
Ask HN: What technology are you sad to see going extinct in the wild? - kleer001
Hardware or software or technique or best practices...
======
duncan_bayne
Email. It's becoming more and more common for people to rely on Twitter,
Facebook, LinkedIn or other proprietary, closed systems.

Several times this year I've tried to get in touch with someone online only to
find that they simply don't make an email address available.

~~~
kleer001
True. I'm starting to realize that these seemingly rock solid "places" are
really just ephemeral watering holes. BBSes, AOL, Facebook, Twitter,
Instagram... Let's drink up in comradeship before it dries away.

~~~
duncan_bayne
But more significantly (I think): it is socially acceptable to expect people
to sign up to closed systems in order to communicate.

How can we reverse this trend?

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pjungwir
Filemaker Pro. It is flexible and under-the-radar like Excel, so non-
programmers can just get stuff done, but you wind up much less of a mess once
it metastasizes into a critical business tool. It even has a client-server
mode so you have share-ability.

Aldus PageMaker. This isn't going extinct---it's long dead. I did our college
literary magazine with this, and it was so fluid. For professional work it
lost to Quark, but it was so much better for ordinary people with small-to-
medium projects. I've never seen anything like it since.

Knockout. This is really nice technology: so much simpler than Angular or
Ember, more like a library than a framework. Made to play nice with lots of
other small JS tools. But last I checked the mapping plugin was abandoned and
had no replacement. I would love to use this for my projects but feel like it
would be a disservice to my clients.

------
Blackthorn
IRC. I basically grew up on it.

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daxfohl
\- Plain HTML. Now even craigslist has succumbed to "web 2.0" pressure. Web
1.0 really wasn't so bad.

\- Drop shadows

\- TV stations. You used to be able to go to a friend's house and know how to
operate the TV without needing a tutorial.

\- Microwave Knobs. Whoever decided that pressing "Time Cook -> 1 -> 0 -> 0 ->
Start", and waiting about 55 seconds and then opening the door, and then still
forcing me to press "Reset", instead of just supplying an old-fashioned timer
knob (accurate to within ~5 sec), and selling that to literally billions of
people, kudos to you. I want knobs back.

\- "Lack thereof". You used to be able to travel to developing nations and get
away from all this junk. "No longer can you do this", which, eh, pouty-face,
but "never again will this be possible", which really is kind of jolting to
me. (And yes I, even in my years, do understand it creates a greater good
(health) but does it? (souls))

\- "finger". Just because, "haha"

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zaidmo
Floppy disk and cd/dvd drives! When you need to recover files from an old pc
and need a Windows XP startup disk.... it's no fun in 2015.

Worse, it was on an IDE Hard drive and I couldn't find an external hard drive
case for it so I had to take it to a PC repair store that had an IDE adaptor.
Charges $40 to copy any amount of data above 20 Gigabytes.

~~~
kleer001
I'll kinda miss the portability there of those. Not the multiplicity. Too many
"standards", especially as you piled on the megabytes. 50MG Optical disk? Yea,
where do I get a drive for that?

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bbcbasic
Mobile phones that still work when you drop them.

P.S. Do American people call them cell phones or mobile phones now? A few
years ago mobile seemed more a British thing to say, but with "mobile"
entering the language of the web maybe it is different now.

~~~
HelloHN
In the old days we use to just call them cell phones. These days I just call
it "my iPhone" or when I am referencing other people's phone, I just say
"phone". If I am developing and talking about it in development context, then
and only then do I reference mobile of any kind.

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Gustomaximus
Building your own desktop. I know this still exists but it seems more sub-
culture than ever. I have such fond memories of planning the perfect rig. Now
my laptop can pretty much handle anything (lower but acceptable specs) so the
need is greatly reduced.

Thunderbird. As I said somewhere else on this thread I feel the market is ripe
for a new email alternative. That said Outlook is a great tool if you take the
time to learn beyond the basics.

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AnimalMuppet
Extreme programming. When done right, it was an _amazing_ environment to work
in. It was just too hard to do right...

~~~
trcollinson
Some of us are actually still quite active with Extreme programming :) it is
hardly dead in the world. But there is a lot of truth to the idea that
management and project management people tend to like scrum a heck of a lot
more.

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cdnsteve
Zip drives. Most of my work in college is still on those!

~~~
kleer001
whirrrrr.... click - click

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dandrift
It can all go. It was never useful, and was/will not be used to try to pass
the beginner stuff in this world.

~~~
kleer001
> pass the beginner stuff in this world.

Sorry? What do you mean?

------
mindcrime
Gopher

NNTP

BBS's

WAIS

X11 (maybe, depending on how Wayland turns out)

OS/2 (esp. Workplace Shell)

MUDs

Payphones

------
anon3_
\- Gnome 2, KDE 3 - The old-style interfaces. Simplicity.

\- Old Slashdot

\- Old style Thinkpads

\- 4chan before it had captcha

\- Kazaa (do these networks still work?)

\- Suprnova (warez has gone downhill, since we now have open source
alternatives)

\- Turntable.fm

\- Runescape Classic

\- Old Firefox (when it was light, phoenix 0.1

\- Utorrent (before they wrecked it with adware)

\- Windows 2000 classic interface, XP

\- Nokia N900 (debian phone, nokia abandoned linux and maemo for microsoft.)

\- Razr 3 / Old nokia "Dumbphones" \- built like tanks. Solid. Reliable.

\- I miss the old innocence of PHP Vbulletin, early CMS systems like PHP-Nuke
- which at the time were cool.

\- Photoshop 6 (before they put CRM callhomes everywhere)

\- BZFlag - no one cares about this anymore :(

\- MySpace - I liked how you could customize it. It was more individualistic

\- AOL / MSN / Yahoo Chat. People were more open to making friendships online.

~~~
mindcrime
> Gnome 2, KDE 3 - The old-style interfaces. Simplicity.

Good one. The good news is, some alternate versions of some of those are still
available and maintained. And, at least since they're OSS, worst case, you
could fork it yourself. :-)

> BZFlag - no one cares about this anymore :(

I hear ya. I've been thinking about setting up a BZFlag instance on a Fogbeam
server, alongside some other "classic" technologies and just put it out there
for people to play around with.

> \- AOL / MSN / Yahoo Chat. People were more open to making friendships
> online.

Don't forget ICQ. That said, I don't so much miss those, as just wishing
people would use Jabber instead of Facebook Messenger or this other
proprietary crap.

