Defunct Technology or Websites that You Miss?

[fumanstan]

Originally Posted by Ranger

Ah, pc gaming. Anyone remember DOOM? Played it on win95. Last pc game I had was GTA vice city. Good times. But gave up gaming in general afterwards, just as part of growing up.

Win95? Better yet on DOS.

Originally Posted by al_bundy

i was in the army back then and built my first PC a little while after Wing Commander Prophecy came out. Before i flew back to Italy i picked up a Voodoo2 card the day they hit store shelves and was the only one in the barracks able to run Doom in 3D

I assume some sort of mod, since Doom is a 2D game. Or you meant Quake.

[al_bundy]

i think Carmack added 3D to Doom after the fact. I think the first one was for Rendition 3D cards and for 3dfx a little later. maybe it was Quake, don't remember.

[Drexl]

It was Quake. There was a later GL port of Doom, but I think that was after the source code was released and not done by Id.

[jeffbase34]

Does anyone use beepers anymore?

[al_bundy]

seems so long ago, that build had a 12MB Voodoo2 and Nvidia's Riva TNT card in there. it was a screamer compared to what anyone else had at the time

[al_bundy]

Originally Posted by jeffbase34

Does anyone use beepers anymore?

i think doctors still use them, but drug dealers gave them up a long time ago in favor of cell phones

[E. Honda]

When was the last time any of us saw a pop-up ad for X10, Bonzi Buddy, or the Comet Cursor?

[fumanstan]

Originally Posted by al_bundy

i think Carmack added 3D to Doom after the fact. I think the first one was for Rendition 3D cards and for 3dfx a little later. maybe it was Quake, don't remember.

Originally Posted by Drexl

It was Quake. There was a later GL port of Doom, but I think that was after the source code was released and not done by Id.

Yeah, it was Quake then. I had a Rendition V1000 card so I used vQuake at the time.

Old video card memories are great. I actually have the first Nvidia card, the NV1 before Direct3D came out. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NV1

[matome]

Originally Posted by pinata242

dvdspot still stings...

[dgmayor]

tvtome.com before it got bought out and became tv.com

And I'll second PC gaming. I miss the old Sierra, Lucasarts (Lucasfilm Games) type of adventure games. Been replacing a lot of them lately for nostaliga.

[al_bundy]

Originally Posted by E. Honda

When was the last time any of us saw a pop-up ad for X10, Bonzi Buddy, or the Comet Cursor?

around 2001 for me

i was doing consulting at a government agency and they had a java based financial program. someone complained that it wasn't opening up and i saw that stupid monkey on the screen. uninstalled it and the java app started working

[al_bundy]

Originally Posted by dgmayor

tvtome.com before it got bought out and became tv.com

And I'll second PC gaming. I miss the old Sierra, Lucasarts (Lucasfilm Games) type of adventure games. Been replacing a lot of them lately for nostaliga.

lucasarts is releasing all the old games on Steam

http://store.steampowered.com/publisher/LucasArts/

more are coming later this year

[Capt Planit]

Certain games-

I remember playing delta force black hawk down, and counter strike online when they were big (although I'm sure people are still playing). Playing warcraft 1 and warcraft 2, before all this wow crap.

[Gilgamesh1082]

thedojo.com for the Magic CCG news. The day that site shut down, my love for the game died with it.

TheGIA.com - To this day, it remains the greatest video game news site of all time. Its a damn shame its no longer with us.

[Numanoid]

I'll tell you what I don't miss about PC gaming...spending one or two ENTIRE DAYS configuring your system memory in order to get the damned game to run. Config.sys this, EMM that, FILES=X, BUFFERS=XX...argh, it was hair-pullingly frustrating.

[Tarantino]

I used to use Geocities to make very simple websites.

[statcat]

probably webtv, had lots of potential but they never really pushed it further. It's still around of course but I dropped it years ago.

[UAIOE]

Originally Posted by Numanoid

I'll tell you what I don't miss about PC gaming...spending one or two ENTIRE DAYS configuring your system memory in order to get the damned game to run. Config.sys this, EMM that, FILES=X, BUFFERS=XX...argh, it was hair-pullingly frustrating.

Yeah, I don't miss dicking around in DOS trying to get a game to work...only to tell me I don't have enough memory.

12mb of ram and I *don't* have enough memory to run "Doom"? Riiiiiiiiight

[al_bundy]

640k ram, high memory, tall memory

those were the days. i thought those were the days until i tried to help someone with OS 9. you had to assign memory to apps manually before you ran them and then take it back

[chanster]

Pointclick.com

[palebluedot]

Originally Posted by Ranger

EDIT: Oh, I'll also add the mini disc format. I had such high hopes for hi-MD but Sony just couldn't come through with better software and music files still had to be converted (atrac?) to be playable on it.

Amazingly still popular in Japan. I was just there for the past few weeks and you can still buy players and media (blank and pre-recorded) very easily at most major shops like Bic or Yodobashi.

[al_bundy]

Originally Posted by palebluedot

Amazingly still popular in Japan. I was just there for the past few weeks and you can still buy players and media (blank and pre-recorded) very easily at most major shops like Bic or Yodobashi.

i read somewhere that the reason all this stuff is in japan first is that it's so expensive there that people live with parents until they are pushing 40 and they have the income to buy this stuff. also read that the japanese are looking at apple and palm to rework their cell phone business model due to the low margins

[palebluedot]

Originally Posted by al_bundy

i read somewhere that the reason all this stuff is in japan first is that it's so expensive there that people live with parents until they are pushing 40 and they have the income to buy this stuff. also read that the japanese are looking at apple and palm to rework their cell phone business model due to the low margins

One of my friends there describes it best. "Salaries are low, rents are crazy, too many people, I only have a week of vacation, and I never see the sky, so I fill my life with gadgets and video games".

But that's their life I guess.

My wife and I were quite surprised to see how many people were using the iPhone in Japan. My wife (who is Japanese) thought it would never be popular because they don't really care about PDA style phones there.

[TheKobra]

I miss Tex Murphy games or interactive movie games. I remember buying Under a Killing Moon back in 1994 when I was in college. The follow sequels Pandora Directive and Overseer were great. There was a sequel planned for Overseer until Microsoft purchases Access software.

[kuroiinu]

Originally Posted by palebluedot

One of my friends there describes it best. "Salaries are low, rents are crazy, too many people, I only have a week of vacation, and I never see the sky, so I fill my life with gadgets and video games".

But that's their life I guess.

My wife and I were quite surprised to see how many people were using the iPhone in Japan. My wife (who is Japanese) thought it would never be popular because they don't really care about PDA style phones there.

There was a recent article in the New York Times discussing this "Galapagos Syndrome" - the phenomenon of Japanese having unique products that don't have a market anywhere else. Sometimes it's because they design to their own standards, other times it's because they want things few other people are willing to pay for.

When friends from Japan come visit us, we are fascinated by their phones, while they want to play with our garage door opener and the Weber grill. Different priorities, I guess


http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/20/te...cell.html?_r=1

July 20, 2009
Why Japan’s Cellphones Haven’t Gone Global

By HIROKO TABUCHI
TOKYO — At first glance, Japanese cellphones are a gadget lover’s dream: ready for Internet and e-mail, they double as credit cards, boarding passes and even body-fat calculators.

But it is hard to find anyone in Chicago or London using a Japanese phone like a Panasonic, a Sharp or an NEC. Despite years of dabbling in overseas markets, Japan’s handset makers have little presence beyond the country’s shores.

“Japan is years ahead in any innovation. But it hasn’t been able to get business out of it,” said Gerhard Fasol, president of the Tokyo-based IT consulting firm, Eurotechnology Japan.

The Japanese have a name for their problem: Galápagos syndrome.

Japan’s cellphones are like the endemic species that Darwin encountered on the Galápagos Islands — fantastically evolved and divergent from their mainland cousins — explains Takeshi Natsuno, who teaches at Tokyo’s Keio University.

This year, Mr. Natsuno, who developed a popular wireless Internet service called i-Mode, assembled some of the best minds in the field to debate how Japanese cellphones can go global.

“The most amazing thing about Japan is that even the average person out there will have a superadvanced phone,” said Mr. Natsuno. “So we’re asking, can’t Japan build on that advantage?”
...

Yet Japan’s lack of global clout is all the more surprising because its cellphones set the pace in almost every industry innovation: e-mail capabilities in 1999, camera phones in 2000, third-generation networks in 2001, full music downloads in 2002, electronic payments in 2004 and digital TV in 2005.

Japan has 100 million users of advanced third-generation smartphones, twice the number used in the United States, a much larger market. Many Japanese rely on their phones, not a PC, for Internet access.

Indeed, Japanese makers thought they had positioned themselves to dominate the age of digital data. But Japanese cellphone makers were a little too clever. The industry turned increasingly inward. In the 1990s, they set a standard for the second-generation network that was rejected everywhere else. Carriers created fenced-in Web services, like i-Mode. Those mobile Web universes fostered huge e-commerce and content markets within Japan, but they have also increased the country’s isolation from the global market.

Then Japan quickly adopted a third-generation standard in 2001. The rest of the world dallied, essentially making Japanese phones too advanced for most markets.
...

Despite their advanced hardware, handsets here often have primitive, clunky interfaces, some participants said. Most handsets have no way to easily synchronize data with PCs as the iPhone and other smartphones do.

Because each handset model is designed with a customized user interface, development is time-consuming and expensive, said Tetsuzo Matsumoto, senior executive vice president at Softbank Mobile, a leading carrier. “Japan’s phones are all ‘handmade’ from scratch,” he said. “That’s reaching the limit.”

Then there are the peculiarities of the Japanese market, like the almost universal clamshell design, which is not as popular overseas. Recent hardware innovations, like solar-powered batteries or waterproofing, have been incremental rather than groundbreaking.

The emphasis on hardware makes even the newest phones here surprisingly bulky. Some analysts say cellphone carriers stifle innovation by demanding so many peripheral hardware functions for phones.

The Sharp 912SH for Softbank, for example, comes with an LCD screen that swivels 90 degrees, GPS tracking, a bar-code reader, digital TV, credit card functions, video conferencing and a camera and is unlocked by face recognition.

Meanwhile, Japanese developers are jealous of the runaway global popularity of the Apple iPhone and App Store, which have pushed the American and European cellphone industry away from its obsession with hardware specifications to software. “This is the kind of phone I wanted to make,” Mr. Natsuno said, playing with his own iPhone 3G.