Ask HN: What are some of yesteryear's buzz words that no-one cares about today?
I'd go for "information super-highway" but I'm sure there are better terms that once were all the rage but now evoke nothing but crickets and tumbleweed.
See the first page of "Libraries and Documentation" by Godet (1939) at https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/614452?jou... .
> Exactly what is the meaning of this word "documentation" which is used in so many different senses? ... Messrs. Lafontaine and Otlet took possession of the word, and at the beginning of the century gave it a wider meaning when they advocated "the systemic organization of information and of documentation."
To read Otlet in the original French, see «Traité de documentation: le livre sur le livre, theéorie et pratique» (1034) https://archive.org/details/OtletTraitDocumentationUgent or http://user.textus.io/examples/trait%C3%A9-de-documentation.... .
As part of this excitement, in the 1930s a number of people interested in microfilm as a form of documentation preservation and dissemination, started American Documentation Institute, with the journal "The Journal of Documentary Reproduction" and after WWII "American Documentation".
The explosion of different types of "documentation" lead to new journals, like the "Journal of Chemical Documentation" in 1961.
However, "documentation" as a term became passé. The ADI renamed itself in 1968 to "American Society for Information Science", its journal to "The Journal of the American Society for Information Science", and J. Chem. Doc. became first the Journal of Chemical Information (in 1975) and Computer Sciences and then Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling (in 2005).
As another example of its former hotness, see Taube's Documentation, Inc. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortimer_Taube#Documentation%2.... ) which did the documentation management for NASA.
Today, "innovate" has lost some of it's sheen and passed into the pantheon of generic, meaningless words. Everyone uses it unthinkingly regardless of whether they believe in it or not (the word "inuitive" is another example).
There was a time once when it was for other people to hail or judge a product as "innovate" - rather than today when you proclaim your product as "innovate".
https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/4/18652971/apple-macos-catal...
Digitization
Mobile
I am really dating myself here. Many years ago I worked for an airline. At the time we looked at how to replace the 20 pounds of flight manuals pilots were required to carry on the airplane. At the time we concluded no technology existed that was reliable enough and affordable enough to replace paper. Now pilots use iPads. Lol.
6 Sigma
CASE (now called "no code")
Client-Server (now called "serverless!")
Interactive
Portals
(web) Directories
Mobile Code
P2P
Data Portability
Groupware
Webmaster
XHTML
Clearfix
Ajax(?)
Dhtml
Yql
Web app
Browser-based
Online/offline
Mobile-first development
Synchronization
Collaborative
Cloud
Distributed
Blockchain
SaaS