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.

VLC, when codec were thé worst.

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.

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.

templeos

Do websites count? Vine fizzled out but it would have been a huge success with today's TikTok crowd.

Imho NAPSTER. Crazy days of sharing mp3's files.

UNIX systems in the 1960s. They are still in use to this day and modified ones run our phones, Steam Decks and space craft!

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.

HyperCard.

All of it, because apparently humans were wholly unprepared for using computer technology responsibly.

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.

Google wave

Postgres, Postgres has always been extremely ahead of the curve... Even when it was Ingres.

Alter Ego, a 1986 life-simulator in which you start as a baby and play through an entire life, choose-your-own-adventure style.

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.

DLNA protocol.

Seriously, how has it been passed up by all the worst little steaming gimmicks?

Quake 3, modern first person shooters are still based on that game.

GEOS on the C64 (and possibly others)? A desktop environment before machines really had the power to pull it off decently.

Battlefield heroes. Somehow it couldn’t pay the bills while that style of game is insanely popular now.

The Source game engine was completely unmatched in its time.

VisiCalc

Kai's Power Tools in 1992 . The interface was so next level it felt out of place and the more you used it features would get unlocked and more advanced. https://winworldpc.com/product/kais-power-tools/20

for those chatbot lovers, respect to the one from 1966 : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA

Dr Sbaitso early TTS and kinda-AI psychologist, with his cantankerous, all-caps responses.

Hardware and software combo… video toaster from Newtech
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Toaster

Google Wave RIP