I also oddly miss Norton Speed Disk. I got a certain OCD satisfaction from knowing that all the bytes on my hard drive were organized.
I was wondering what software other people miss being able to run.
It started from a-drag-and-drop equivalent of today's PowerPoint and scaled all the way up to creating the game Myst, all with no bumps or steep sections on the learning curve. I used to teach it to middle schoolers and the things they could do with it were amazing; students were teaching themselves programming because it was a simple, obvious step forward.
Coding in VB 1.0 was cool. I think I made a rapid color changing thing in it. Like a modern stuck pixel exerciser, but probably way too fast to work. Not sure.
Mac OS X in the early versions (until like .7 maybe?) had a feel and look that’s definitely been lost. Probably mostly for the better but not exclusively.
Definitely wish modern OSes would take some time to make user interfaces as fast to respond as possible and reliable enough to basically never lock up. Just give an error indicator if something’s locked up under the hood (aka background/off thread).
Definitely wish modern websites were more text based.
Problem with such hardware is that when you look for a piece, you find it cheaper in a batch than alone. I've ended up so far with a nice collection 10-12 PCs from the eighties. Nicest ones are the IBM 5150, 5160 and 5162, the Compaq Deskpro 386-20 (in the original huge Compaq form factor), the original Compaq Portable 386, a pair of IBM PS/2 8530-286...
I can play my old games, run Turbo Pascal programs I wrote in 1988-1990, play with x86 Assembler programming, play MOD files on PC bipper and Sound Blaster 2. In addition I can run Area5150, 8088MPH... Recent software that only run on very specific and very old hardware.
No regret, it is mostly fun!
By the time I'd used Fireworks alongside Photoshop and Illustrator in the mid-2000s, it started seeming ludicrous to me that Photoshop was anywhere near as prevalent as it was for screen design. Raster layers were a poor primitive, semi-parameterized raster features bolted on weren't a lot better. Fireworks was simply better as a melding of vector and bitmap capabilities from the start, and made dozens of little better tooling decisions along the way.
Mobile's rise and frustration with Adobe's pricing/ownership model probably helped the industry shake off the idea that Photoshop was THE approach, so we got Sketch and Figma and others and even Adobe figured it out with specific screen-design tooling. But Fireworks got it right a lot earlier.
Since Apple's hostile to even virtualizing its old environments, I've considered buying a windows license for Fw and using it that way, though I'm also getting to know Affinity's products too. Not convinced they or anything else are a true replacement yet, though.
I also wish I could have kept my TurboCAD license for Linux somehow when I moved away from Mac OS. It would have been fun to keep learning.
(Actually I admit that what frightens me is: I get those running under Wine somehow and am off and away, and just never find the time to use them again :-/)
I also miss running some WinAmp 5.x skins in Linux, not sure if these are supported now. I also liked the ~2003 era internet radio stations list that came with it, in a themed window. So I use qmmp and 3.x skins.
In vintage Linux software I really miss that I could do icon scaling & free icon layout in Gnome back around 2009. Not sure if that's still possible but I use XFCE now most of the time anyway.
You could scale individual icons in two clicks, and turn icons into a sort of functional, interactive desktop wallpaper design that was more interesting than the standard grid.
imgSeek. It requires python 2.4 among other things. It allowed me to draw crude MS Paint style images and then use them to search for similar colored/shaped images on my hard drive. There's no good replacement for it's ability and porting is non-trivial. https://sourceforge.net/projects/imgseek/
Also, the relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2224/ My solution for this is to keep my old computers running old OSes and software. I build a new computer with all the new software once every 5-10 years when I'm finding I can no longer compile things.
Borland Delphi 5, it was the peak of productive windows programming
debug - the DOS command, you could write small programs on the fly.
list - an incredibly fast file viewer by Vernon D. Buerg.
I feel like there are so many old games from those years that people have a strong attachment to that will gradually become harder and harder to run or find. I fear for the day when no amount of debugging and compatibility flagging and messing about will get these games to run on modern hardware. Battlezone may not be a great example because it's popular enough to have a good scene around it, but some games aren't.
To illustrate such strong attachments, and also to just tell an interesting story, my father purchased Battlezone 1998 when it came out because he needed something to keep occupied while on baby-minding duties. with me. I was the baby!. He kept it for years. And years. And finally, one day, when I was an older-yet-still-very-young child, I'm helping with some cleaning or something (I don't exactly remember) and I find the game in clear transparent box! I show my father, and I remember him getting excited and firing it up on our one family's laptop. We gamed for a while and then he let me continue. I remember constantly killing myself or getting the base killed because my infantile brain couldn't understand how those damn scavengers and turrets worked. I remember that day to this day, around 15 years later. I remember grinding it for days just to get to the second stage - Mars.
Wouldn't it be a shame if such software is lost to time!
P.S. If anyone is on HN who was even remotely involved in that game, please know that you are a really awesome person
You could inspect any memory and disassembly and write plus patch any machine code while the system was paused. There also was a diff mechanism to see which memory changed (e.g. if you lost a life).
This is the thing I wish to make myself (https://tablam.org) to, in part, being able to run it on mobile/cloud. And Mac/Linux (Fox long ago run on Mac but that die with MS).
As far as I can tell, there is a significant gap in modern software: there is a large catalogue of software that is intended to be easy to use but is inflexible, and a decent selection of software that is flexible yet is incredibly complex to use. A lot of software of the 1990's was both flexible yet not overwhelming to use.
It pretend to be xBase language but actually close to C.
It had fuzzy file and application search, but where it really stood out was the application plugin system. Wanted to send a quick message to a coworker? Summon Gnome do with a shortcut, type message a space and then fuzzy complete on the coworkers name. Then just type the message right there and get back to what you were doing.
It was kinda like Alfred, but just much more powerful. It got destroyed during the transition to Unity, and was never made to work again, and now that all the apps are webapps there aren't any halfway decent plugins so it wouldn't matter much.
Technically you can still run it in an emulator, but without a dot matrix printer, it wouldn't be the same.
Mainly I miss the free time and the lack of social networks. Content sucks, I think. Posts and statuses were definitely a mistake.
Building desktop apps and hybrid desktop/web apps in the same language that could talk to each other for the first? time was so much fun. I built some cool apps.
Have been dying to build a desktop app again and dig into what the js or other world has to offer but haven’t had time.
If you could talk to people, Trillian and/or Pidgin supported it.
On that note, I miss Google Talk and Google Voice via Talk.
I absolutely hate how siloed and protectionist chat platforms have become.
I spend most of my work time in a terminal shell connected to a Linux server, very similar to what I used 40 years ago.