Ask HN: What were the tech trends thought to be revolutionary but died out?

Second Life and all the similar stuff.

Iirc IBM even held an event there and had like an official place.

Cool concept tho.

It was known 15 years ago that sensors will be the next big thing, but Kinect did not make it. It was later repurposed as an AI sensor.

Sensors are more important than ever, but they became technological details as opposed to selling points.

Most tech trends are less revolutionary than they first appear. Really life-changing stuff doesn’t come along that often.

Parallel computing's actually progressed pretty far. Virtually all GPU-based applications (unfortunatly, cyptocurrency mining being the most notable) are massively / embarassingly parallel.

As far as practical applications --- the set is vastly smaller, especially where there's a human in the REPL loop.

Shareware - Back when we had the relative safety of hardware too dumb to stuff trojan horses in, and write protectable operating system disks, it was commonplace to have a vendor at your local user group with floppy diskettes full of new stuff to try out, for $2-3 per disk. There are thousands of disks with dozens of programs on each.

This was mobile code on a scale that is currently impossible. Once we get capability based security that protects the hardware and our data from things we run by default, it's possible it'll make a comeback, and there will be another wild explosion of creativity in programming.