Cool Tool of the Day (1997) | Hacker News Reader

Cool Tool of the Day (1997)

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60 pointsecliptik18 comments

"Text is dead, man! Why spend time conversing in decades-old tech on IRC when you can go 3D with Moondo. Even though it has a stupid name, Moondo does some pretty cool stuff, allowing you to cruise VRML landscapes, create your own "avatars," fly through various camera angles, chat, browse around, and even create your own virtual home. It may not be the Metaverse, but it's about as close as you'll get at this point." - Moondo 4/6/96

There’s a tool called “iSeek” listed here, in ‘96. I thought the lowercase “i” prefix began its popularity with the iMac in 1998. Did Ken Segall not come up with it, but just ran with a trend that was already going on? What was the first /^i[A-Z][a-z]+$/ product name?

I think that is an interesting coincidence. iSeek was a tool released by InfoSeek (a search engine). Seems like they came to a similar branding outcome as far as I can tell.

We had an iPhone before the iPhone around 1995 (?) - Internet Phone was a pretty incredible voip application by VocalTec (?). Incredible that it worked - not so much by today's standards of quality.

Linksys released an "iPhone" in 1998 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linksys_iPhone).

iGuide was started in 1995 or 1995 (a Newscorp / MCI JV). Surprisingly no Wikipedia entry for it. Was intended to be a "TV Guide" for the web.

The i* prefix was popular before the iMac, it was a way to show you were hip and into the Internets much as appending *coin to everything today shows you are hip and into the blockchain.

Aging developer here. That was a Windows application that let you quickly search with Infoseek. I remember using it alongside Altavista, Magellan, and Excite, before Yahoo and Google came to be.

Diebold rebranded their ATM models from MDS to i-Series in 1991, the year I joined Interbold, the Diebold/IBM joint partnership. Prefixing everything with an "i" was a thing.

I saw ftpsearch there, which I used to use.

You can convince Google to do an ftp search, like:

  inurl:ftp:// "some search string here"

But, it's awkward now that Chrome has decided not to support the resulting ftp:// urls that come back :)

This is like the original product hunt.

Interesting, this does not appear to be related to Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools (https://kk.org/cooltools/), which I assumed would date back to those days. Apparently the KK page was started as late as 2000. The idea is nice, expanding your knowledge of tools that are out there, so that when you need to achieve something, you have a rough idea what sort equipment is available.

"Paaarrrrtaaaayyy! Meet hot singles! Erotic conversation! Intimate 1 on 1! Talk Live! Horny ! All ready and waiting for you.... Well, maybe not. Actually, if you get into one of these multi-party audio chat servers (kinda like audio IRC) you're probably more likely to run into some hairy-palmed geeks in boxershorts, but that's beside the point. Internet Party Line is a unique application that takes multiple voice streams, queues them up, and plays them out in the order that they come in. The effect is kinda like a free-wheeling cocktail party where only one person can speak at a time (I know, not too free wheeling, but its the only metaphor I could think of, damnit!)"

What I love most about this one ('Internet Party Line' for anyone trying to find it in the list) is that it wasn't produced by some random person, it was literally made by Intel and published on their own website. Wild times.

Wait isn't that clubhouse? :P

Everything old is new again.

If you run into Tim Pritlove ask him how he invented Clubhouse 25 years ago.

Ah, good ol' MacZilla. Back when seeing videos with a Mac browser was much more difficult and not nearly as nice as on a PC. MacZilla made it better but it still sucked (slow, crashy, and rebooty).

Lacks `Bonzi Buddy`.

Good grief.

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