with the
middle mouse click but who cares). Their newer keyboard and mouses are all
wireless and all with crappy design - designer gone mad. Very sad story. It
get's harder and harder to find a suitable good traditional standard quality
mouse and keyboard these days, that were so common 15 years ago (and cheap as
well). Not everyone needs a gaming device (expensive and last only like 2
years) nor would like to use ultra cheaply made crap for small hands only. The
normal products aren't available anymore as it seems.

I hope it doesn't sound too negative, sadly some devices aren't available in a
quality we used to have available in mainstream. On the other side, a lot of
other things I haven't mentioned got a lot better than what was available some
years ago - but it isn't the topic in this discussion.

~~~
anexprogrammer
Lenovo destroyed the Thinkpad legacy.

I gave up on them a few years ago when they dropped the 7 row keyboard. The 7
row keyboard was leagues ahead of any other laptop keyboard, ever. The
replacement keyboard is awful. I hate the loss of web forward/back keys too. I
hate chicklet keys. I hate pgup/dn placed as though I'll almost never use
them. I still prefer the trackpoint over _any_ touchpad.

I'd buy a retro Thinkpad, like you link, in a second. I'd Hackintosh or Linux
it. Barring miracles, my next laptop will be a Mac.

A friend has a W540. It's horrible. Worst sound output of any machine I came
across, horrible chicklet keyboard, and cracks in the keyboard surround that's
design fault but Lenovo won't fix. All the once handy TP utilities are Adobe
Air bloatware that take 5s+ to even open.

After 20 years he says it's his last TP.

~~~
Havoc
The Lenovo keyboards aren't bad? I actually like them. Well aside from the
bottom left key being FN instead of Ctrl...that part is retarded.

The trackpads on them are beyond redemption though. How that made it past well
any kind of user testing is beyond me.

~~~
privong
> Well aside from the bottom left key being FN instead of Ctrl...that part is
> retarded.

There's a BIOS option to swap Fn and Ctrl, at least on the X250.

~~~
Havoc
Interesting. I'll check. Not sure I can get into BIOS though...corporate
laptop.

~~~
i336_
Did it work? If not, can you hit ESC and still save the option?

(None of my old TPs have this, so I can't check.)

------
whatnotests
Flash.

No, really. JavaScript hasn't quite caught up to what was possible ten years
ago.

I'm tire of waiting for browsers to agree on video formats and protocols.

Sometimes a benevolent dictator really is better.

~~~
rogual
Seconded. Flash's vector engine was also superior to the Canvas 2D API. You
can export to HTML/JS from Flash these days but you get artifacts and gaps at
the edges because Canvas simply doesn't support things like shapes sharing an
edge.

Flash was "killed" before there was a viable replacement and Flash devs are
still feeling the pain.

------
ILoveMonads
1\. Metrowerks.

2\. Turbo Pascal for Windows (which I guess became Delphi)

3\. C-Terp

~~~
msbarnett
God I miss Metrowerks, for so many reasons.

------
TaiFood
Common sense.

~~~
teknopaul
Google Wave.

Only kidding. ;)

~~~
based2
[https://incubator.apache.org/wave/](https://incubator.apache.org/wave/)

------
ProxCoques
File servers. Everywhere I've worked for the past 5 years makes you use a
cloud "solution" like DropBox or Google Drive. Those things are find for
individual use, but a nightmare to work with in a team. "I'll share that doc
with you." "I can't access it - can you give me permissions?" "OK what's your
email address..." etc. I sure do miss the days when a) there was a common root
directory that everyone could see and b) the issue of permissions wasn't crowd
sourced to people who don't understand permissions systems.

