Opera back in 2000s.
Compressing webpages, built in mail, built in BitTorrent client, tab stacking, “fit to width” which would remove horizontal scrollbars, page tiling, mouse gestures, rocker gestures, I think it even had a calendar.
It’s a shame the direction Opera took after Jon left, but thankfully he started Vivaldi which feels like the spiritual successor.
Opera?
The only web browser in the 90’s to try and charge money for a web browser‽
The only thing they were ahead of their time on is bilking people out of money for something that should have been free.
NextStep - eventually became Mac OS X (that’s why all sorts of system calls start with
NS)BeOS. Playing 4 video streams at the same time in 1995 was mind blowing.
OS/2 was WINE before WINE
SixDegrees was a social network before Friendster
Prodigy was an online service (and ISP later) owned by Sears, which had a significant mail-order business. It could have been Amazon.
I used to work at Sears, and I could never figure out how a company that found its initial success in a catalog business didn’t immediately see the opportunities the internet presented. Now Sears is all but gone, and Bezos gets to go to space with Shatner :(
Eddie fucking Lampert.
They very likely saw, but very likely could not make the transition without causing revolt in its ranks and in its own middle management. Or even its own board directors.
*NeXTSTEP. And the NS object calls are part of the Objective-C programming language it was built with.
Oops yeah, corrected in my post
Another fun fact you might want to add, is that Apple, when they came to a crossroads after the failure of trying to invent a NexGen operating system in Copeland, had to decide whether to buy BeOS or to buy the entire company NeXT in order to get NeXTSTEP. They decided to acquire NeXT, along with NeXTSTEP and Steve Jobs (the then CEO of NeXT)and to hire him on as interim CEO of Apple, and, eventually the CEO. And that’s how Apple got Steve Jobs back as CEO.  technically, it was a huge gambit that Steve Jobs arranged while he was still the CEO of NeXT and it saved both companies from complete ruin, particularly when he arranged a financing deal with Microsoft year later. 
that’s why all sorts of system calls start with
NSWhat do you mean with this?
Flash and Java, honestly, albeit in different ways. Both saw the web as a platform above all platforms.
Flash was the only way for browsers to do anything high-performance or good-looking from like 1997 to 2010. Any idiot could slap together a cool spinning animation with gradient-colored vector graphics. There were countless genuinely-free games, apparently made for the fun of making them, and even more interactive animations, apparently made to be as offensive as humanly possible.
Java was the big-grey-rectangle alternative, where you knew your browser was about to spend five entire minutes loading something, just to demonstrate a bouncing ball experiment or whatever. But: it was a real general-purpose executable format, with no installation or setup. You stuck a program on a page and it worked right there on the page. Eventually. And once it loaded it’d hitch and jerk constantly, because garbage-collection was always a terrible idea. But sometimes you’d find a page that’d hitch and jerk through playing Quake 2 in your goddamn web browser.
What ultimately killed them was that Adobe is among the worst software companies in the world and Oracle is number one. Flash was a security nightmare. It was hacked together for impressive functionality, and then repackaged for ease of use, so it was about as exploit-hardened as a wet paper towel. The fact it ran poorly on phones (and Steve Jobs was a dick) was just the excuse to stop tolerating its endless vulnerabilities. Java meanwhile was an okay format owned by the devil. It served kinda the same role as WebAssembly does now, except absolutely no-one wanted to put up with licensing it, because Oracle likes to sue its competitors and fuckin’ loves to sue its customers. The company name is an acronym for One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison. And if two devices running Java connect via wifi, he expects the air in-between them to be properly licensed. If the free software movement had not been founded to say “fuck printers,” it would have sprung into being in order to say “fuck Oracle.”
Anyway.
Google Chrome, intolerable leash that it now is, made Javascript usefully fast in 2008. Prior to that it was interpreted. Javascript calculators in the AOL days could lag. Mozilla responded with asm.js, inviting the language itself to be performant. Nowadays just about anything could be WASM + WebGPU, and quite frankly most things should be. But for some stupid reason even the chat programs written in Javascript bundle their own browser.
Excel enabled non-programmers to create basically any app as long as they are fine with a cell-based UI. Same with Access and CRUD apps. I know people love to dunk on M$ here, and for good reasons too, but these two programs are probably responsible for a decent chunk or PoC/v1 projects worldwide.
I use Excel for POCs quite a lot. Sometimes it’s easier to generate a CSV file, load it up in Excel and test the maths there instead of writing code to do that. And you can visualise the data as well, so your tens of thousands of rows are easier to digest and understand if what you’re doing is sound or not. It takes a lot more time to do decent data visualisation in JS or Python.
MS did a little revolution in WYSIWYG editors. Most persons can’t solve a basic tech problem but are proficient in using them. If there’s any hate to them it’s for their weird design decisions, being a monopolist and people using their programs for the things they were never prepared for. I still love MS '03 Office. It lacks some functions and can render pages differently than never editions due to converting formats, but it’s a solid boring workhorse with everything at the end of your fingers.
Imho NAPSTER. Crazy days of sharing mp3’s files.
Not sure it was ahead of its time, it revolutionized an entire industry. To me it feels more as if it came at the exact right time.
UNIX systems in the 1960s. They are still in use to this day and modified ones run our phones, Steam Decks and space craft!
HyperCard was awesome!
I have been using computers since the 80s. I had a hiatus in the late 80s/early 90s. Seeing an ad in a magazine for HyperCard is what made me want to get back into it.
Real Player.
Nobody had enough bandwidth to actually stream anything. I guess some people had IDSN, and maybe even fewer cable internet, but the majority of the world was still on dial up. You can’t stream video on dial up.
It was pretty good for the time indeed! I had a 10MBit link back then, watched a lot of funny videos through RP.
I liked that I could get loud bursts of static in real-time!!
Google glasses, I think it’s death was mainly because it looks nerdy aside of course the huge privacy concerns. Which honestly don’t exist now. Look at twitch streamers streaming everywhere. People installing cameras at their home and connected to the net for the world to see. Now we are going hard with VR/AR even Apple has a product for it.
The concerns exist and are bigger than ever. Ask c/privacy about it. You’re referencing the fractional percentage of people who elect to be streamers. Irrelevant to the general population.
A decade ago, one of my local dives, never seen a fight break out there… dude attacked a woman over them. You don’t think people are more poor and angry and traumatized now?
https://www.eater.com/2014/2/25/6273629/woman-attacked-for-wearing-google-glass-at-a-bar-in-sf
I’d never hit a woman or condone violence like this. And, fuck invasive undercover surveillance cameras. This technology can stay in a fuckin dumpster.
I mean, screw the camera. An affordable, non-intrusive heads-up display on glasses, we’re still dying to actually make that a thing. There’s a few third party solutions that still kind of do what they were doing but it’s nowhere near as good.
Yes, streamers might a bad example I admit but in terms of general population being privacy centric. I doubt most people don’t really care until ofcourse it affects them if we do we would have huge backlash with Amazon Echo, Google assistant those stuff won’t take off. Baby cameras, IP cameras installed in their very homes those things are a huge privacy concerns yet they are still here. We have TikTok/ Vine which people voluntarily submit videos. Theres Pokemon GO which prompt people to use their cameras to catch Pokemons. Not knowing if those image captured might be stored and analyze. Smartphone themselves we have no idea if that thing is recording us. I think Google glass failed simply because of its market which were rich and fashion centric did not like it. Compared to it’s competition who still seem alive today.
There are people who suddenly go offline completely because they have enough. I guess I should too
The privacy concern is even worse than it was for google glass. 10 years ago, you could rest assured that google wasn’t processing your video feed in a meaningful way because there was simply no way to meaningfully use it. Now, the stream can be analyzed on your phone using an AI for meaningful results, and that data can easily be sold because user telemetry is worth more now than ever before. People are also faster to dismiss privacy concerns, so it’ll be an easier thing to sell to customers.
Apple does not have a product. They have a prototype. It is not for sale.
It’s less than a month away, you know what he means.
Or so Apple says
Apple hasn’t said anything. It’s based on the supply chain. All Apple has said is early 2024 but all analysts predict a launch announcement in the next couple weeks, with actual launch within a month.
I think it died because of technical problems more than anything. We didn’t have batteries good enough back then, and the screen wasn’t all that good. It was heavy, it had problems with overheating and it worked for couple of hours tops
Postgres, Postgres has always been extremely ahead of the curve… Even when it was Ingres.
All of it, because apparently humans were wholly unprepared for using computer technology responsibly.
Google wave
I think its downfall was being a closed beta, which made it useless for communicating with other people who weren’t already invited
Google Wave was beautiful. I was rooting for it to replace email as a standard. So many possibilities lost…
In retrospect, wave did feel like an EEE attempt by Google on email, I am happy it didn’t replace email, but Google wave’s features have since spread to web app standards
I used it to generate a shit ton of policy documents in a hurry.
The company I was at was being staged to be purchased. We had Jack shit for policy documents. The company that was organizing our sale said they needed a wide range of formalized documentation.
I basically set my entire team up on wave. I threw up outlines in different threads and we all just went to fucking town writing policy. We would peer review, make suggestions on each other’s policy read over stuff while we worked on our own things.
It really was an amazing product.
It’s been quite a while so I might not be remembering correctly, but even though they advertised it as an application, wasn’t Google Wave more akin to a proof of concept? I was under the impression they took that engine and incorporated it into their collaboration products like Google Docs?
Quake 3, modern first person shooters are still based on that game.
for those chatbot lovers, respect to the one from 1966 : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
VisiCalc
