What's your favorite “forgotten” technology / software?

Usenet in the Internet early days when the net was not filled with spam. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet

IRC before Slack took off. IRC a standardized chat protocol, there is not chat islands.

Gopher, the text version of meta browsable Internet before World wide web. You could navigate gopher with just a keyboard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_%28protocol%29

BBS Bulletin Board systems there were local computer communities formed around them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system

I still write all my projects in Pascal

Memory safety has become a modern buzzword, but Pascal had memory safe strings and arrays decades ago, based on automated reference counting. Now it also has other types that are not memory safe, but you do not have to use them. Everything would be much safer if all the C code was replaced by Pascal code. And Pascal is compiled to native code without GC, so it is also very fast

And XPath. It is the best language to map and filter data. It felt out of favor with XML, but it can be used on all data, HTML, CSV, JSON, Plaintext, ...

People talk about Lisp and Delphi not really being used anymore in the mainstream. Smalltalk as well, especially when it has the ability to have the entire program running and suspended on disk for analysis. That is not available in any modern language if I recall correctly.

Old-school server-side-rendered HTML. It's sufficient for the majority of websites and CRUD apps and is so much simpler to develop for with less moving parts and failure modes.

Mesa/Cedar, Lisp Machines, Oberon and Active Oberon, Amiga, Atari ST, BeOS, Smalltalk, Clipper 5.x, GUI RAD (VB, Delphi, C++ Builder).

Some of those did make into mainstream, but current generations have lost that phase.

I'm obsessed with MUDs. There's still a robust MUD community out there, but most people have never heard of them. I'm currently building one from scratch in Go. Fun times.

I also miss the good ol' BBS days. I know there's some BBS communities out there, but it doesn't feel the same without dialup. I also spent some time this summer writing Solar Realms Elite from scratch as well. I didn't finish it, but I got a decent engine going.

Speaking of BBSes, there was a networking protocol back then known as FidoNet which allowed BBSes to communicate and share information. In my more bored moments I've considered trying to find the spec and build some modern FidoNet clients/servers or whatever it is.

Short version: I really love the old text-based (ASCII ftw) internet days, and I think about that tech a lot.

Visual Basic was awesome. I was making simple shooting games and card games as a teenager with minimal understanding of any programming at all. They felt like real, robust, desktop apps. You could drag and drop UI components and very easily add functionality.

I'm fond of my early development tools: Hypercard, Resedit, Think Pascal, MacsBug... It gives me rainbows whenever I think about it, no matter how grey my developer life currently is.

And not a mention of CP/M, the 8-bit Disk Operating System that was ubiquitous till about 1985.

I still use it, but with a Z80 emulator on a 64-bit machine. One of my emulators if rendered in the real hardware of the era would have cost somewhere around 40-50 thousand dollars. These days it's merely about 140 megabytes of data tucked away in a directory

Film photography.

People still use film but it is no longer ubiquitous. There are people in the world approaching adulthood who likely never experienced what it was like to take a picture and wait hours or days to find out if it turned out. There is something unique about film that goes beyond the image itself. It is an entire experience from taking a photo to waiting to get the photo processed and printed. The experience is what makes the image special.

One thing I really dislike about digital is the churn of the technology. Every year new sensors are released and the old ones become obsolete and eventually useless. I have film cameras older than me and some even older than my parents that are still capable of creating great images. Digital cameras are not likely to enjoy a second life like this. I appreciate digital photography for its utility but for me film will always be "real" photography and it will always be better.

I’ve been fascinated with Trinary computing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ternary_computer

Borland Paradox for DOS 4.5 (build full data-driven desktop applications, from form designer to relational database to reporting).

4DOS/4NT (a command-line enhancer which really made DOS/Windows CMD.EXE really productive. I use cmder these days but still miss the 4DOS/4NT level productivity).

SuperMemo, the spaced repetition software for learning that's the equivalent of photoshop in that space compared to the more popular Anki that's more akin to MS Paint.

Hotline [1] the precursor to Gnutella and Kazaa. Chat, message board, file transfer client / server software ahead of its time. While not peer-to-peer, it's easy to navigate and use user interface was superior.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotline_Communications

I still miss my MusicMatch Jukebox - the paid version, before yahoo took it and ruined it.. I paid for 7.1 I think - then yahoo forced an upgrade - ruined it imho - and thier tech support said the only way to get back my old version that I had paid for was to do some registry hacks..

And whichever tech had the good visualizations back then - it might have been windows media player - or maybe winamp - but there was a plugin that actually had visualizations that changed in different ways with the beat and sometimes other parts of the various frequencies.

Not sure this is my favorite forgotten tech, but first to mind.

Seems computers / programs / OS's have needed so many updates and the time it takes - it's really ruined what use to be more fun imho.

Wish I kept all mu c-64 floppies - archon, jumpman jr, little computer people, MULE..

I do want minidiscs back - a new blue ray type version with backwards compat would be nice.

Im going to think of more I'm sure. Oh how progress ruins things.

Allaire’s Coldfusion web server and language which existed before .Net existed. Allaire did everyone a disservice when they sold themselves to Macronedia which was then bought by Adobe. At the time, Coldfusion was years ahead of what would become asp.net. I wished they sold or licensed themselves to Microsoft.

Winamp visualisations. Spent a lot of hours in front of that app a couple of decades back.

I'm sure there's better stuff somewhere out there nowadays, but my music consumption has simply moved away anyway - period on iTunes/Google Music, now only ever streaming random stuff on-demand from Spotify.

KeyKOS - https://github.com/void4/notes/issues/41

MUDs - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD

Delphi and Visual Basic. Creating applications by dragging some buttons onto a grid, and double-clicking to add code to them, was such a better developer experience than what we have now. Sadly such tools didn't translate to the complexities of the web...

Turbo C/C++ with its blue background DOS editor.

TCL/Tk, expect.

Perl though I don’t think I miss it much.

Norton Your Eyes Only. Early desktop encryption software for Windows 3.1. Also, Menuworks for DOS. Graphical User Interface which was editable for personal or corporate use.

TI calculators, a mechanical pencil with a good eraser, and a notebook. It really let's me focus on the engineering and not the tools.

I love Zip and Jazz drives/disks

XyWrite, WordStar (word processing)

Forth, Tcl/Tk programming

ARCNET token-bus networking

Wire-wrap technique for electronic circuit boards

I miss themes in Windows. I guess windows 98 had them and it was awesome

Noblink TSR. Get rid of that maddening blinking cursor.