[HN Gopher] The Lost Apps of the 80s
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The Lost Apps of the 80s
Author : ingve
Score : 41 points
Date : 2021-04-04 19:49 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (scripting.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (scripting.com)
| gecko wrote:
| Whenever this comes up, I always ask, even though I can
| anticipate the answer:
|
| has anyone cloned Lotus Improv, either literally or
| ideologically? The closest thing I've used recently that was
| close was probably Airtable, but that's more an iterative
| improvement on FileMaker/Access, with a web focus, than really a
| competitor to Improv. There also used to be a Java desktop app,
| but it wasn't targeted for casual desktop use, and I've long
| since forgotten its name.
| Avshalom wrote:
| How "cloned" do you want?
|
| as far as I know Quantrix Modeler
| https://quantrix.com/products/quantrix-modeler/ started as a
| clone and has continued on with the same idea, though by now I
| assume it's accreted enough bells and whistles to be just
| barely recognizable.
|
| ETA: also it's 2.5 grand a seat so...
| gecko wrote:
| Aha! Yeah, that's the Java GUI client I mentioned. But yes,
| $2500 a seat is a bit more than I would like to pay for my
| use case. :)
|
| (I'm not saying it's Not Worth That, but I definitely would
| not get back my investment for what I use spreadsheets for.)
| guessbest wrote:
| Flexisheet was created to be a clone of Improv for Gnustep, but
| it was abandoned long ago. You could compiled the source.
|
| https://flexisheet-orphans.blogspot.com/2006/10/circa-2002-l...
|
| Sourcecode : https://github.com/gnustep/gap/tree/master/user-
| apps/FlexiSh...
|
| Review of alternatives:
| https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=546563
| currymj wrote:
| Isn't Notion pretty close to what's being described here? Sort of
| weird combination of networked spreadsheet, relational database,
| writing + notetaking app?
|
| There's been an explosion of competitors and imitators, too.
| Some, like Roam, definitely have a utopian 1980s hypertext ethos.
| readflaggedcomm wrote:
| >Now, we don't have choice. [...] I have to use their editors
|
| Only for the submission. You can write externally. There used to
| be "It's All Text" before Firefox's extensions got gutted, which
| automated that copying. I wonder where that lies on their list of
| "apps" to edit with.
| asymptosis wrote:
| Based on the title, I thought this was going to be about finding,
| archiving and curating those lost apps. Instead, it's just a
| complaint about how "it was better in the old days."
|
| What gets me about this line of thought is that the technology
| didn't disappear. Anyone who wants to recreate "the lost apps of
| the 80s" just needs to grab a text editor and start coding.
|
| Everyone has the power to create any app they like. Stop pointing
| the finger at other people asking why they don't do the work for
| you.
| tyingq wrote:
| I see what the author is saying, but I also think the "low code"
| stuff is catching up. I've seen things people build in O365,
| Quickbase, Airtable, Knack, and so on that have the same level of
| functionality I remember seeing in Notes/Domino.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| These apps have been "lost" for one single reason: they weren't
| FLOSS. There's plenty of software written in the 1980s that has
| been maintained since and is used today on modern platforms,
| because its code _was_ made available under a suitable license.
| Proprietary software is a dead end, and proprietary online
| services only more so.
| jonahbenton wrote:
| Quick hypothesis on PIMs/editors/etc, from someone who worked on
| a PIM in the late 1980s and who misses outliners and others- the
| biggest "unimagined" change is from personal information
| management to hive-mind information management (via search
| engines).
|
| It used to be that everyone had to maintain their own personal
| "library"- now this activity is relegated to cranks and luddites.
| The second order effect is a change in demand for personal
| information authoring/management/etc.
|
| A small number of tools, like Scrivener, that may have been
| competitive in the 1980s, have a market today. The idea of an
| isolated, focused, non-networked writing environment, surviving
| like the crocodile.
|
| I don't have a hypothesis for the lack of innovation in the
| spreadsheet space. The incentives are certainly there. Literally
| billions/trillions of dollars of assets are subjected to all
| kinds of spreadsheet risk. Yet that workflow persists, and small
| and large businesses that attempt to tackle it rise and fall by
| the wayside.
| blihp wrote:
| The problem with any of the old 'killer applications' like
| spreadsheets is that the network effect now dominates the
| productivity market.[1] So you'd spend most of your energy on
| trying to maintain compatibility and feature parity with an
| application that users are very resistant to moving away from.
| It's a pretty bad risk/reward unless you have a use case with a
| 10x (or more) value proposition.
|
| [1] Back when businesses were mainly concerned with internal
| document sharing it wasn't as much of an issue. But as that
| expanded to marking up documents with outside lawyers,
| accountants etc that changed quickly. When the Internet
| happened for the masses in the late 90's it was game over for
| most of the competition.
| jbullock35 wrote:
| People who weren't alive at the time may not appreciate how
| different the commercial app ecosystem was: how many more
| options, how much less concentrated.
|
| Here is a PC Magazine cover from 1988:
| https://archive.org/details/PC-Mag-1988-02-29. It boasts a review
| of 55 different word processors. All of them would have been
| commercial; none of it was free, let alone open-source.
|
| It wasn't just word processors. Here is a different cover:
| https://archive.org/details/PC-Mag-1988-05-17. It boasts tests of
| 43 different consumer-level database products. And magazine
| covers like these two weren't extraordinary.
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| Those annual PC Magazine Best Printer of 19XX that weighed the
| same as a tome - but they really tested in depth - now we just
| go to the local PC store and buy a crappy $99 inkjet on special
| from HP/Epson or Canon.
| webmaven wrote:
| I wonder if Ozzie considers Groove to be one of the products he
| expended energy on and failed. From my perspective it seemed to
| actually be succeeding as a deeply network-aware thick client for
| collaborative knowledge work when Microsoft acquired it and
| killed it off. Or if not outright killed it, then managed it to
| death by strapping it to the SharePoint boat anchor. I wouldn't
| count that as a failure per-se. It didn't _succeed_ , but wasn't
| really given the chance to do so, which seemed to be what
| Microsoft wanted to get out of the transaction.
| gerikson wrote:
| I think OneDrive had its origins in Groove back in the day.
| Arainach wrote:
| No, SkyDrive was always centralized server-side without any
| of the conflict resolution coauth concepts that Groove had.
| It was a completely separate project.
| rozzie wrote:
| Undeniably the product failed commercially. By the time we
| decided to sell the company, the product was doing ~20M+ of
| revenue but on a low growth rate, after having gone through
| ~140M of capital with (not unreasonable) investor expectations
| of unicorn-like returns.
|
| That said, I absolutely loved Groove the product and Groove the
| team. It was a dapp with a wonderfully-usable interface, built
| on a pure P2P blockchain-like infrastructure that achieved
| distributed consensus for generalized transactions.
|
| It had an extremely loyal following in the NGO and GOV space.
| They "got it" as to the unique benefits of a secure end-to-end
| encrypted system for small team collaboration.
|
| But the enterprise and consumers chose centralization as the
| winning architecture, and the rest is history.
| randomifcpfan wrote:
| Ben Evans has thought about this: https://www.ben-
| evans.com/benedictevans/2015/5/21/office-mes...
|
| I could quote at length but basically for most people there are
| now better ways of doing work than using word processors and
| spreadsheets.
| reitanqild wrote:
| I'm actually missing working OLE (Object Linking and Embedding).
| I used to like it in MS Works in the 90ies: I could insert an
| area from a Works spreadsheet into a Works document and have it
| auto-update (you could choose if it should link the data or copy
| it.)
| pjmlp wrote:
| I works perfectly fine today in Windows applications like
| Office.
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| Sadly nobody has figured out something like OLE for the web -
| cut and paste is a hit and miss affair.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Right it was very powerful. We can do something similar with
| frames or other embedding strategies on the web.
| open-source-ux wrote:
| The desktop app scene is so different today with more and more
| apps moving to SaaS. In the 90s, they were so many interesting
| and well-made desktop apps that were full of interesting ideas.
| Lotus Improv was certainly one of them. ( A 1990 video
| demonstration can be seen here:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsYsZmhnXR4 )
|
| Lotus Word Pro also took a refreshingly different UI approach to
| MS Word. Long before Microsoft introduced the Office 'ribbon',
| Lotus Word Pro essentially had the same idea with their floated
| tabbed property box. The low resolution of screens at the time
| meant the design of the property box was a bit cramped. But it
| was still much better designed and organised than the Office
| 'ribbon' that would come later. See the Lotus Word Pro example
| below:
|
| https://youtu.be/svijgsb2iLs?t=463
| gecko wrote:
| WordPro was awesome. It came on my mom's ThinkPad back in the
| mid-90s (along with an optional partition of OS/2 that I
| immediately removed to make more room for Windows, and then
| restored, and then removed, each a half-dozen times), and I
| initially hated it because it wasn't WordPerfect, but I soon
| grew to really appreciate how carefully thought out their
| entire approach was. _In my opinion_ , WordPro (and the other
| modern apps in that suite, notably _not_ including 1-2-3) were
| just a great example of how really doing something right for
| the GUI was fundamentally different from doing it right for the
| CLI.
|
| Somewhere, in my office, is still a CD with Lotus 96 on it, but
| I've had no real desire to reinstall it in a VM.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I still use microEmacs, which floated around the intertoobs in
| the 1980s. Of course, I've modified it substantially over the
| years, most recently adding color syntax highlighting and
| Unicode.
|
| D version:
|
| https://github.com/DigitalMars/med
|
| C version:
|
| https://github.com/DigitalMars/me
|
| The "extension language" is it's so easy to just add some code
| and recompile it, there's no point in adding an extension
| language.
|
| I like microEmacs a lot because I can use it remotely over a tty
| interface.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| But why use a mEmacs when you can use _actual_ Emacs, with its
| comprehensive scriptability? mEmacsen made sense on older
| platforms like CP /M and MS-DOG, but they're pointless today.
| mattl wrote:
| I use mg because it's super fast
| WalterBright wrote:
| I've used real Emacs in the past. I scripted extensions to
| it. It turns out that just adding code to microEmacs isn't
| any harder than scripting.
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