VLC, when codec were thé worst.
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
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
I remember using an app called Kai’s Power Goo, which is assume is made by the same person.
Pretty bold assumption
Dr Sbaitso early TTS and kinda-AI psychologist, with his cantankerous, all-caps responses.
Now that is a name I haven’t heard in a long time! There are videos of Dr. Sbaitso usage on YouTube (of course). Also got this software with a Soundblaster card somewhen in the 90s.
Dr. Sbaitso popped in my head and I had to see if anyone here remembered it. I had the privilege of being able to use it when it came out. Fun times!
You can still use it through the Classic Reloaded site!
Postgres, Postgres has always been extremely ahead of the curve… Even when it was Ingres.
Visicalc
Battlefield heroes. Somehow it couldn’t pay the bills while that style of game is insanely popular now.
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_ToasterI expected an IOT toaster, but was disappointed.
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.
IMO there’s still nothing that’s quite as good as Flash. Efficient vector animations that perform consistently across all major browsers are still unusually hard for non-developers. There are some solutions, but they usually aren’t as designer or animator-friendly and require a huge JavaScript library to be loaded. The barrier to entry for non-developers (or inexperienced developers) creating games that run well cross-browser is still quite high too.
I remember creating a Flash-based chat system back in the day. Before WebSockets and Server Sent Events, Flash was the only way to get bidirectional sockets in a web browser, other than Java applets of course (which were pretty locked down by that point).
Ruffle is obviously as good as Flash, by emulating Flash - but yeah, the creative environment is missing. We need some .io page that clones the old way of churning out 2D games and animations.
We’re in a stupid period of computing where a legitimate way to get games on smartphones and computers is to publish software for DOS because everything has some kind of emulator for that archaic platform.
I’ve heard it phrased as “the only stable API for Linux games is Win32.”
Somewhere I have a boxed copy of Hexen for Linux and I doubt it will run on Void (holding with kernel 6.6.6)
GEOS on the C64 (and possibly others)? A desktop environment before machines really had the power to pull it off decently.
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…
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.
Alter Ego, a 1986 life-simulator in which you start as a baby and play through an entire life, choose-your-own-adventure style.
