No so much orphaned as obsolete: cassette tapes. They were easier and less finicky to record than CD-Rs, more robust, and towards the end of the 1990s, acheiving a sound quality that was close to CD on a car or non-audiophile home system.
The Sharp Wizard.
I used those for years, and loved them. I could enter and retrieve data easily and rapidly, no need for bells and whistles. Then for some reason, we decided we’d rather WRITE on PDA screens. Never understood why we’d want to do that.
Never went back to using a PDA again. Although I understand we’re back to typing again on these newfangled BlackBerry thingies?
Still fond of my Sony Clie.
I’ll third the vote for the Psion Revo; great little machine. Now I get by with an Acer netbook, which is both better and worse than the Psion was.
Also - I miss the type-ahead feature in DOS. There is just no way that I’ve found in Windows that you can input five or six commands while the computer is still executing the first command…TRM
I miss File Manager for Windows 3.11. It had little icons at the top that were your drive letters so switching to different drives was easy as pie.
I have a Nokia 770 that is a perfect ebook reader for me. When they came out with a new model, they goofed. The 770 has an integrated hard case, the buttons are easy to distinguish and push. The new one comes with a cloth bag and the buttons are for shit.
I have my NES. Tetris is in it. I can’t find the controllers or power supply. I am sad.
Try searching in Amazon, but read the reviews. There are some refurbished original controllers, which seem to work pretty well, and at least one controller made by a third party which doesn’t even fit the NES. They also list some power supplies. Or, Google for the controller and power supply, and I’m sure you’ll find plenty of them for sale.
I miss them too. My main hobby in the 90s was tape trading. Now I have all of these tapes and no inclination to take the time to put them on CD.
Also, when it was tapes it felt really special to get a copy of something. Now everything is a click away. You’re no longer in an exclusive club.
The feature I miss from File Manager is the option to “Overwrite if Newer”. It let you condense multiple folders of work without having to worry about losing the newest work. (I know, sloppy of me but I’m working on it.)
I miss actual knobs on car stereos. Actual knobs that had a definite high/low limit rather then just being infinitely spinning and computer-sampled. And separate knobs for bass, trable, balance, fader, although I rarely touched the last two. Now you have to go beep-beep-beeping though a bunch of menus to do anything.
I miss the VMS operating system. I could make a VAX stand on its hind legs and howl at the moon if I wanted to.
I kind of miss the original clean Palm PDA OS before everything went to Windows Mobile based PDAs.
I miss the old super heavy duty IBM keyboards.
I miss VU meters on sound equipment with needles vs LEDS.
VU meters were cool to watch.
I still use an IBM model M keyboard. It has that large-diameter plug on it, but all I needed was a PS2 adapter for it to use on a modern PC. This thing feels like it will never wear out, still as tough and clicky as ever.
My Amiga. I’m not one of those die-hards trying to browse the web on it, and I haven’t had one powered up in a decade, but there are still things that have yet to be re-invented on modern machines, PC or Mac.
For instance, the Amiga 1000 I used had a Live video digitizer (like a modern video input card) and a Genlock, a device that could overlay the Amiga’s graphics over incoming video for titling. Both of these technologies exist on PC and Mac now, but their appearance on the Amiga caused a flood of innovative products that died with the Amiga and have not re-appeared.
I used the Live board with a piece of software called Invision Plus by a company called Elan. The only proof that it even existed was a mind-numbingly dull promotional video by the company that completely missed the point of the software. It was just digitizing video in B&W, but you could apply new color palettes to the gray scales, color cycle those palettes, do basic video effects like flipping and mirroring the image, keying, strobing, etc… Bit the clever part was that any combination of these effects setups could be applied to any key so you could have 40 or so different presets available. Also, the various parameters could be assigned to the mouse movements and two buttons - so you could have color cycle applied to mouse up and down plus left-mouse button, etc. Also, short video clips were assignable to the function keys - but the clever bit was that shift-function-key would record.
So I’d be doing a show with a band I used to work with called the Psychowelders. I’d have the big video projector set up (this was back in the days of CRT projectors), a friend on the camera shooting the band getting goofy angles, and processing the living shit out of the video. If the bass player was banging his head, I could hit a key, capturing 5 seconds of that and play the loop whenever I wanted, mixing it with the live feed of the singer, my left hand flying over the keys, my right on the mouse or mixing the video on the genlock.
For all the power modern computers have, I have still not seen a piece of software that will allow me to manipulate video in real time with anywhere near this level of flexibility. If you know of one, I’d love to hear it.
This is my favorite piece of old technology. I never could get it to transfer files to my regular computer though.
I love old technology and abandonware. I’ve got Commodore 64s, a Commodore +4 (it was the business model), NES, Atari 2600, Intelivision, Milton Bradley BlockBuster (the first portable designed for different game cartridges), Gameboys and more.
My favorite old piece of software is Beast. It used Ascii characters for graphics. You were a blue diamond that pushed around chunks of green wall to kill red H’s. It’s about a thousand times more fun than it sounds. I still have Beast but it runs way too fast on anything over a 286. Trying to slow it down with Moslo, Slo and such just gets me errors.
Since the OP includes abandonware, I miss Sidekick. It still kicks Outlook’s ass.
Similarly, I keep buying up used Apple ADB Extended Keyboard and Extended Keyboard II (aka “Saratoga”) keyboards and use a USB/ADB adapter. I love that solid & springy feelng.
My old Intellivision still works.
Tron and the Shooting Gallery are still fun.
Dungeons and Dragons, not so much.
When I was a Freshman in college (1993) to get internet access you had to sign up for and get ADI. (I thought that stood for Asynchronous Data Interface but that brings up no hits so… dunno) It was better than a modem because you could still get a phone call over the same line while the ADI was using it. It was way faster than a modem too – almost as fast as ethernet as I understand. The dorms were wired with ethernet in 1997. I never heard of an ADI again, but when I was living on a rural farm, and was once again reliant on a modem, I sure missed my ADI – it’s a pain having your calls blocked while you get your Dope fix. Pity, really.
In a separate bout of nostalgia, you had to manually handshake ++++++_ when you heard the carrier signal. Those were the days!
HD-DVD, but I’ll save that fight for another thread. Most of the Blu-rays that I buy play properly…
I also preferred Windows 3.x and Dos 6.x, even though now I would probably hate giving up the stuff that modern Windows offers. I still think there something strange about playing games through Windows. The only good games were Dos only.
I miss the photo program that came with Windows. It was the greatest tool for scanning and quickly cropping or adjusting a picture. Newer versions of Windows would beep some indignation if it was loaded but it worked until I got to XP professional and now it just refuses to let it run.
I also miss separate knobs for car stereos. My current one has a volume knob. It was one of the reasons I chose it. However, it has a USB port so I found a micro-sd reader that is the size of a nickle. Only a 1/4 inch of it sticks out of my stereo so I effectively now have an 8 gb hard drive.