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The Lost Apps of the 80s

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Re: The Lost Apps of the 80s

#111

Post by homarp »

ConceptJunkie wrote: post #109
rwallace wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

indeed https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=990

(see also Ray Ozzie answer in other comment about portability layer https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26697054 )

Re: The Lost Apps of the 80s

#112

Post by tacurran »

I think that today's developer tools, such as GitHub, represent the main difference to application developers. The secondary factor is ship cadence and deployment infrastructure. Lotus Symphony was one of my favourites at the time. It was so advanced with its own language "script" when it appeared. It supported add ins, an early predecessor to APIs, and had its own database. But dev tools such as Macro, Quick C, Quick Basic, MFC, Bench, NextStep, and Hypercard. There were many great Unix tools such as Emacs and RCS along with languages such as Smalltalk, LISP, Pascal, and C. And not to be forgotten Symbolics - the beginning of AI hardware. It was a great time to develop software. Anything was possible and everything seemed impossible. There was only some Internet (ARPANET) if you worked at the university like I did, or some advanced research lab, and to launch a product you went to trade shows and advertised in Dr Dobbs Journal. In the 80s we wrote wonderful software, and while as @rozzie says, most of it is gone forever, the innovations live on IMHO.

Re: The Lost Apps of the 80s

#113

Post by threeforks »

iFreilicht wrote: post #78
criddell wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This for me is the key: we expect tools to live on the network. All those apps of old, they were based around files I agree and it's why I'm a fan of apps that sync data via something like Dropbox or Google Drive. The application can still be file based and the developer doesn't have to run servers. There are the obvious limitations, but for personal use it works pretty well.

Yes, absolutely. I have to mention Joplin here, which became my note-taking app after a lot of research. There are certainly more powerful apps, but Joplin is open source, runs on all devices, (Windows, Linux, Android and iOS in my case), syncs data via Nextcloud or Dropbox, and supports E2E-encryption. It also allows inserting images directly into the notes, which I found cumbersome with other markdown-based note ap…

I second that mention. I use it across Linux, macOS, Windows, both in terminal mode and in GUI. Very flexible, Markdown friendly. I have my editor of choice (vim) which launches inside the terminal version. You can define which editor you wish to use if you don't like the included editing.

Re: The Lost Apps of the 80s

#114

Post by canadianfella »

anaerobicover wrote: post #106
open-source-ux wrote: post #80

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 " 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.

Why latin?

Re: The Lost Apps of the 80s

#115

Post by weinzierl »

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.

I heard app the first time in connection with "killer app", before I only remember the term "program". If my memory serves me right I heard "killer app" the first time in the late 90s

Re: The Lost Apps of the 80s

#116

Post by fistynuts »

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...

RISC OS was using the term App from around 1987 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_OS), to describe an executable collection of files wrapped up in a folder. The folder had to start with a "!" to distinguish it as an app rather than a standard folder.

Re: The Lost Apps of the 80s

#117

Post by robenkleene »

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…

All of that complexity has been replaced by sync (e.g., collaborative editing as one example of). Sync is the problem of our era and it branches out in many directions (e.g., infinitely restorable, branching, searchable history).

Re: The Lost Apps of the 80s

#118

Post by robenkleene »

zozbot234 wrote: post #21

These apps have been "lost" for one single reason: they weren't FLOSS. There's plenty of software written in the 1980s that has been maintained since and is used today on modern platforms, because its code was made available under a suitable license. Proprietary software is a dead end, and proprietary online services only more so.

Photoshop, Excel, Word, Illustrator, PowerPoint, Cubase?

Re: The Lost Apps of the 80s

#119

Post by epc »

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.

Notes was fun to use if your experience prior to it was Profs/OfficeVision. I had the odd privilege of using it inside IBM in the months before IBM bought Lotus, including writing the worst hack of sendmail.cf macros I thought possible to interchange between Notes, IBM’s RSCS networks, and the internet gateway we had. IBM had been developing a variety of GUI email products, mostly for OS/2, a little bit for Windows, but all in conflict with each other as well as the various OfficeVision flavors for OS/400 and VM/CMS. DEC had their enterprise email for their platforms, there was something for Novell. Notes gave IBM a single unifying platform for email and document sharing / management both internally as well as a product to sell to customers 10,000 seats at a time. In parallel the Internet went from being a thing a very small number of people were using to being the backbone of business, making a lot of the novelty of Notes obsolete. IBM in turn gave Notes the hug of death, loading up so much enterprisiness that Notes 5 felt like bloatware (it had a web server built into each client. And a JVM IIRC).

Things you got with Notes out of the box with minimal systems configuration effort: easy document sharing, easy authentication, entitlement, encryption of documents (and emails) across an organization. Easy provisioning of strong encryption across an organization. I could send digitally signed documents both within IBM and to peers outside IBM fairly easily. I could create a library of security processes for IBM's internet operations, pick out the organizations and people who could have access across the company, and it just worked. For bonus points we got document retention, audit logs, it all just was there out of the box. I didn't need to know ahead of time if someone was using Windows or OS/2 or a Mac.

It's easy to dismiss it all today as horrible bloatware, and as "just" an email tool it was probably overkill. I think too many companies (IBM especially) bought it, set it up, and utterly failed at educating people how to use it (IBMers were notorious for sending around email chains with multiple copies of Freelance or Powerpoint presentations, instead of a link to the presentation in a central repository, partly because IBM's services arm and IBM's CIO didn't want the overhead of managing such things.).

Re: The Lost Apps of the 80s

#120

Post by mpweiher »

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...

NeXTstep applications (and by extension macOS, iOS) have been directories (bundles) with the extension ".app" since at least 1988.
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