Photoshop. Kinda obvious now but at the time it was as revolutionary as it is mundane now.
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.
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"
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.
It was an evolution of previous protocols and only marginally better/faster than, say, ymodem.
It was useful, but was it really ahead of its time?
Robot Odyssey, an adventure game played by programming robots to help you. Still nothing like it.
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.
KeyKOS, EROS, and other capability-based mainframe OSes could offer security and data integrity guarantees that "modern" OSes are only now just catching up with. Nothing from the Unix or VMS lineages, including Linux and Windows¹, really comes close.
The next chance for widespread adoption of a capability-based system is maybe Fuchsia; if Google ever deploys it for anything other than Nest devices, or if its open-source core gets picked up by someone else.
¹ Windows isn't literally a VMS, but modern Windows descends from Windows NT, which was led by Dave Cutler, who had also been the tech lead on VMS. And there's the joke about "WNT" and "VMS".
If games count, Black and White. I think that game is peak VR material just happened way before VR and now the IP is dead afaik
KDX Peer to Peer and cross platform "sharing". loved the custom interface options. lucked into a few good servers that had hard to find vinyl shares.
Windows Vista
It looked so good, and brought 64-bit computing to the mainstream. Everyone fucking hated it because the computers that they had (which at the time was the majority) absolutely sucked.
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.
NeXT. I still use WindowMaker partially out of nostalgia for NeXTSTEP. BeOS was also mind blowing. And can’t forget WebOS for phones.
Lisp Machines and Smalltak. We're still catching up to a lot of things that were possible with these systems.
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