Have you ever had some software that you really liked but then it went out of date?
I was reading about the potential of abandoned technologies and the difficulties in resurrecting them due to copyrights etc.
My question is what was your favourite orphaned technology or abandonware?
I miss my Atari 400 computer.
But what I REALLY miss is reel-to-reel tape.
I miss the old Nintendo. I want to dig out the Koei Nobunaga’s Ambition for it.
Yep, Nintendo 64. I never DID manage to beat the final monster in Breath of Fire II.
I miss Zip drives and Zip disks. Yes, I know they were unreliable and that we now have postage stamp sized devices that can hold thousands of times more information than Zip disks but I still miss them. I still have my original USB drive and one disk. I remember the joy I experienced when I bought and opened the box. Like a kid with a new toy.
Zip drives were brilliant at the time, considering that for many they replaced those clunky Syquest drives.
I just finished restoring my TurboGrafx16, just so I could play one of my favorite games again: Splatterhouse. Eh - it’s not all that great; I guess you had to be there. I loved the music, though - especially around the 1:50 mark.
There’s a “new” console out…plays NES and SNES games, in one console. I’m thinking about getting it, as I have my SNES console hooked up (hey, I love Secret of Mana, OK?) and I’d like to play some of my old NES games, too.
I miss After Dark. I could watch the rock, paper, and scissors chase each other around all day. Also the groovy swirling colors.
I miss minidiscs. I wish Sony hadn’t crippled the data version by making the discs different from the audio version; data minidiscs never had a chance in the computer market and there was only a relatively-short time that it could have pushed aside the zipdisk as a successor to the floppy disk.
I miss Wordperfect when if fit on 2 floppy disks, and you only needed one for just about everything.
I miss MS DOS Version 3.1 (or was it version 3.31?) never crashed, had better system tools than Windows or Vista does now.
They also should have pushed them in the US. They didn’t start advertising them until something like a year before the iPod was released–which was already a full decade after the creation of the minidisc.
The Psion Revo (or, as it was branded in the US, the Diamond Mako). Best PDA ever made, bar none. Crisp screen, fine keyboard, powerful OS, and the whole thing was the most solid-feeling clamshell design you could want. Roughly the size of an iphone.
I have one (I used to work for them). It had a great little keyboard. Just try to hook it up to a Mac these days, though…
This isn’t an orphaned platform, but a feature that seemed to disappear in the past year: Tablet PC with high-resolution display (SXGA+ or WXGA+).
My current tablet PC is a Lenovo X61T, and I opted for the 1400x1050 display. It’s been fantastic, but after using it as my main work+personal computer for over a year, it’s becoming unreliable and worn, and I’d like to get a working spare. Except I can’t - every single tablet PC currently available has a 1280x800 or smaller display. And that’s not quite enough pixels to display a full page of a scientific journal article and read it comfortably. I honestly don’t understand it. It’s a common complaint on tablet PC message boards, and older tablet PCs with high-resolution screens are selling for good money on eBay.
There’s something satisfying about using tech items that are physically substantial. Heavier, more solid devices just feel more powerful than tiny, lightweight ones, even if they’re not in actuality. I absolutely cannot stand using new-generation keyboards, especially the ones on Macs - those flat, weightless keys with no heft to them do not respond to my fingers and I wind up typing gibberish every time. I need a good solid heavy keyboard, with big, raised keys.
Also - Sega Dreamcast. It still pisses me off that they disabled the Shenmue Online feature, which means I can’t buy the special toys.
HoTMeteL Pro. It’s apparently evolved into a high-end XML tool called XMetal, but it’s not advertised.
It had a feature that would allow you to follow every link on your web site graphically. I wish I knew what the technical term for this type of interface was. It was completely intuitive in operation, but hard to explain. Here goes:
Here’s a icon representing a web page. Every link on that page has lines going to the pages linked. In turn, every one of those pages has links to further pages. The clever bit was that the page in the middle of the window was “magnified”. The second level pages were smaller, and the 3rd level pages were even smaller and closer together. So, when you’d click on an area in the window, you’d drag the one of the other pages and it would be the one magnified.
The closest analogy would be beads strung on lace laid over a hemisphere. The lace at the top of the hemisphere is widely spread out, while the rest is bunched together round the edges.
When you had a large web site loaded into this program, you could see complicated areas, broken links, external links and how it all fit together in one easy system. It was so cool.
Say what you will about America Online, but AOL Press was one of the best WYSIWYG HTML editors for it’s time. It never kept up with the advances in CSS or XHTML and was eventually dropped altogether, but I still have a copy here and still use it every now and then for very simple web editing tasks,
I definitely miss zip disks. They were like floppy disks but with steroids. Solid state memory just came by way too quickly…
I miss the Classic MacOS. Oh, not in the sense that I wish I were still stuck with its myriad limitations, but it was such a fundamentally cute little OS. You could give me the files that constitute MacOS 8 or 9, but not in their proper folders, just loose; and I could arrange them properly and boot a a device from what you had given me. It was that simple. All the other operating systems have to be “installed” to result in bootability, with the old classic MacOS you usually only needed the System file and the Finder file, in the same folder (any folder, no matter what its name), on any media with a Mac-native format.
And dear god you could boot from damn near ANYTHING if you could format it HFS or HFS+. If the central hardware could “see” the storage medium on which the OS files existed without having to load a fancy 3rd party driver beforehand, it could boot from it. I’ve booted MacOS 9 (8, 7, 6…) from: hard disks and floppies (of course), SyQuests, Zip cartridges, 21 MB Flopticals (OK that took awhile), Type III PC Cards (PCMCIA Cards), Jaz disks, CDs, DVDs, iPods, solid-state “flash” drives, pen drives, digital camera memory sticks, and even (maybe) a backup TAPE drive (after 10 minutes it was still not past the smiling Mac face and I got tired of waiting…those things are not designed to do seek operations quickly!)