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Ask HN: What software do you miss that no longer runs on modern hardware?

by offsky on 10/25/22, 11:26 PM with 112 comments

• by mcherm on 10/26/22, 12:14 AM

  Hypercard.

  It started from a-drag-and-drop equivalent of today's PowerPoint and scaled all the way up to creating the game Myst, all with no bumps or steep sections on the learning curve. I used to teach it to middle schoolers and the things they could do with it were amazing; students were teaching themselves programming because it was a simple, obvious step forward.

• by ianai on 10/26/22, 12:13 AM

  Yeah the old windows defrag visualization was cool. Probably inspired some people to dig deeper.

  Coding in VB 1.0 was cool. I think I made a rapid color changing thing in it. Like a modern stuck pixel exerciser, but probably way too fast to work. Not sure.

  Mac OS X in the early versions (until like .7 maybe?) had a feel and look that’s definitely been lost. Probably mostly for the better but not exclusively.

  Definitely wish modern OSes would take some time to make user interfaces as fast to respond as possible and reliable enough to basically never lock up. Just give an error indicator if something’s locked up under the hood (aka background/off thread).

  Definitely wish modern websites were more text based.

• by illys on 10/26/22, 12:09 AM

  I started collecting some legacy hardware in 2018 because I missed the touch and feel of playing Digger, Popcorn, Lemmings... on real hardware (not attracted by emulators).

  Problem with such hardware is that when you look for a piece, you find it cheaper in a batch than alone. I've ended up so far with a nice collection 10-12 PCs from the eighties. Nicest ones are the IBM 5150, 5160 and 5162, the Compaq Deskpro 386-20 (in the original huge Compaq form factor), the original Compaq Portable 386, a pair of IBM PS/2 8530-286...

  I can play my old games, run Turbo Pascal programs I wrote in 1988-1990, play with x86 Assembler programming, play MOD files on PC bipper and Sound Blaster 2. In addition I can run Area5150, 8088MPH... Recent software that only run on very specific and very old hardware.

  No regret, it is mostly fun!

• by wwweston on 10/26/22, 12:24 AM

  Macromedia / Adobe Fireworks, which stopped working on Macs with Catalina.

  By the time I'd used Fireworks alongside Photoshop and Illustrator in the mid-2000s, it started seeming ludicrous to me that Photoshop was anywhere near as prevalent as it was for screen design. Raster layers were a poor primitive, semi-parameterized raster features bolted on weren't a lot better. Fireworks was simply better as a melding of vector and bitmap capabilities from the start, and made dozens of little better tooling decisions along the way.

  Mobile's rise and frustration with Adobe's pricing/ownership model probably helped the industry shake off the idea that Photoshop was THE approach, so we got Sketch and Figma and others and even Adobe figured it out with specific screen-design tooling. But Fireworks got it right a lot earlier.

  Since Apple's hostile to even virtualizing its old environments, I've considered buying a windows license for Fw and using it that way, though I'm also getting to know Affinity's products too. Not convinced they or anything else are a true replacement yet, though.

• by hirundo on 10/26/22, 12:30 AM

  Back in the '80s there was a NORAD supercomputer called the WOPR that had cool games written specifically for it, like "Theaterwide Biotoxic and Chemical Warfare", and "Global Thermonuclear War." Now that the Russians are hostile again it would be nice to use those to game out current conditions. Likely there's still no winning move but we should check.

• by akeck on 10/26/22, 12:13 AM

  Google Picasa. Its ability to find local images was magical.

• by themodelplumber on 10/25/22, 11:41 PM

  Reason, Sony Vegas (with some mic emulation plugin, can't remember it) made me a good chunk of cash doing CD-ROM soundtracks back in the day, and I wish I still had that setup set up here in Linux.

  I also wish I could have kept my TurboCAD license for Linux somehow when I moved away from Mac OS. It would have been fun to keep learning.

  (Actually I admit that what frightens me is: I get those running under Wine somehow and am off and away, and just never find the time to use them again :-/)

  I also miss running some WinAmp 5.x skins in Linux, not sure if these are supported now. I also liked the ~2003 era internet radio stations list that came with it, in a themed window. So I use qmmp and 3.x skins.

  In vintage Linux software I really miss that I could do icon scaling & free icon layout in Gnome back around 2009. Not sure if that's still possible but I use XFCE now most of the time anyway.

  You could scale individual icons in two clicks, and turn icons into a sort of functional, interactive desktop wallpaper design that was more interesting than the standard grid.

• by superkuh on 10/26/22, 12:06 AM

  Festival 1.96 text to speech. Festival 2.x available in modern distros does not support the 1.9 voices and the Festival 2.0 voices are far inferior. There are no comparable replacements for native text to speech on linux. Just a bunch of cloud stuff and bleeding edge things that require nvidia GPUs, etc. If an OS can't run Festival 1.96 then it can't be my main desktop.

  imgSeek. It requires python 2.4 among other things. It allowed me to draw crude MS Paint style images and then use them to search for similar colored/shaped images on my hard drive. There's no good replacement for it's ability and porting is non-trivial. https://sourceforge.net/projects/imgseek/

  Also, the relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2224/ My solution for this is to keep my old computers running old OSes and software. I build a new computer with all the new software once every 5-10 years when I'm finding I can no longer compile things.

• by intelVISA on 10/26/22, 12:43 AM

  Native/performant applications

• by mikewarot on 10/26/22, 12:04 PM

  Borland Sidekick, you could pop up a text editor anywhere in the days of MS-DOS

  Borland Delphi 5, it was the peak of productive windows programming

  debug - the DOS command, you could write small programs on the fly.

  list - an incredibly fast file viewer by Vernon D. Buerg.

• by samhuk on 10/26/22, 12:57 AM

  Old games around the 2000's like Battlezone 1998 (give it up for OG Activision).

  I feel like there are so many old games from those years that people have a strong attachment to that will gradually become harder and harder to run or find. I fear for the day when no amount of debugging and compatibility flagging and messing about will get these games to run on modern hardware. Battlezone may not be a great example because it's popular enough to have a good scene around it, but some games aren't.

  To illustrate such strong attachments, and also to just tell an interesting story, my father purchased Battlezone 1998 when it came out because he needed something to keep occupied while on baby-minding duties. with me. I was the baby!. He kept it for years. And years. And finally, one day, when I was an older-yet-still-very-young child, I'm helping with some cleaning or something (I don't exactly remember) and I find the game in clear transparent box! I show my father, and I remember him getting excited and firing it up on our one family's laptop. We gamed for a while and then he let me continue. I remember constantly killing myself or getting the base killed because my infantile brain couldn't understand how those damn scavengers and turrets worked. I remember that day to this day, around 15 years later. I remember grinding it for days just to get to the second stage - Mars.

  Wouldn't it be a shame if such software is lost to time!

  P.S. If anyone is on HN who was even remotely involved in that game, please know that you are a really awesome person

• by singularity2001 on 10/26/22, 6:02 AM

  Softice hacking environment backed by a hardware button: On the C64 there was an extension cartridge "module" called "Action Replay MK5" which would put the whole system into a REPL debug mode similar to gdb.

  You could inspect any memory and disassembly and write plus patch any machine code while the system was paused. There also was a diff mechanism to see which memory changed (e.g. if you lost a life).

• by mamcx on 10/26/22, 2:18 AM

  I'm not sure if can or not, but Visual FoxPro is not that far from the revolutionary aspect of HyperCard/SmallTalk.

  This is the thing I wish to make myself (https://tablam.org) to, in part, being able to run it on mobile/cloud. And Mac/Linux (Fox long ago run on Mac but that die with MS).

• by II2II on 10/26/22, 1:04 AM

  Pretty much everything.

  As far as I can tell, there is a significant gap in modern software: there is a large catalogue of software that is intended to be easy to use but is inflexible, and a decent selection of software that is flexible yet is incredibly complex to use. A lot of software of the 1990's was both flexible yet not overwhelming to use.

• by becurious on 10/26/22, 12:23 AM

  Being able to directly access sectors of a floppy disk on Windows. You could to this and read floppies with different file systems. Went away somewhere around Windows 2000 and modern external USB floppy disk drives just implement mass storage device class and you can’t access sectors or differently formatted drives.

• by casualwriter on 10/26/22, 3:12 AM

  Clipper. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_(programming_language)

  It pretend to be xBase language but actually close to C.

• by conductr on 10/26/22, 1:04 AM

  I’m going contrarian and will say I really don’t miss the CRT and how it burned my eyes after hours of use on a daily basis making pixel perfect web design at 1024x768 and using some of the things I see discussed on this post.

• by tomjen3 on 10/26/22, 3:38 PM

  Gnome Do.

  It had fuzzy file and application search, but where it really stood out was the application plugin system. Wanted to send a quick message to a coworker? Summon Gnome do with a shortcut, type message a space and then fuzzy complete on the coworkers name. Then just type the message right there and get back to what you were doing.

  It was kinda like Alfred, but just much more powerful. It got destroyed during the transition to Unity, and was never made to work again, and now that all the apps are webapps there aren't any halfway decent plugins so it wouldn't matter much.

• by xtracto on 10/26/22, 12:11 AM

  Theres a series of really good games called Commandos. I think the latest one (Commandos 3 destination berlin) only works in Windows XP, and doesnt work in "compatibility mode" in newer versions, nor in Wine.

• by schwartzworld on 10/26/22, 3:38 PM

  PrintShop. I had it for the Apple II and had tons of fun making signs and banners to hang around the house.

  Technically you can still run it in an emulator, but without a dot matrix printer, it wouldn't be the same.

• by superchroma on 10/26/22, 1:09 AM

  MSN Messenger. Compact and I still like the emoji.... ah, smileys that it came with.

  Mainly I miss the free time and the lack of social networks. Content sucks, I think. Posts and statuses were definitely a mistake.

• by aerovistae on 10/26/22, 12:17 AM

  The game Gruntz. Amazing puzzle game from the 90s, long forgotten. It was made by the studio that went on to make F.E.A.R., the hit horror FPS for which they are better known these days.

• by anthk on 10/26/22, 1:11 AM

  - Opera 12. I know, propietary. But Otter is not as fast as Opera 12 was, not even close. By comparison, it should be screaming lightweight too under a 2007 netbook.

• by icco on 10/26/22, 1:16 AM

  I miss the original sim games. Simtower being my favorite.

• by logosmonkey on 10/26/22, 12:35 AM

  Glyder 2. It was a magnificent mobile game that stopped working quite a few android versions ago. I keep meaning to dig up an old phone and sideload it.

• by glmeece on 10/26/22, 4:26 PM

  I stuck to Mojave for essentially the same reason. Then I found out you could provision another volume, install Mojave on it, and treat the Mac like a dual-boot machine. When I need to run any of my 32-bit apps (mostly games, but there are others), I change the startup disk to that volume. I switch back to run in Monterey (still deciding on Ventura).

• by thatjoeoverthr on 10/26/22, 12:09 AM

  I don’t miss it, but I remember the strangest thing. It was a Back to the Future themed interactive screensaver. I think it may have been internal use to some company - maybe AT&T was involved - and installed from a floppy disc. I remember getting stuck in it. I wonder what I actually remember of it, and tried to Google it, but found nothing. Anyone ever encounter it?

• by yoav on 10/27/22, 2:40 PM

  Adobe Flex Builder and AIR runtime.

  Building desktop apps and hybrid desktop/web apps in the same language that could talk to each other for the first? time was so much fun. I built some cool apps.

  Have been dying to build a desktop app again and dig into what the js or other world has to offer but haven’t had time.

• by 6510 on 10/26/22, 2:55 AM

  I forget their names but Firefox use to have 2 similar extensions. Both had a sortable table popup with filters one could apply. One extracted all tabs from the window and the other all links from the page. You could save it in various formats or copy it to clip board as links only, links with titles, bb code and html.

• by jrs235 on 10/26/22, 1:19 AM

  Sid Meyers Railroad Tycoon and Colonization

• by jmpman on 10/26/22, 2:19 PM

  Microsoft Project. When will they have a natively compiled version for OSX?

• by jmartin2683 on 10/26/22, 12:34 AM

  That Disney roller coaster designing game from the early 90s. Also, pretty much all BBS door games. I’m sure there’s somewhere hosting them on the web, but it’s just not the same.

• by nunez on 10/26/22, 5:38 AM

  Trillian and Pidgin!

  If you could talk to people, Trillian and/or Pidgin supported it.

  On that note, I miss Google Talk and Google Voice via Talk.

  I absolutely hate how siloed and protectionist chat platforms have become.

• by gregjor on 10/26/22, 12:27 AM

  FTP itself mostly deprecated because not secure.

  I spend most of my work time in a terminal shell connected to a Linux server, very similar to what I used 40 years ago.

• by xtracto on 10/26/22, 12:12 AM

  Double space and drive space with 'transparent ' compression was cool. I wish there was something as ubiquitous for USB drives nowadays.

• by giantg2 on 10/26/22, 3:36 PM

  It seems I can't run F22 ADF. It was an interesring game given the time it was released. However, F22 TAW basically covers it.

• by Overtonwindow on 10/26/22, 12:40 AM

  Stainless. It was a great browser that had each window as a separate instance. I really enjoy it because it was a no BS browser for Mac.

• by contingencies on 10/26/22, 1:13 AM

  Quarantine, DOS. Required EMS, so you always had to EDIT AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS to play.

• by notjustanymike on 10/26/22, 12:40 AM

  JiTouch. The only gesture library that let me draw characters on screen to open specific apps.

• by mannyv on 10/26/22, 12:52 AM

  Aldus Freehand. Still the best!

• by umeshunni on 10/26/22, 2:41 AM

  Norton Commander. Still the best and most efficient way to access all your files.

• by o4tuna on 10/26/22, 12:47 AM

  Xara

• by gerdesj on 10/26/22, 12:16 AM

  Absolutely nothing. It can always be emulated, if you need it.

• by brothrock on 10/26/22, 12:59 AM

  Johnny Castaway.

• by hcarvalhoalves on 10/26/22, 10:28 PM

  Apple’s Aperture app.

• by andrei_says_ on 10/26/22, 7:01 AM

  Braid the MacOS game.

• by nickd2001 on 10/27/22, 1:16 PM

  Chuckie Egg ;)

• by PainfullyNormal on 10/27/22, 10:05 AM

  Google Reader.

• by 5555624 on 10/26/22, 2:59 PM

  Lotus Magellan

• by rstevens333 on 10/28/22, 12:02 PM

  Eudora.

• by andrewinardeer on 10/26/22, 10:08 AM

  Xtree Pro