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The Lost Apps of the 80s

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Re: The Lost Apps of the 80s

#101

Post by tonyedgecombe »

ConceptJunkie wrote: post #99
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.

Not only that but now we have to pay a subscription for the trivialist of applications.

Re: The Lost Apps of the 80s

#102

Post by NaOH »

cblconfederate wrote: post #74

> Also there should be networked spreadsheets. And since it's 40 years later, there should be products we never imagined in the 80s. They aren't there. That's linear thinking. Computer science peaked in the 80s-90s. There arent bold new ideas to add, just incremental progress. Today it's all about polishing and making things more addictive in order to make the highest profit. Rounded corner screens for displaying sli…

>Computer science peaked in the 80s-90s. There arent bold new ideas to add, just incremental progress.

Any time I see a statement like this around here it never seems to include a suggestion. That's not to say there isn't something to be done, but when I think about my computer or phone there's no new idea I'm wishing they had.

>I can't think of a new mode of communication invented in the last decades.

Human communication is confined to the human senses. So again, what are we missing? What should be developed?

Re: The Lost Apps of the 80s

#103

Post by lproven »

readflaggedcomm wrote: post #19

>Now, we don't have choice. [...] I have to use their editors Only for the submission. You can write externally. There used to be "It's All Text" before Firefox's extensions got gutted, which automated that copying. I wonder where that lies on their list of "apps" to edit with.

> before Firefox's extensions got gutted

You might like to take a look at Waterfox. It's a fork of the last pre-Quantum of Firefox, with frequent security update releases (roughly every 8 weeks), that still runs XUL extensions.

It's my default browser since Firefox Quantum, because recent Firefox versions simply can't do all the customisations I like — such as a vertical tab bar combined with a flat bookmarks bar, a smart download manager in a tab, and so on.

Re: The Lost Apps of the 80s

#104

Post by asdff »

tibbydudeza wrote: post #25
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…

Those annual PC Magazine Best Printer of 19XX that weighed the same as a tome - but they really tested in depth - now we just go to the local PC store and buy a crappy $99 inkjet on special from HP/Epson or Canon.

To be fair, the crappy $99 inkjet these days is a much better machine than even 10 years ago. I got mine for free locally because the market is so saturated (used at least), which is great for the consumer. It has a scanner. It can connect to my computer or my cell phone wirelessly. I don't have to turn it on, feed in paper, and open some flaps or anything like that before use to ensure the ink doesn't dry out when I'm not printing. I just hit print on my device and it fires up in the next room from its sleep state. Putting in just the black ink turned it on black ink only mode automatically, my old inkjets on the other hand would moan about missing some colors, or protest by doing strange things like printing out a black and white document using only the yellow ink on the white page. It's also remarkably quiet compared to my ancient inkjets, which made my home sound like a machine shop when I printed out a few pages. Time will tell how it holds up over the years, but barring anything catastrophic, printing might now be a solved thing for me.

Re: The Lost Apps of the 80s

#105

Post by arantius »

redwall_hp wrote: post #47
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...

I definitely remember hearing the phrase "killer app" plenty of times in the early 2000s, and Macworld definitely shortened "application" to "app" frequently in the late 90s and early 2000s.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content="killer+app"

With a peak in 2002 it seems.

Re: The Lost Apps of the 80s

#106

Post by anaerobicover »

open-source-ux wrote: post #80
JamesAdir wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you compare word processors to note taking apps of today which I think are very equivalent to the same use you'll find more than 55 tools. Word processors belong to an era where the computer replaced the typewriter and it's not needed any more these days. You can find commercial, free or open source note taking apps that are local or cloud based and offer a huge variety of features.

" If you compare word processors to note taking apps of today which I think are very equivalent to the same use " Are they really equivalent though? A word processor - with multi-page documents, pagination, rich formatting and layout, footnotes, headers, footers, ToC (table of contents) and so much more - seems a magnitude greater than simply a note-taking app. I can understand why many developers might tackle a simp…

In general commercial note-taking apps are not at all simple; they have similar features to those you named. Also consider that automatic syncing across devices (at least, if not also across platforms) is practically a sine qua non, which is complex it its own right.

Re: The Lost Apps of the 80s

#107

Post by webmaven »

rozzie wrote: post #62
webmaven wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Undeniably the product failed commercially. By the time we decided to sell the company, the product was doing ~20M+ of revenue but on a low growth rate, after having gone through ~140M of capital with (not unreasonable) investor expectations of unicorn-like returns. Groove's revenue exceeded expenditures, though, right? Or could have? I'm not sure it was reasonable to expect success at that scale for an entirely no…

Perhaps. Hard to say. The dev team was large by necessity, but the GTM was far too large because we hadn't come to terms with giving up on enterprise and individual sales. Had we focused exclusively on public sector and hunkered down we MAY have been able to be profitable on an operational basis. But we would have had to recap and get existing investors to write it off at a time when the board had two offers on the t…

> [T]hose who will need to collaborate when trying to deal with an APT.

Well, that's certainly a growing market segment, both domestically and internationally. It is starting to feel like there may soon not be anyone left who doesn't have to deal with an APT, if only as collateral damage.

Thanks for engaging!

Re: The Lost Apps of the 80s

#108

Post by cblconfederate »

NaOH wrote: post #102
cblconfederate wrote: post #74

> Also there should be networked spreadsheets. And since it's 40 years later, there should be products we never imagined in the 80s. They aren't there. That's linear thinking. Computer science peaked in the 80s-90s. There arent bold new ideas to add, just incremental progress. Today it's all about polishing and making things more addictive in order to make the highest profit. Rounded corner screens for displaying sli…

>Computer science peaked in the 80s-90s. There arent bold new ideas to add, just incremental progress. Any time I see a statement like this around here it never seems to include a suggestion. That's not to say there isn't something to be done, but when I think about my computer or phone there's no new idea I'm wishing they had. >I can't think of a new mode of communication invented in the last decades. Human communic…

Usually novel ideas are not something we wished we had (like faster horses). Ground breaking ideas are technologies that are enabling new ecosystems, like the WWW, the iPhone, and probably in the future, VR. Even with mobile tech, we still have not exploited them to the max largely because they are overly dependent on the cloud, making simple things needlessly complicated (like transferring a file to a nearby computer).

> what are we missing? What should be developed?

We can only speculate, but despite all the tech thrown at it, our communication is still pretty mundane, serial dialogues. A technology like the internet could enable new modes of organizing information in which the output is more than the sum of the parts (like a spreadsheet for minds). Wikipedia did this, and open source software. Another is the ability to have direct payments without middlemen (what blockains do), that would enable a ton of new possibilities.

Re: The Lost Apps of the 80s

#109

Post by ConceptJunkie »

rwallace wrote: post #34
divbzero wrote: post #33

I’m intrigued by the comment that “there is nothing out there with the power and usability that Lotus Notes had back-in-the-day”. I didn’t have the opportunity to experience Lotus Notes personally, would be curious to hear the perspective of someone who used (or developed) the application.

A surprising remark! The usability of Lotus Notes was so bad that it earned itself an entire section on a site called the User Interface Hall of Shame.

I last used Lotus Notes around 2003, and it didn't even conform to things that had been standard 10-15 years earlier. It felt like going back in time to the 1970s, long before I'd ever used computers.

Re: The Lost Apps of the 80s

#110

Post by homarp »

asymptosis wrote: post #7

Based on the title, I thought this was going to be about finding, archiving and curating those lost apps. Instead, it's just a complaint about how "it was better in the old days." What gets me about this line of thought is that the technology didn't disappear. Anyone who wants to recreate "the lost apps of the 80s" just needs to grab a text editor and start coding. Everyone has the power to create any app they like.…

he is: http://scripting.com/2021/03/23.html#a133813

recreating his old 'Frontier' in/with the web browser

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