Ask HN: What technology are you sad to see going extinct in the wild? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What technology are you sad to see going extinct in the wild?

6 pointskleer00125 comments

Hardware or software or technique or best practices...

Email. It's becoming more and more common for people to rely on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or other proprietary, closed systems.

Several times this year I've tried to get in touch with someone online only to find that they simply don't make an email address available.

True. I'm starting to realize that these seemingly rock solid "places" are really just ephemeral watering holes. BBSes, AOL, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram... Let's drink up in comradeship before it dries away.

But more significantly (I think): it is socially acceptable to expect people to sign up to closed systems in order to communicate.

How can we reverse this trend?

Done, Highland Park 18. Great suggestion. (feels his social/tech relevance dying away as he types)

At a personal level maybe, in the business world can't see it disappearing easily. It's more a matter of educating people how to use it. I really believe companies should set some level of email training in their development i.e. don't reply all thanks, don't treat it like IM, how to use cc/to correctly, how to auto filter etc.

More generally history tends to show proprietary systems like Linkedin/FB break down and are replaced. They are too open to profiteering if companies feel they have market dominance. Every companey eventually gets that short therm thinking manager that want instant profit at the expense of user experience and it's so easy to swap platforms these days. Take the messaging Linkedin update they did a few weeks back. You cant see sent emails anymore if you didn't get a reply, and the increased need for a paid account to contact people. I'm seriously considering canceling my paid account as they keep taking more away.

I more feel email will at some point advance in usability. The market is ripe for a business to re-think they standard interface. Basically do what threaded SMS did to the old one message at a time SMS days.

Filemaker Pro. It is flexible and under-the-radar like Excel, so non-programmers can just get stuff done, but you wind up much less of a mess once it metastasizes into a critical business tool. It even has a client-server mode so you have share-ability.

Aldus PageMaker. This isn't going extinct---it's long dead. I did our college literary magazine with this, and it was so fluid. For professional work it lost to Quark, but it was so much better for ordinary people with small-to-medium projects. I've never seen anything like it since.

Knockout. This is really nice technology: so much simpler than Angular or Ember, more like a library than a framework. Made to play nice with lots of other small JS tools. But last I checked the mapping plugin was abandoned and had no replacement. I would love to use this for my projects but feel like it would be a disservice to my clients.

IRC. I basically grew up on it.

- Plain HTML. Now even craigslist has succumbed to "web 2.0" pressure. Web 1.0 really wasn't so bad.

- Drop shadows

- TV stations. You used to be able to go to a friend's house and know how to operate the TV without needing a tutorial.

- Microwave Knobs. Whoever decided that pressing "Time Cook -> 1 -> 0 -> 0 -> Start", and waiting about 55 seconds and then opening the door, and then still forcing me to press "Reset", instead of just supplying an old-fashioned timer knob (accurate to within ~5 sec), and selling that to literally billions of people, kudos to you. I want knobs back.

- "Lack thereof". You used to be able to travel to developing nations and get away from all this junk. "No longer can you do this", which, eh, pouty-face, but "never again will this be possible", which really is kind of jolting to me. (And yes I, even in my years, do understand it creates a greater good (health) but does it? (souls))

- "finger". Just because, "haha"

Floppy disk and cd/dvd drives! When you need to recover files from an old pc and need a Windows XP startup disk.... it's no fun in 2015.

Worse, it was on an IDE Hard drive and I couldn't find an external hard drive case for it so I had to take it to a PC repair store that had an IDE adaptor. Charges $40 to copy any amount of data above 20 Gigabytes.

I'll kinda miss the portability there of those. Not the multiplicity. Too many "standards", especially as you piled on the megabytes. 50MG Optical disk? Yea, where do I get a drive for that?

Mobile phones that still work when you drop them.

P.S. Do American people call them cell phones or mobile phones now? A few years ago mobile seemed more a British thing to say, but with "mobile" entering the language of the web maybe it is different now.

In the old days we use to just call them cell phones. These days I just call it "my iPhone" or when I am referencing other people's phone, I just say "phone". If I am developing and talking about it in development context, then and only then do I reference mobile of any kind.

Building your own desktop. I know this still exists but it seems more sub-culture than ever. I have such fond memories of planning the perfect rig. Now my laptop can pretty much handle anything (lower but acceptable specs) so the need is greatly reduced.

Thunderbird. As I said somewhere else on this thread I feel the market is ripe for a new email alternative. That said Outlook is a great tool if you take the time to learn beyond the basics.

Extreme programming. When done right, it was an amazing environment to work in. It was just too hard to do right...

Some of us are actually still quite active with Extreme programming :) it is hardly dead in the world. But there is a lot of truth to the idea that management and project management people tend to like scrum a heck of a lot more.

Zip drives. Most of my work in college is still on those!

whirrrrr.... click - click

It can all go. It was never useful, and was/will not be used to try to pass the beginner stuff in this world.

> pass the beginner stuff in this world.

Sorry? What do you mean?

Gopher

NNTP

BBS's

WAIS

X11 (maybe, depending on how Wayland turns out)

OS/2 (esp. Workplace Shell)

MUDs

Payphones

- Gnome 2, KDE 3 - The old-style interfaces. Simplicity.

- Old Slashdot

- Old style Thinkpads

- 4chan before it had captcha

- Kazaa (do these networks still work?)

- Suprnova (warez has gone downhill, since we now have open source alternatives)

- Turntable.fm

- Runescape Classic

- Old Firefox (when it was light, phoenix 0.1

- Utorrent (before they wrecked it with adware)

- Windows 2000 classic interface, XP

- Nokia N900 (debian phone, nokia abandoned linux and maemo for microsoft.)

- Razr 3 / Old nokia "Dumbphones" - built like tanks. Solid. Reliable.

- I miss the old innocence of PHP Vbulletin, early CMS systems like PHP-Nuke - which at the time were cool.

- Photoshop 6 (before they put CRM callhomes everywhere)

- BZFlag - no one cares about this anymore :(

- MySpace - I liked how you could customize it. It was more individualistic

- AOL / MSN / Yahoo Chat. People were more open to making friendships online.

> Gnome 2, KDE 3 - The old-style interfaces. Simplicity.

Good one. The good news is, some alternate versions of some of those are still available and maintained. And, at least since they're OSS, worst case, you could fork it yourself. :-)

> BZFlag - no one cares about this anymore :(

I hear ya. I've been thinking about setting up a BZFlag instance on a Fogbeam server, alongside some other "classic" technologies and just put it out there for people to play around with.

> - AOL / MSN / Yahoo Chat. People were more open to making friendships online.

Don't forget ICQ. That said, I don't so much miss those, as just wishing people would use Jabber instead of Facebook Messenger or this other proprietary crap.

> - Gnome 2, KDE 3 - The old-style interfaces. Simplicity.

and associated programs deprecated along with them -> Gnome Blackjack, Kooka OCR and Quanta Plus IDE. Also the quick desktop responsiveness.

> - BZFlag - no one cares about this anymore :(

Been there a few times in the last couple weeks, yeah kinda quiet.

> - MySpace - I liked how you could customize it. It was more individualistic

I think if someone refactored it they might get converts from Facebook.

My Additions:

- FoxBase +/Mac (very underrated tool, you could do a lot more than you realize with it) - Claris Works/AppleWorks (the database on it was quite simple, creative and usable.) - AI/EPS exporters for PrintShop Deluxe graphics - Software that had MORE features when new versions come out.

> Gnome 2, KDE 3 - The old-style interfaces. Simplicity.

I remember the tetris clone KSirtet from KDE 3.x projects very fondly. It was quick, responsive, aesthetically pleasing in its minimality and fun to play. KDE 4 introduced this new iteration called KBlocks that was simply a travesty in terms of usability. Very slow controls, odd delays in a dead-simple game, useless graphics.

MATE is a fork of Gnome 2 that I've been using for a year or so. It works pretty well.

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