Finding out more about not-so-mainstream tech is one of the main reasons I read HN. And I see once in a while some "forgotten" tech mentioned, from where it seems the current state of art is a step back.
What's your favourite software / technology / tools that were better but couldn't make into mainstream?
IRC before Slack took off. IRC a standardized chat protocol, there is not chat islands.
Gopher, the text version of meta browsable Internet before World wide web. You could navigate gopher with just a keyboard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_%28protocol%29
BBS Bulletin Board systems there were local computer communities formed around them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system
BBS are alive and well in the communities of the tildeverse https://tildeverse.org/
On BBS', ssh/telnet synchro.net or gopher cvs.synchro.net.
People is alive and posting well. Ditto with usenet.
Memory safety has become a modern buzzword, but Pascal had memory safe strings and arrays decades ago, based on automated reference counting. Now it also has other types that are not memory safe, but you do not have to use them. Everything would be much safer if all the C code was replaced by Pascal code. And Pascal is compiled to native code without GC, so it is also very fast
And XPath. It is the best language to map and filter data. It felt out of favor with XML, but it can be used on all data, HTML, CSV, JSON, Plaintext, ...
Java Spring/JSF and ASP.NET for the win.
Then when doing solo projects, most clients only ask for a site, they have no idea of what they actually want, technically speaking, secret is too deliver something that makes them and their customers happy.
Doing stuff for industries whose main business is not selling software is very eye opening.
Some of those did make into mainstream, but current generations have lost that phase.
I also miss the good ol' BBS days. I know there's some BBS communities out there, but it doesn't feel the same without dialup. I also spent some time this summer writing Solar Realms Elite from scratch as well. I didn't finish it, but I got a decent engine going.
Speaking of BBSes, there was a networking protocol back then known as FidoNet which allowed BBSes to communicate and share information. In my more bored moments I've considered trying to find the spec and build some modern FidoNet clients/servers or whatever it is.
Short version: I really love the old text-based (ASCII ftw) internet days, and I think about that tech a lot.
Telnet or SSH synchro.net, still alive.
On MUDs, the Cybersphere MOO is nice, but as a non-native English speaker, emoting is hard.
I'd like it more if emoting/posing was not enforced.
I still use it, but with a Z80 emulator on a 64-bit machine. One of my emulators if rendered in the real hardware of the era would have cost somewhere around 40-50 thousand dollars. These days it's merely about 140 megabytes of data tucked away in a directory
Wut, the Altair/Simh fork it's less than 10MB, 30 with CPM 2.2 and some working software/games.
People still use film but it is no longer ubiquitous. There are people in the world approaching adulthood who likely never experienced what it was like to take a picture and wait hours or days to find out if it turned out. There is something unique about film that goes beyond the image itself. It is an entire experience from taking a photo to waiting to get the photo processed and printed. The experience is what makes the image special.
One thing I really dislike about digital is the churn of the technology. Every year new sensors are released and the old ones become obsolete and eventually useless. I have film cameras older than me and some even older than my parents that are still capable of creating great images. Digital cameras are not likely to enjoy a second life like this. I appreciate digital photography for its utility but for me film will always be "real" photography and it will always be better.
I’ve since bought an entry-level DSLR but the AE-1 keeps drawing me back. There is something really neat about the whole process and anticipation of seeing the developed film. Not to mention the old cameras just look and feel cool and the photos have a vintage-like texture that is really unique.
4DOS/4NT (a command-line enhancer which really made DOS/Windows CMD.EXE really productive. I use cmder these days but still miss the 4DOS/4NT level productivity).
And that was a non-option when Anki was created many years ago. At least Anki has plugins, though, which let you add quite a few capabilities to it bringing it more in line with SuperMemo.
[1]: https://github.com/alessivs/supermemo-wine
[2]: https://lutris.net/
Failing that, there's obviously virtualization.
> Anki has plugins...
I could dive and swim in the sea of Anki plugins. Though if you look closer, while activity around the extension ecosystem is vibrant, there is something more fundamental in the core of Anki that is producing excessive workloads, and making it generally not up to the demands of a large and varied body of knowledge and vehement use.
One example is the recommendation that a whole body of study is split into separate decks–which, I assume, seeks to avoid biasing scheduling towards that required by the more representative portion of material present in reviews. But you are equipped with one brain and live by a single time line, taking frequent local decisions regarding learning material which have global implications for your performance. When you split your study material into separate units of analysis, these details are too easy to ignore.
In contrast, SuperMemo's algorithms play well with (it is the recommendation, actually:) throwing everything into a single collection (deck)–items of knowledge which you can optionally prioritize individually or in groups–such that the global implications of your local choices are accounted for, maintaining the forgetting index premise, and gracefully adapting workloads to your capacity.
Instead of improving the core functionality in this direction, Anki community's response has been to give you more knobs (scheduler this, scheduler that, load balancer gobbledygook) around essentially the same historical limitations.
EDIT: so, not peer to peer.
Any advanced Jabber client does that.
And whichever tech had the good visualizations back then - it might have been windows media player - or maybe winamp - but there was a plugin that actually had visualizations that changed in different ways with the beat and sometimes other parts of the various frequencies.
Not sure this is my favorite forgotten tech, but first to mind.
Seems computers / programs / OS's have needed so many updates and the time it takes - it's really ruined what use to be more fun imho.
Wish I kept all mu c-64 floppies - archon, jumpman jr, little computer people, MULE..
I do want minidiscs back - a new blue ray type version with backwards compat would be nice.
Im going to think of more I'm sure. Oh how progress ruins things.
I'm sure there's better stuff somewhere out there nowadays, but my music consumption has simply moved away anyway - period on iTunes/Google Music, now only ever streaming random stuff on-demand from Spotify.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LambdaMOO
TCL/Tk, expect.
Perl though I don’t think I miss it much.
Still alive
Turbo C/C++ with its blue background DOS editor.
A Borland colorscheme is available at github https://github.com/mbadolato/iTerm2-Color-Schemes
Which TI calculators did you mean specifically?
Forth, Tcl/Tk programming
ARCNET token-bus networking
Wire-wrap technique for electronic circuit boards