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Ask HN: What's an old software that you would like to have again?

by serhack_ on 5/18/24, 7:59 PM with 40 comments

We're on HN there're many people that start to look for some ideas to start programming or building better skills. In my life I had many newbies that just wanted to "copy" software characteristics and then open source it.

Do you have any old software that you would like to have again? Let's fill some comments for those people that want to start a weekend project or just want to revive some nostalgia

  • by kleer001 on 6/1/24, 7:07 PM

    Does google reader count? The social aspect was delightful

  • by cookiengineer on 5/19/24, 4:40 PM

    woltlab burning board or phpbb:

    But in a memory safe and secure (read as: strongly typed and sanitized) language, with a better database query concept. The old forums were plagued by SQL injection or PHP parser corruption/overflow exploits.

    After reddit and stackoverflow both kinda are on their way to the shitter, I'd love to see e.g. an open source golang or rust based forum software flourish. Ideally supported by EFF or the Linux foundation.

    There is Apache Answers [1] which was very promising, but I'm not sure whether the focus was that this was just a one time incubator product or whether they plan on building it further.

    I fear that a lot of projects that were trying to tackle this niche were too overengineered. The reason why PHP forums were so popular is because it was easy (or convenient) to deploy. A simple VPS setup, even XAMPP or LAMPP tools existed, and all server administration web UIs like confixx had support for managing its dependencies.

    [1] https://github.com/apache/incubator-answer

  • by al_borland on 5/19/24, 3:30 PM

    Old iTunes, pre-store, pre-video, etc. Just a music library and playlist management.

    I’ve actually been thinking about setting up an old G4 Mac just for this.

  • by smarri on 5/20/24, 6:51 AM

    A birds eye view, turn based game, based on the Aliens film. I played it on apple Mac maybe 25+ years ago. Have never been able to find it since. It always ended with the famous quote from the film "it's game over man, game over".

  • by admissionsguy on 5/20/24, 7:30 AM

    RescueTime before they removed most features. The old version still technically exists, but is unmaintained and broken. It's really the weirdest regression I have seen in consumer software.

  • by visox on 5/20/24, 9:40 AM

    Do have some nostalgia towards ICQ, think it was great at finding people based on interest and geo-location. Dont think there is anything like that now, but i also think it cant be copied.

  • by horsellama on 5/19/24, 6:57 PM

  • by DamonHD on 5/18/24, 8:04 PM

    WordStar (non-document mode).

    I stil remember way too many of the key sequences from ~1985!

  • by mikewarot on 5/19/24, 6:23 PM

    Picassa, which Google killed.

  • by janpavlque on 5/20/24, 11:53 AM

    - an IM that doesn’t suck. All modern IMs (Facebook Messenger and such) are garbage compared to old-school desktop apps.

    - a music player that doesn’t suck. I wish I could use streaming services with Foobar2000.

  • by vunderba on 5/19/24, 6:03 PM

    Microsoft PDS (aka Quickbasic). QB64 is an okay substitute but since it's compiled rather than interpreted it loses a lot of the magic that made BASIC special back in the day.

  • by gadders on 5/20/24, 9:54 AM

    Lotus Notes. Still beats Outlook for searching for emails and is easily better than the pile of refuse that is SharePoint for document libraries, workflows etc.

  • by mrKola on 5/21/24, 2:35 AM

    Macromedia Fireworks

  • by pavluha on 5/20/24, 9:27 PM

    Windows 7 was the best _windows_ based OS for me.

  • by bindd on 5/21/24, 9:33 AM

    There was an image-editor I used to use and it was a joy. IrfanView, I think, it was!

    I would like to have that back if I could!

  • by cpach on 5/19/24, 3:19 PM

    a) Knox – no good alternatives exist today

    https://www.macstories.net/reviews/agile-web-solutions-acqui...

    b) Evernote, before it jumped the shark.

  • by dakiol on 5/19/24, 9:16 PM

    Winamp (for macOS, for instance)

  • by yen223 on 5/20/24, 2:56 AM

    2017 SketchUp

  • by dagw on 5/20/24, 10:02 AM

    slrn. Although I think what I actually miss is old usenet and the community I had there.

  • by runjake on 5/20/24, 5:22 AM

    Eudora, an old email client.

  • by neonnoodle on 5/19/24, 8:21 PM

    Corel Painter 6

  • by RetroTechie on 5/19/24, 3:12 PM

    WinDiff

  • by JojoFatsani on 5/18/24, 10:28 PM

    Office 97