Corn Flakes, the old recipe
Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
371–380 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#372HyperCard. It's been decades and I've still never found a better way to make simple GUI applications.
Maybe give http://www.hyperfiddle.net/ a try too.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#373DabbleDB, it was such a great way to play with data til you knew how it should be organized.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#374Groklaw
There are important legal things happening, involving our industry, and which I think do not get the coverage required.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#375Video game arcades. They were amazing during their heyday, but I was also young. I want both of those things back!
Inflation changes things. 25 cents back in 1984 would be worth about $2.00 now.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#376The Macbook Pro chassis before the OLED touchstrip. I'm a web developer and learned on MBPs. The touchpad was the right size, the keys had the right amount of travel, the form factor and weight were perfect. Right now I'm considering moving to developing on a Galaga Pro and using Windows/WSL. I've got most things setup on my desktop how I like using HyperTerm (I had too much trouble with Cmder), VS Code, and ZSH. I c…
WSL is very, very slow. Be warned.
It's really not slow, I use it for everyday work in webdev and I basically have very few complaints
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#377The Axis-49 [1]. Ninety eight velocity sensitive keys in a hexagonal layout, ready to be remapped to Wicki-Hayden. I discovered them after they were discontinued and when a used one popped up after several years I bought it, but I'm really disappointed these didn't catch on. [1] https://www.c-thru-music.com/cgi/?page=prod_axis-49
Have you become proficient with them? I thought it was an interesting idea but the quality of the hardware is really pretty poor (buttons get stuck as you press them) and the hexagonal layout does not really seem that easy to learn / operate.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#378Grooveshark had a better interface for managing "currently playing" than anything I've used before or since. Most apps don't even track what's currently playing in an intelligent fashion. Similarly, rockbox was really great mp3 player firmware, when I used to use one of those. It had a funny feature I've never seen elsewhere: multi-lingual article-ignoring sort. I had German band "Die Prinzen" on that mp3 player, and…
iTunes sort of has the sort thing: if you open up the track info window, you can specify sorting versions of the various pieces of metadata
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#379Irix and SGI computers 90s era design in general.
Sad to see Silicon Graphics so far down this list.
IRIX Indigo Magic Desktop was the Rolls Royce of user interfaces in an era when Apple computers couldn't even do multi-tasking and PC's still had an interface (Windows) that sat on MS-DOS. Linux was a 'toy' with a GUI that was positively 'off-brand' and the Sun version of X-Window was just plain awkward, clunky and slow. Meanwhile, on SGI computers, you could have a 'CPU eater' 3D rendered desktop background with real-time video compositing in 3D scenes going on in your programs.
SGI computers were also 'useless' at things normal people used PCs for. So no spreadsheets and certainly no word-processors. Games were also lacking, yet so many games were built with SGI machines.
Regarding the design of the boxes, nothing exuded power and awe in quite the same way. Racks of SGI hardware made a place 'mission control', other stuff is just data centre plumbing that just does not project a futuristic vision of cool. To take an automotive analogy a gaggle of SGI machines was more like a Formula 1 grid of cars whereas any other computers en-masse just looked like a supermarket car park.
There was something accessible about video and 3D on the SGI machines that has not been seen since. Hardware may be better today but it does not compel you to want to play with it.
I blame Microsoft for destroying SGI even though there were problems with the wider SGI management and business model. We ended up with a 2D flat web whereas had SGI been around then I am sure that things would have been 3D, in the browser, as per the awesome demos that came with the machines back then.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#380Video game arcades. They were amazing during their heyday, but I was also young. I want both of those things back!
A nice one no one seems to know about is near Seattle in Monroe WA. Called "let's play Cafe". I used to take my son there to teach him video game history.