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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 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
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.
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 :(
Man, I remember seeing that BeOS demonstration that had a spinning cube with a different video playing on each face, and being absolutely dumbfounded. Thanks for reminding me of that.
*NeXTSTEP. And the NS object calls are part of the Objective-C programming language it was built with.
The fact he called the language HolyC is brilliant. He might be crazy, but that doesn't mean he isn't a genius.
Unfortunately your statements should be past tense :(. They died kind of tragically.
Wow, that was a wild ride of a story. Very sad though.
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.
Do websites count? Vine fizzled out but it would have been a huge success with today's TikTok crowd.
It had today's tiktok crowd. It was a huge hit. The only reason it failed is because of monetisation.
Only reason YouTube is popular. No competitor can match it in those terms.
Saying Vine was ahead of its time is like saying Digg or MySpace was ahead of its time. No it was at the precipice and just horribly failed to manage its growth and responding to competitors
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.
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
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.
Alter Ego, a 1986 life-simulator in which you start as a baby and play through an entire life, choose-your-own-adventure style.
The pointing-finger cursor used for navigating stacks was later used in the first web browsers, as the hyperlink cursor.[39]
All of it, because apparently humans were wholly unprepared for using computer technology responsibly.
DLNA protocol.
Seriously, how has it been passed up by all the worst little steaming gimmicks?
Okay, I’m probably super ignorant and in need of a lesson… Every piece of DLNA software I’ve ever messed with sucked and was a massive security and privacy issue? I haven’t looked at it much, but it didn’t seem worth it? Is it good? What’s good about it?
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.
Fwiw, citing c/privacy on Lemmy is very, very much also referencing a fractional percentage of society.
GEOS on the C64 (and possibly others)? A desktop environment before machines really had the power to pull it off decently.
VisiCalc
Battlefield heroes. Somehow it couldn’t pay the bills while that style of game is insanely popular now.
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
Photoshop. Kinda obvious now but at the time it was as revolutionary as it is mundane now.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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...