161–170 of 912 posts
The information superhighway The internet before advertising, artificial intelligence, social media and bots. When folks created startups in their bedrooms or garages. The days when google slogan was “don’t be evil”.
WebOS. Javascript/HTML based smartphone / app interface.
In the late 90s there was a website called fuckedcompany which was a place where people could spill the beans about startups (mainly in silicon valley). It was anonymous and a pretty good view into the real state of tech. Now there is twitter/x but it's not as focused on this niche.
I kind of expect we might see something similar if the AI bubble pops
I wonder who owns the domain now
Looked cool during demos. Got killed when Flash died.
Fortress language. It suffered from being too Haskell-like in terms of too many, non-orthogonal features. Rust and Go applied lessons from it perhaps indirectly.
Microsoft Silverlight. Full C# instead of god forbidden js. Full vector dpi aware UI, with grid, complex animation, and all other stuff that html5/css didn’t have in 2018 but silverlight had even in 2010 (probable even earlier). MVVM pattern, two-way bindings. Expression Blend (basically figma) that allowed designers create UI that was XAML, had sample data, and could be used be devs as is with maybe some cleanup. Ex…
Lots of their stuff was delivered as Silverlight apps. It turns out that getting office workers to install a blessed plugin from Microsoft and navigate to a web page is much easier than distributing binaries that you have to install and keep up to date. And developing for it was pure pleasure; you got to use C# and Visual Studio, and a GUI interface builder, rather than the Byzantine HTML/JS/CSS ecosystem.
I get why it never took off, but in this niche of small-time custom software it was really way nicer than anything else that existed at the time. Web distribution combined with classic desktop GUI development.
I could think of many examples, but I'll talk about the top four that I have in mind, that I'd like to see re-evaluated for today's times. 1. When Windows Vista was being developed, there were plans to replace the file system with a database, allowing users to organize and search for files using database queries. This was known as WinFS ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS ). I was looking forward to this in the mid…
MIME types for mail addressed much of the demand for pluggable data types.
If something like that existed today, powered by modern APIs and AI, it could become the ultimate no-code creativity playground.
Just on principle, I'd have liked to see it on the market for more than 49 days! It pains me as an engineer to think of the effort to bring a hardware device to market for such a minuscule run.