The fact he called the language HolyC is brilliant. He might be crazy, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t a genius.
Wasn’t.
Superscape Do3D blew my mind back in the day. I used to spend weeks just building little houses and landscapes, then watch them come alive with virtual “NPCs” and such.
Definitely required some imagination, but for a time when connecting to the internet still made a noise, it was definitely impressive.
I remember when Minecraft was first being developed, my first thought was that it looked like a modern voxel-based Do3D.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
GEOS on the C64 (and possibly others)? A desktop environment before machines really had the power to pull it off decently.
zmodem. It was the fastest way to move data back in the day and was a trailblazer for streaming protocols. It excelled over dialup connections. Moving a file by say ftp over tcp/ip was painful by comparison.
VLC, when codec were thé worst.
Words cannot convey how sketchy the MP4 codec scene was, pirating media in the Windows XP era. Every month you’d have to find some DivX CCCP K-Lite [cracked].7zip.exe and roll the fuckin’ dice.
We were very proficient at reinstalling our operating systems.
omg, klite code pack with media player classic. You took me back
Media Player Classic still rules. Feature-rich with zero bullshit.
I definitely don’t miss having to install codec packs.
Absolutely VLC, VLC was excellent at what it does before codec issues were even that widespread.
wouldnt this one really just be ffmpeg?
VLC does use ffmpeg (or more specifically, libavcodec) for some of its codecs, but it uses a bunch of other libraries as well, including VLC specific ones.
All of it, because apparently humans were wholly unprepared for using computer technology responsibly.
Hardware and software combo… video toaster from Newtech
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_ToasterAlter Ego, a 1986 life-simulator in which you start as a baby and play through an entire life, choose-your-own-adventure style.
Postgres, Postgres has always been extremely ahead of the curve… Even when it was Ingres.
Robot Odyssey, an adventure game played by programming robots to help you. Still nothing like it.
Still feels like an untapped niche. Doesn’t help that adventure games in general have mostly been folded into other genres now.
Human Resource Machine and even Factorio scratched that same part of my brain.
UNIX systems in the 1960s. They are still in use to this day and modified ones run our phones, Steam Decks and space craft!
This is a matter of interpretation, I’ll wager, but to me, “before its time” implies something that came about too early, before the world was ready for it. I’d argue that Unix was of its time, since it was the operating system that went on to widespread success. That is to say, I think that it’s Multics that was before its time. It was derided at the time for being too large and complex (2MB of memory—outrageous!!), and the creators of Unix were Multics programmers who borrowed many of its concepts to make a smaller, less resource-intensive OS that ran better on the computers of the day.
I mean, most of us were stuck using inferior operating systems until Linux and OS X became mainstream versions of it we could use. It’s not like everyone got to use UNIX from day one.
Fair, my thoughts are of the current utilization and use-case we have for Unix-like systems makes it so dynamic and universal. I absolutely love it.
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.
Used to be the first thing we installed on phones and PCs. Opera was blazing fast on basic phones as far back as 2008sh.
Opera also invented full page zooming. Originally, browser zoom would only increase text size - everything else (including images, the actual page layout, etc) would remain the same size. Opera was the first browser to instead zoom into the entire page.
It also had a lot of features that either require extensions or don’t even exist these days. Things like being able to disable JavaScript or change the User-agent per-site, basic content blocking before ad blockers existed (like modern-day ad blockers but you’d manually build your own list of things to block by going into content blocking mode and clicking on them), an option to only show cached images (useful on slow dial up connections), a fully customizable UI (literally every toolbar, button, and status bar segment could be moved around), and many more.
It was truly a web browser for the future, far far ahead of its time. I miss those days.
Opera also invented the browser Speed Dial, which was super handy back in the day.
But most importantly, Opera invented tabs, or at least the concept of tabbed browsing. I recall using Opera on Windows 3.11 and for the longest time, even during the Win 9x era, no other app used tabs.
In addition to mouse gestures, they had customisable keyboard shortcuts for practically every browser feature, again, something which very few apps bothered with.
The page compression built into Opera Mini was a life saver on Symbian and Windows Mobile devices back in the 2G/GPRS era. Opera Mini loaded pages blindingly quick and there was nothing else like it on the market, even leading up to early Android days.
but thankfully he started Vivaldi which feels like the spiritual successor.
Too bad he made the unfortunate decision of going with the Chromium engine instead of Gecko, or even making their own engine. I would’ve loved to use Vivalidi if it weren’t for that fact.
Opera didn’t actually invent browser tabs. That’s a common misconception.
Tabs was first invented for the browser InternetWorks
Searching for almost anything was so much easy. Such a powerful tool that disappeared. Its performance 20 years ago was better than Finder is today. At least from my experience.
If you’re on windows, Everything by Void tools is the best at indexing and searching.
I switched to Linux and I desperately miss Everything. It was fucking instant.
I’m sure there are similar tools on Linux. When I install KDE Plasma, I always disable baloo indexer because I don’t need it, but I think it does something like Everything.
Its performance 20 years ago was better than Finder is today
This is the case for a lot of software, and it drives me crazy. We used to have slow, relatively unreliable hard drives, single core processors, and significantly slower RAM, and yet some things feel slower today than they did 20 years ago. Try Windows 98 on an old PC (or a VM with a single throttled core) and compare it to any modern Windows OS. Try Visual Basic 6 and compare the startup and build speeds to any modern IDE.
It feels like some software has been getting slower more quickly than hardware has been getting faster…
Developers went like: “it’s free real estate”
I’m gonna cheat a little one and mention the PSP GO (take it as an honorable mention because it uses software to work lol).
The damn thing was meant to be used with an online connection to get games, updates and DLCs but people failed to see the appeal to it (mostly because of the poor infrastructure we used to have) people decided that UMD was the better option and guess which of those thrived.
That’s downplaying how Sony tried forcing everyone to switch, once they’d already bought UMDs. They just could not stop themselves from fucking over their own customers. Buy a PSP! It needs Sony’s special memory cards. No, extra-special ones, not the kind your Sony digital cameras use. Upgrade your PSP! Fuck you, buy new memory cards. Yeah it’s the same shape, but it’s special-er, you peasant. Upgrade your PSP again! And throw out all your games, because we didn’t include a slot this time! It’s all on the memory card, and of course you have to buy a new one, from us, specifically for this single gizmo, priced like it’s made out of gold recovered from deep-water shipwrecks.
If they’d just launched with forced internet connectivity it might be a different story. God knows the OG PSP never spent long without getting leashed to a wall, so yet another game could forcibly install new firmware, once your battery reached exactly 100.0% charge.
All of those changes were to prevent the absolutely rampant piracy.
Source: I was a rampant pirate who spread the word better than a Jehovah’s Witness.
The forced updates were definitely to prevent piracy… and didn’t work.
The new kinds of Memory Stick were naked rampant greed.
Source: I was a rampant pirate who spread the word better than a Jehovah’s Witness.
LMAO, yeah, same for me, maybe that is why I never see the problem with the GO but the downgrade design/ergonomics.
Google Wave RIP
