The Psion Series 3 handhelds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_3 A (tiny, but) usable, physical keyboard on a device that lasted _ages_, fit into a suit pocket and was eminently practical. The age of the PDA is long gone (heck, I'm typing this on an iPad mini), but we still haven't caught up with some of its best bits.
I saw someone using a 5mx on a train a month ago. It was still fully functional and he was perfectly happy with his 96MB CompactFlash card.
Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
211–220 of 891 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
#212RSS, Usenet newsgroups, netbooks, 4:3 CRT monitors, GNOME 2.x, non-BitTorrent file sharing networks.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
#213CygnusEd editor for Amiga. Thanks Bruce
Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
#214* IBM ThinkPad T41p/60. Lenovo T410/X210 where still somewhat fine. But these newer ultrabooks nowadays have less powerful specs than 5 year old notebooks. The Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon isn't bad, but a far cry given it's ultrabook less powerful specs than an 5 year old high end notebook. And these shitty keyboard nowadays, give me back the old keyboard layout like grouped F1-F12 key, better placed Home/PgUp/PgDn/End…
Lenovo destroyed the Thinkpad legacy. I gave up on them a few years ago when they dropped the 7 row keyboard. The 7 row keyboard was leagues ahead of any other laptop keyboard, ever. The replacement keyboard is awful. I hate the loss of web forward/back keys too. I hate chicklet keys. I hate pgup/dn placed as though I'll almost never use them. I still prefer the trackpoint over any touchpad. I'd buy a retro Thinkpad,…
Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
#215* IBM ThinkPad T41p/60. Lenovo T410/X210 where still somewhat fine. But these newer ultrabooks nowadays have less powerful specs than 5 year old notebooks. The Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon isn't bad, but a far cry given it's ultrabook less powerful specs than an 5 year old high end notebook. And these shitty keyboard nowadays, give me back the old keyboard layout like grouped F1-F12 key, better placed Home/PgUp/PgDn/End…
Lenovo destroyed the Thinkpad legacy. I gave up on them a few years ago when they dropped the 7 row keyboard. The 7 row keyboard was leagues ahead of any other laptop keyboard, ever. The replacement keyboard is awful. I hate the loss of web forward/back keys too. I hate chicklet keys. I hate pgup/dn placed as though I'll almost never use them. I still prefer the trackpoint over any touchpad. I'd buy a retro Thinkpad,…
Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
#216IMO.im Back in the days, when the service unified different messengers in a single web interface, also providing a handy history search.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just try to interview as a front end engineer these days. Someone at Airbnb laughed at me because I used a for loop instead of lodash on an array. He said "wow, you write it old school." Why write fast code when you can write triple transpiled bloats bullshit vis a vis Babel, flow and jsx.
The best part of this: The native for loop is what lodash uses. It's the fastest way to do it.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
#218I never do it anymore, but it worked great until I got a PC, a Psion 5, and especially after my first Macbook. Since then I barely write with a pen, and if I do it's cramped.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
#219Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wrote my first program in HyperCard.
"HyperCard was created by Bill Atkinson following a LSD trip." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard HyperCard somehow managed to be almost as captivating as the web, with barely any resources.