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Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

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Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#571

Post by neoCrimeLabs »

myself248 wrote: post #407

The Ricochet network. A packet mesh network providing ISDN speeds in the dialup era, wirelessly. They burned through $5B of 1999 dollars, building out a network in 23 cities, and had effectively zero customers. Finally shut down in 2001. All their marketing was focused on "mobile professionals", whoever those were, while ignoring home users who were clamoring for faster internet where other ISPs dragged their feet. T…

Wow, I forgot about this.

It was surprisingly great for the time. Apparently I was one of their 4 customers, too!

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#572

Post by Y-bar »

GuB-42 wrote: post #372
Y-bar wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those tools were awesome. But as formats go, they were awful due to bad performance and more security holes than anything else. I still miss Macromedia Fireworks.

Performance was way better than what we have now with modern web stacks, we just have more powerful computers. I agree on security and bugs, but bugs can be fixed. It just shows neglect by Adobe, which was, I think, the real problem. I think that if Adobe seriously wanted to, it could have been a web standard.

Lots of people say performance was good, but that seems to be through the nostalgic lens of a handful of cool games.

Those did sometimes run really great, but most implementations were indeed very slow.

I remember vividly because it was part of my job back then to help with web performance and when we measured page speed and user interface responsiveness flash was almost always the worst.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#573

Post by teddyh »

renehsz wrote: post #470

The Plan 9 operating system. It's the closest thing to a Unix successor we ever got, taking the "everything is a file" philosophy to another level and allowing to easily share those files over the network to build distributed systems. Accessing any remote resources is easy and robust on Plan9, meanwhile on other systems we need to install specialized software with bad interoperability for each individual use case. Pl…

> The reasons it died are likely:

The reason Plan 9 died a swift death was that, unlike Unix – which hardware manufacturers could license for a song and adapt to their own hardware (and be guaranteed compatibility with lots of Unix software) – Bell Labs tried to sell Plan 9, as commercial software, for $350 a box.

(As I have written many times in the past: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22412539>, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33937087>, and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43641480>)

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#574

Post by MomsAVoxell »

Visix Vibe. It was a "WYSIWYG"-type visual programming environment for .. Java.

It had its own cross platform UI and other frameworks too, so you could "write once in Java, and ship on all the things" .. well theoretically.

It got abandoned too soon. But it was quite fun to build apps with it for a while, almost Delphi- like. I always wonder if it went open source, if things would have been different vis a vis Flash, etc.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#576

Post by BirAdam »

spooky_deep wrote: post #232
BirAdam wrote: post #68

Google Wave. Edit: you asked why. I first saw it at SELF where Chris DiBona showed it to me and a close friend. It was awesome. Real time translation, integration of various types of messaging, tons of cool capabilities, and it was fully open source. What made it out of Google was a stripped down version of what I was shown, the market rejected it, and it was a sad day. Now, I am left with JIRA, Slack, and email. It…

Is there a video or anything of this version of Wave?

I haven’t found one showing what Chris showed. Most seem to focus on just communications with little demonstration of productivity or other features. This is sad to me because its most glorious asset was being open source with a rich set of plugins/extensions allowing tons of functionality.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#577

Post by eloisant »

Havoc wrote: post #363

Pascal/Delphi - especially in the educational context. Crazy fast compiler so doesn't frustrate trial & erroring students, decent type system without the wildness of say rust and all the basic programming building blocks you want students to grasp are present without language specific funkiness.

Apparently Python is now the language of choice for teaching programming, and I'm a bit worried about it because the type system is a mess.

I think Pascal or ADA are better language to start learning about types with a good base.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#580

Post by david_allison »

huhkerrf wrote: post #179
bxparks wrote: post #37

A lot of things on https://killedbygoogle.com/ . I used to use 30-40 Google products and services. I'm down to 3-4. Google Picasa: Everything local, so fast, so good. I'm never going to give my photos to G Photos. Google Hangouts: Can't keep track of all the Google chat apps. I use Signal now. Google G Suite Legacy: It was supposed to be free forever. They killed it, tried to make me pay. I migrated out of Google. Go…

> Google Play Music: I had uploaded thousands of MP3 files there. They killed it. I won't waste my time uploading again. You can argue whether it's as good as GPM or not, but it's false to imply that your uploaded music disappeared when Google moved to YouTube Music. I made the transition, and all of my music moved without a new upload.

YouTube Music isn't available in all countries which Google Play Music was available in.

My music was deleted.

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