The Lost Apps of the 80s • Hacker News Board

Re: The Lost Apps of the 80s

#91

Post by efficax » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 1:52 PM UTC

currymj wrote: post #24

Isn't Notion pretty close to what's being described here? Sort of weird combination of networked spreadsheet, relational database, writing + notetaking app? There's been an explosion of competitors and imitators, too. Some, like Roam, definitely have a utopian 1980s hypertext ethos.

Notion is definitely the closest but it lacks some of the magic (maybe it will get there).

Lotus Agenda for example would take your notes and automatically categorize them based on the categories you created in the earlier not taking process, allowing you to filter your notes by different "views" with no input on your end (after the initial category creation). For example you could mention a contact in a Task or Note and then that note would appear under the view for that contact automatically. Etc.

All this in 640k.

Re: The Lost Apps of the 80s

#92

Post by jimbokun » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 2:22 PM UTC

dmz73 wrote: post #83

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One could say video, but live TV existed before. Okay but, could anyone broadcast on TV? Could anyone have their own TV channel? TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitch... preceded by JustinTV, Vine, Periscope. It's a different ballgame. There's whole new revenue streams, individual content creators are collectively making a ton of money . Consumers are directly (or nearly directly) compensating creators in many cases…

That is still just improvement on what's already available. Next level will be obvious when it is available. It could be VR or AR or something so radical we can't imagine it but it has to be like computer to typewriter improvement. It does everything old technology did but it also opens the door to a whole new level of development.

> That is still just improvement on what's already available.

This is the entire history of computing.

Re: The Lost Apps of the 80s

#93

Post by currymj » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 2:41 PM UTC

efficax wrote: post #91

currymj wrote: post #24

Isn't Notion pretty close to what's being described here? Sort of weird combination of networked spreadsheet, relational database, writing + notetaking app? There's been an explosion of competitors and imitators, too. Some, like Roam, definitely have a utopian 1980s hypertext ethos.

Notion is definitely the closest but it lacks some of the magic (maybe it will get there). Lotus Agenda for example would take your notes and automatically categorize them based on the categories you created in the earlier not taking process, allowing you to filter your notes by different "views" with no input on your end (after the initial category creation). For example you could mention a contact in a Task or Note…

Roam started doing something very close to this with its backlinks, and a lot of the competing notetaking apps are imitating this feature. For instance I believe Notion has this now too -- if you link to or mention a page, a backlink will automatically up on that page.

Anyway, I think it will get there. The fact that Notion is using 500MB of RAM on my machine is definitely a downside compared to older software...

Re: The Lost Apps of the 80s

#94

Post by vidanay » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 2:51 PM UTC

jbullock35 wrote: post #8

People who weren't alive at the time may not appreciate how different the commercial app ecosystem was: how many more options, how much less concentrated. Here is a PC Magazine cover from 1988: https://archive.org/details/PC-Mag-1988-02-29 . It boasts a review of 55 different word processors. All of them would have been commercial; none of it was free, let alone open-source. It wasn't just word processors. Here is a…

God, flipping through those magazines brings a tear of nostalgia to my eye. Those were such different days.

Re: The Lost Apps of the 80s

#95

Post by chrisdone » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 3:25 PM UTC

gecko wrote: post #15

Whenever this comes up, I always ask, even though I can anticipate the answer: has anyone cloned Lotus Improv, either literally or ideologically? The closest thing I've used recently that was close was probably Airtable, but that's more an iterative improvement on FileMaker/Access, with a web focus, than really a competitor to Improv. There also used to be a Java desktop app, but it wasn't targeted for casual desktop…

I’m working on https://inflex.io/ which can achieve the data / logic separation of Improv, by putting functions in cells. But Improv isn’t an inspiration. Inflex is certainly closer to it than Airtable though.

Re: The Lost Apps of the 80s

#96

Post by every » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 3:25 PM UTC

In the 80's and 90's I used Tornado Notes for DOS both at work and at home:

https://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue76/ibm_writing_t...

Re: The Lost Apps of the 80s

#97

Post by marbletiles » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 3:30 PM UTC

jonahbenton wrote: post #3

Quick hypothesis on PIMs/editors/etc, from someone who worked on a PIM in the late 1980s and who misses outliners and others- the biggest "unimagined" change is from personal information management to hive-mind information management (via search engines). It used to be that everyone had to maintain their own personal "library"- now this activity is relegated to cranks and luddites. The second order effect is a change…

This is a great insight, but there's a third angle too: a lot of these 80s tools assumed you'd invest in them, and not just in cash: you'd give them a lot of time and attention and learning and hence reap expert-user rewards. The world simply isn't like that now, except in niches.

And if you're niche, you can't establish a new file format in a networked world, so you end up having to be interoperable, with markdown in text or xls for spreadsheets. And if you're interoperable, you end up shrinking your market even further: people your users are sharing with don't need to use you.

You really can't build much of a moat on "powerful UX that boils down to a sharable file format". The only way to make space for yourself then is to become a platform in your own right (see emacs/vscode etc).

And what prevents spreadsheets becoming a platform? The install base of Excel, for a kickoff, but also the enormous limitations of csv on the other hand.

In short, the conditions that allowed all those 1980s applications to flourish – bespoke file formats, invested users, no truly dominant players, less networked sharing - have all gone. And so have the apps.

Re: The Lost Apps of the 80s

#98

Post by ConceptJunkie » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 3:42 PM UTC

cblconfederate wrote: post #75

mard wrote: post #44

It's weird to see the term "App" in relation to anything before iOS era. Back then such software used to be mostly called applications or just programs. [1] [1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=app%2Ccomputer...

Yeah now even microsoft has renamed "programs" to "apps" in windows. On the one hand it s bad because they are all programs made by programmers who know programming, and it's all that people need to know. OTOH , it's kinda good that the status of mobile apps is equated with ordinary desktop apps, because it makes users realize that their walled garden is needlessly walled.

Microsoft is inconsistent with this. At one point, based on my understanding, "programs" meant traditional Windows apps and "apps" meant those "Modern" Windows 8 apps that they tried to foist on us. Then, at some point, it seems "apps" came to mean any application. Of course, Microsoft hasn't had consistency for a long time.

In some ways, I miss the Microsoft of the 80s and 90s. Sure, they were totally evil, but at least they made good UIs.

Re: The Lost Apps of the 80s

#99

Post by ConceptJunkie » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 3:44 PM UTC

tablet wrote: post #72

I think the main reason of their abandonment is Internet. It just changed everything, people stopped create desktop apps and started to create web apps. However, web as a platform was really weak for complex apps, so only now we see how companies re-discover lost apps from 80s and re-create them in the web (Notion, Coda, Airtable, Fibery)

The web ended up setting back UI 20 years. Everything good from the 80s and 90s is being slowly and haphazardly recreated in the web browser, and we're still not to where we were in the late 90s.

Re: The Lost Apps of the 80s

#100

Post by ConceptJunkie » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 3:46 PM UTC

criddell wrote: post #61

sakesun wrote: post #40

Borland Sidekick. The productivity software small enough to hide in your system. These days productivity software run under Electron.

macOS seems to have the healthiest ecosystem today. Small developers are still supporting themselves by selling software. Even there though, I'm not sure how sustainable it is these days.

The walled garden and app store seems to work in their favor then. Microsoft saw that 30% cut that Apple got and decided to throw everything good away in an attempt to get that for themselves. It apparently never occurred to them that this wasn't something you could just bolt onto an ecosystem that went all the way back to the 1980s.