ello.co - what a fun and pretty social media website that was.
Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
201–210 of 912 posts
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#202Fro me, DESQview. Microsoft tried to buy it in order to use its tech in their windows system. I wonder how things would be today if they were able to purchase it. But DESQview said "no". Instead it went into a slow death spiral due to Windows 95.
Love seeing this one. My uncle was co-founder of Quarterdeck, and I grew up in a world of DESQview and QEMM. It was a big influence on me as a child.
Got a good family story about that whole acquisition attempt, but I don't want to speak publicly on behalf of my uncle. I know we've talked at length about the what-ifs of that moment.
I do have a scattering of some neat Quarterdeck memorabilia I can share, though:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/0ca1omn2kwda9op5go34e/ACpO6bz...
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#203In 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.
creator now makes wild, bespoke headphones https://www.reddit.com/user/pudjam667/submitted/
This is hilarious, thanks for sharing.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#204RethinkDB. Technically it still exists (under The Linux Foundation), but (IMO) the original company's widening scope (the Horizon BaaS) that eventually led to its demise killed its momentum.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#205RAM Disks. Basically extremely fast storage using RAM sticks slotted into a specially made board that fit in a PCIe slot. Not sure what happened to the project exactly but the website disappeared sometime in 2023. The idea that you could read and write data at RAM speeds was really exciting to me. At work it's very common to see microscope image sets anywhere from 20 to 200 GB and file transfer rates can be a big bot…
soon will be able to buy a gigabyte AI Top CXL R5X4. PCI expansion card with up to 512gb RAM over four DIMMs.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#206CLPM, the Common Lisp Package Manager. The Quicklisp client doesn't do HTTPS, ql-https doesn't do Ultralisp, and OCICL (which I'm currently using) doesn't do system-wide packages. CLPM is a great project, but it's gone neglected long enough that it's bitrotted and needs some thorough patching to be made usable. Fortunately Common Lisp is still as stable as it has been for 31 years, so it's just the code which interacts with 3rd-party libraries that needs updating.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#207Nokia smartphone line killed by Microshaft.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#208Yahoo Pipes
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#209A lot of things on https://killedbygoogle.com/ . I used to use 30-40 Google products and services. I'm down to 3-4. Google Picasa: Everything local, so fast, so good. I'm never going to give my photos to G Photos. Google Hangouts: Can't keep track of all the Google chat apps. I use Signal now. Google G Suite Legacy: It was supposed to be free forever. They killed it, tried to make me pay. I migrated out of Google. Go…
I still use PICASA it works fine. However, when google severed the gdrive-photo linking it meant my photos didn’t automatically download from google to my PC. This is what killed google for me.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#210RAM Disks. Basically extremely fast storage using RAM sticks slotted into a specially made board that fit in a PCIe slot. Not sure what happened to the project exactly but the website disappeared sometime in 2023. The idea that you could read and write data at RAM speeds was really exciting to me. At work it's very common to see microscope image sets anywhere from 20 to 200 GB and file transfer rates can be a big bot…
There's now a standard for memory over a physical PCIe interface (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compute_Express_Link) and off-the-shelf products (https://www.micron.com/products/memory/cxl-memory).