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Nostalgia -- what programs do you miss?
What are those programs that you used back in the day (or even recently!) that you look back on fondly and think about how they once were-- or worse, programs that seemed to have just up and disappeared?
What made me think of this question, for me, was Opera. It had everything: browsing, RSS, and torrenting all in one browser. However, a lot of sites loved to break in it since it was the least supported and I eventually moved to Firefox (then Chrome, then Firefox...). Looking at the browser now-- and unsure if I'm just picky or its a case of enshittification, or both-- I'm just "meh."
Winamp -- it really whips the llama's... y'know.
I spent countless hours customizing this beautiful application.
Now that is a cultural touchstone! All those cool themes!
Cool themes and milkdrop visualizers!
Also... play counts. Frustrating that some asshole Spotify product manager's KPIs preclude giving us such a simple, nice to have feature.
Speaking of visualizers, anyone remember G-Force? My roommates and I decided to forego a cable subscription in 2011 and just put G-Force on all the time. This was before all the streaming services came around besides Netflix. It was basically just Netflix and visualizers with music for us for a full year before we stopped living together.
I, too, shared G-Force with roommates and it was a great hang. We had a projector that took up a whole wall of the room so you really got immersed in it.
I’ve tried the modern music visualizer, Synesthesia, and it just doesn’t seem to recreate the magic that G-Force once did.
Just in case you didn't know, you can link your spotify account to last.fm. That's how I've been keeping track of my play count.
Sounds like somebody needs to build a Spotify plugin for winamp.
E: oh my god they did!
https://gist.github.com/jclosure/d4b9e7c944cf66e0e20bb515c282400e
I miss music players in general. But they're essentially pointless to me because I stream everything via Spotify, so I'm locked to their player. I've tried a few times to go back to having big collections of MP3s, but they just cannot beat the speed and availability of streaming. Piracy, purchasing, ripping CDs, etc. when you want to listen to a random song is just a pain in the ass compared to just hitting play in Spotify.
I wish that there were a streaming service that allowed you to use the music player apps of your choice. Like some streaming standard that supports the DRM and all that, but you can use whatever interface you want. Hoping for a Cunningham's Law scenario here where someone will quickly point out that it does exist and it's amazing.
I fell into the same line of thought for awhile. Now I treat my local mp3 collection like a hobby. My default is to pull up YT Music, but sometimes I sit at my PC, lean back, put on my headphones and listen through Winamp. Same as playing a record or a CD on my stereo. It's not any different than playing on YT Music, but it is different to me because it's intentional and it's mine. Lol Friends think I'm crazy.
No I totally get it. That's why I have a small record collection. Turning music into an activity rather than something I passively do is hugely satisfying. Same for movies. I pulled out my VCR and some tapes to show my kids and they chose Toy Story, which is easily available on Disney+, but the act of rewinding the tape, hitting play, skipping through the trailers, adjusting the tracking, etc. was very satisfying.
That might be a good approach for me to take with music I want to listen to in higher quality than records. Find a few albums or playlists that I love, grab MP3s, and keep a small curated library of important stuff that I can go "old" school with.
One thing I love about Apple Music/iTunes is that my personal library of songs is also synced. I believe the feature is called iTunes Match.
I can listen to any song off the streaming platform and it also has all my demos, live recordings and b-sides that I’ve collected available within the app as well.
Sometimes I’ll share a playlist with my friends though and songs will be missing because I didn’t realize they were from my Matched Library but other than that it is seamless.
That was one feature of iTunes I really liked. I remember being stoked for the iTunes Match release and used it for awhile. I stopped using it when I switched to an Android phone and tried Google Play Music. It was just as seamless, but at the time had a full streaming service to compliment it like Apple Music does todah. I've been subscribed ever since. Sucks that YouTube Music really killed any cohesion between a personal collection and streaming, but I've moved on to other methods so no major loss.
I miss early days of Google Play Music 😔. Youtube Music just isn’t the same.
That’s actually a really neat idea. I would love to see a backend only music service that you can plug into with the front end of your choice.
Streaming services don't want to be just a dumb data backend because then they have no value add, no moat, etc. It would just be a race to the bottom for providing the cheapest price which would typically be a company that's subsidizing the cost or has some other unfair advantage.
Spotify and such want to be able to use algorithmic suggestions, nice UI, and such as the value they are adding over the competitors.
If you use Macintosh or Linux, then I can very much for this purpose recommend Mopidy! It acts as a little server on your computer that can stream from services like Spotify to any client of your choice that supports it. I found it rather lovely and if you can run it on your computer then I hope that it's useful for you too.
Can you recommend a good client for Windows? I've got Mopidy setup with Spotify on my linux server, but I'm having a bit of trouble finding a decent player for it.
Absolutely this. I miss the concept of music players, but I've been a Spotify Premium user since it first came to the US over a decade ago because it's convenient and reasonably priced. Downloading a bunch of music and maintaining a library was a huge nightmare.
Spotify's royalty-to-artists thing aside, I think this is what the TV/movie industry is really missing. I still have a 30TB+ NAS and Plex server that probably cost me more than I would spend on years of streaming services, but it's so much more convenient with all the automation. If I could get Spotify-like convenience on my TV I'd do it in a heartbeat.
I don't personally use it, but I have heard that Tidal supports various third party clients. I know that Plexamp and Audirvana supports it, I'm not sure of others.
For me personally it's a principle thing. Spotify's royalty payments are pretty bad. Then again, I tend to listen to obscure stuff and indie artists, so it hits them harder than a mainstream artist who gets millions of plays.
I try to get as much music as I can from Bandcamp. When you buy an album, you get the physical item plus high quality audio files to download and even the ability to stream the full album via the Bandcamp app. Many indie artists use it.
There is an open source "clone" called Audacious that is compatible with Winamp skins.
For completeness, WACUP is also available and Winamp Classic still works.
I'll have to check out Audacious.
Welcome back, The Silence V5, old friend!
I had Invicta theme for ages. Then eventually I just went back to default one.
skins.webamp.org is another good resource for old skins.
My sister and brother-in-law used to throw a big holiday party every December and I was in charge of the music. I loved building a fun and varied playlist in Winamp and then loading that year’s party logo into the R4 Visualizer. Good times.
I remember getting so excited over different Winamp visualizations!
I spent so much time managing my music library there before eventually moving everything into iTunes when I got my first iPod.
Ryan Gordon (aka Icculus) wrote a clone of winamp using SDL. It can even use winamp's skins! He chronicled its creation in a series of videos -- an excellent resource for anyone looking to learn about SDL from one of its developers.
Sonique had better visualizations
Winamp was great! Always the contrarian, I ultimately ended up switching to a player called K-Jöfol for most of my MP3 playing. I can't even remember why I switched at this point, but that app saw me through peak MP3.
Oh god... i thought i was the only one i remembered k-jofol. For i while i used it instead of winamp because I really loved some skins. Differently from winamp u werent stucked with a rectangle shape.
Sadly... i moved back to winamp for the same reason. Kjofol was too visually noisy and pretty big for a 640x480 resolution :/
Being able to randomize the sort order of an entire playlist and then also play it on shuffle is one feature I especially miss. I fucking hate these algorithm based shuffles that heavily favour recently added tracks. I'll often try to shuffle play my liked songs list on YTM and at least half of the first 20 songs will be the most recently added songs every time.
Oh that is something I miss. Late nights listening to w/e with Winamp (I've gotten older and the late nights seem to have gone away about the same time Winamp did). I remember my favorite skin was Energy Amplifier.
What are you talking about? I still use winamp.
I still use it for FLAC files, used it yesterday. It's such a great, fast program. Plus the visualisers are still the best all these years later.
Have you tried out WebAmp? It a fun website with a seemingly faithful rework of WinAmp into a web page. It even supports WinAmp themes. Was a fun diversion for me one day.
The llama's donkey?
The llama's llama.
100% this. In fact, I'm listening to Trance[]Control (MP3s) while reading all of these great comments. That was the height of mp3.com and Winamp for me.
Yeah, huge nostalgia for the 1997-2001 era and Winamp was a big part of that. Just the novelty alone was enough ("CD Quality" music from a computer that I can download!?) but that was a genuinely good piece of software and it could even turn a pretty lowly machine for those fast moving times into something a teenager didn't hate quite so much.
It had so many plugins too. One of the best I encountered came quite late but it effectively made the Sony Net-MD players useful! in case anyone doesn't remember that debacle, Sony released a series of Minidisc players/recorders that had USB connectivity and technically you could load your MP3 library (after conversion) onto them. The software Sony provided was absolutely terrible though and of course came with so many restrictions and general Sony software shittiness that at best it made this massive feature hugely annoying to use if not completely broken.
Someone wrote a plugin for Winamp that let you load up a playlist and click "transfer to MD" and that was it, it just worked.
Ahhh, this is a question that brings back some memories hahah.
Trillian - For those who don't know it was an all in one messaging app with support for AIM, Yahoo, MSN, and IRC. Was really slick with themes (which where all the rage for all apps at the time). Granted all those messaging apps are long gone now, replaced with Discord or text or whatever, but back in the mid 2000's that was one of my most used. I guess technically it's still around, but definitely not at the level it used to be.
Winamp - It really whips the llama's ass! Again another app that is just obsolete due to the existence of services like Spotify, but I bet you can tell I'm partial to older apps with themes hahah.
Napster/Bearshare/Limewire - I kind of lumped these all together because there wasn't one in particular I far preferred. Mostly it's just due to nostalgia for the earlier days of the internet/piracy, where many now tech veterans were forged in the fires of sketchy downloads. For every legit file you could find you could also just as easily have ended up with a "Lincoln Perk - In The End V2.exe"
SkiFree - Does this count? I still have PTSD of that damn yeti... Shame it doesn't exist as an easter egg on newer versions of Windows.
Trillian, holy shit is that a blast from the past. I remember when they got ICQ compatibility, basically the end all, be all of messenger apps. Makes me miss AIM tbh.
I miss ICQ most of all, especially the "uh oh" notification.
That "uh oh" is currently my notification sound on my phone... So whenever a new text comes in, that's what plays.
That's awesome!
You nailed this - Trillian especially was what I used to aggregate all my chats with my friends. It was such an iconic thing, even the icon makes me profoundly nostalgic. I had no idea it still existed in any form. It's impressive that it's still around considering that it was released July 1st 2000.
Here's a really dumb set -
This was my introduction to hex code and hexediting. Incredibly, the site I used to go to back then, while it's not at its ".co.uk" address anymore (I had the whole thing memorized), it still exists! Carolyn's Creations.
Jellybean is where I hung out with my friends when we were not in person, on the phone (with me stretching the extendible phone cable across the house) or on Trillian. It inspired me to work on my own MUD with another friend and seems like the natural next step after I realized I could zone out in math class and instead make text based adventure games on my TI graphing calculator.
Really, so much of these sorts of parts of the early internet have a direct line to where I stand now (working in an Interactive/Digital arts department at a big arts school). I wouldn't get to do what I do today without all of the freedom to just... Explore.
That's what I miss most about older tech and games and apps. So much of it was clearly made by individual humans, just making things with the utter magic of code. This is why I love it here - it's got that genuine human feeling.
Petz is pure f***ing magic, the community is still doing new things with the game. I don't spend too much time on that side of the internet these days but knowing that people still make their little kennel sites and post on forums makes me pretty happy.
PFM really nailed the timing, Petz II was released in '97 and really hyped their website. My first ever experience with the internet was going on petz.com (rip) to download the web-exclusive breeds and toys. (Free DLC, what a concept.) I've met so many people with similar stories to yours - they got into hexing or building websites as kids, some of them went on to make it a career or significant hobby.
Okay, for hyper specific nostalgia, I'm nostalgic for the way petz would react to the music box in Petz II? They seemed to take out the dancing behavior in later versions.
Yes, the music box!! Those cute little jumping things they did were so cute. I loved the candies and the physics of how things would fall/scatter. Somehow it's just so uniquely charming.
I'm so glad to hear that the community is still going strong! Are there any pages that you like that you feel like sharing a link to? I fell out of all of it and Carolyn's is the only page I really remember.
whiskerwick is a very active petz forum! you can find links to other petz sites there. litterz factory is the oldest site with regular updates AFAIK.
It makes me so happy to know people are still playing those games! I used to be obsessed with the Petz series, and I always wished I could play Oddballz, because I love weird and wacky monsters (I used to download custom Petz breeds that were dragons and the like) but all I had was the demo and I couldn't ever find a copy in local stores. I've still never played the full game.
Here are invite links to Petz discords I'm in! I'm not active in these right now but I'm just amazed that the community's still alive. I even got to connect with Carolyn herself through one of these discords! Gosh I sent her a long fan message to tell her how much I loved her work.
So glad to read about Petz here on Tildes! I still have so much admiration for the original creators of this game. I don't think any virtual pet game has since come close to the expressiveness and "aliveness" of the animation style and gameplay of Petz. It's just incredible.
https://discord.gg/A4MMkYVS
https://discord.gg/fAQTFbXV
https://discord.gg/jDFUTtkY
Spraying the chinchilla persian with water!
Homebody! And there was Oscar the dachshund... I don't remember any of the other default names but that is so engrained in my mind somehow. I hated scolding them, they would get such a shivering sad look. It's funny how well they conveyed emotion through body language when the models were so simple.
Until it curls up into a ball and then throwing it around the room?
I would never.
Oh my days, you've really unlocked an old memory there for me. Thanks for this, I had completely forgotten the name of this site - used to love it!
I'm so glad to have triggered that! It was such a great website, I love being able to revisit it :)
Winamp got so many things right. I can't believe how far modern music software has fallen.
Can you elaborate more on this? I do agree with you, but other than subscription hell and paywalled features (and ads. always the ads.), I'm drawing blanks.
I've accumulated a niche collection of music and I'm real particular in how I organize it. So I still use Foobar2k and whatever Android audio player doesn't piss me off (mobile playlists are a bane of my existence). YT Music (with ""calibrations"") is a last resort to fill in the gaps.
Foobar2000 is also my media player of choice (on Windows, at least), though it’s largely because of the vast library of plugins. I’ve got a lot of obscure audio formats that I listen to. In particular, Fb2k with an extension is the only way I am aware of being able to decode and playback HDCD streams when they are not on an actual disc.
It's pretty great on Android too, that's where I still use fb2k anyway.
What Android audio player apps don't piss you off? I'm looking to try alternatives.
I've been using Poweramp for many years, but it's started to piss me off - no matter how I configure it, it won't play nicely with my Mazda infotainment system when I want to switch back and forth between Bluetooth and Android Auto. Back when I first started using it, Poweramp was one of the few players to support direct FLAC playback (as opposed to on-the-fly transcode to mp3) and I've just stuck with it despite the pain.
ETA: I just tried out a few new music players: Pi Music Player didn't have Android Auto support; Rocket Player would close immediately after opening; but Musicolet was perfect! Lots of power user options, Android Auto support, and seems like stable and trustworthy software.
Poweramp user from a long time here. I feel like it got bloated with features. I wouldn't mind a stripped down version of Poweramp that has just the folder based music player with basic equalizer options. No viz, no android auto, no playlists.
I like Pi Music Player. Not sure how it will play with your Mazda infotainment but it's worth a try. It has ads under the screen, but not too obtrusive. It's also only 3 euro's to remove them.
So far, it's just one by JRT Studio. I specifically use their Rocket Music Player. It's been the only one to not fragment my albums that have multiple artists.
Edit to add that after I installed "Android Music Player" it uses a subscription model to get rid of the ads. Nah, I'll stick to Rocket.
I ultimately switched to Pidgin because it was a lot more light weight than Trillian was, but Trillian was an amazing piece of software all the same. Felt so cool to be able to use any and all IM services from a single unified interface. Even if a few features here and there didn't work quite right.
Trillian! I’ve spent the past few days trying to remember the name of that client that let you use all the messaging services.
I’m sure mIRC is still around, that was a big one for me back in the day. It’s weird to think that one day I logged off without realizing it was the last time I’d participate in those communities.
I remember on Napster I downloaded a song called talent crisis that was supposedly by Blink-182. I never did find out who the real band behind it was but it absolutely slapped!
I mostly lived on mIRC from around 2001 till 2008-ish. Still have good friends from back then. My first job even used IRC as the internal chat tool before Slack took over. It was a true social network before the term was commercialized.
The days of Napster we're amazing but discovering Spotify for the first time was another level.
I prefer Napster.
I made the mistake of searching for one of those "rain sounds for sleep" when I first discovered Spotify and all it wanted to play me were 8 hour long atmosphere tracks.
Oh, I used the hell out of Trillian! That was my powerhouse. I even bought the lifetime license waaaay back in the day.
I've poked around since I was curious about it; it looks like they've pivoted to the business and medical sector, but they still got all those 3rd party plugins!
I always favored ICQ after its release but switched to Trillian to consolidate all my messanger apps. Then AOL (I think) kept playing whack-a-mole with their API. Are IM programs still a thing anymore or did FB Messanger and texting swallow them up?
WinAmp had so many things going for it from being lightweight and incredibly fast to the visualizations. I would spend hours trying different visualizations usually weekly. I even tried downloading it again recently but ended up with Foobar2000 after Windows went crazy with PUP/security warnings.
I always used WinMX in the heyday of the Napster era. I was lucky enough to be able to use a cable modem back when the vast majority of people were on dial up. OMG the hundreds of MBs we'd fill in a night (an obscene amount back then, tbh). The most money I ever spent on music was because of artists I found through sharing. I also could find things that just weren't for sale anywhere. I found a 60 minute jam session of Clapton, BB King and Stevie Ray Vaughn that was amazing to listen to.
There's Beeper, which is sort of today's Trillian. It uses Matrix on the backend to bridge everything into one app and achieve cross-device sync.
Pidgin is also still around.
I tried to set Beeper up the other day, but I guess I'm on a wait-list... Are there other apps or frontends that utilize this Matrix backend?
I'm not sure. I know someone who works for Beeper and they're going to launch out of closed beta soon(tm).
Give Audacious a try. It can use winamp skins.
You're welcome.
It's not exactly the same, but a more modern game that scratches the SkiFree itch for me has been Grand Mountain Adventure
Another Trillian fan here! Also, when you mention those fileshare apps, it reminds me of Sharaza - it did everything pirate-y and was my introduction to torrents.
Inbox by Gmail
My email has never recovered from the loss of this program. To this day I haven’t found anything that is as good at sorting through everything and organizing it into useful, actionable information.
Apollo for Reddit
I used the crap out of this app, and miss it dearly. Reddit might not be all it used to be but there are still a lot of communities that only exist there and this app was transformative to the experience of interacting with those communities.
Sigh. Pour one out for Inbox and many others who were gone too soon. (obligatory link to killedByGoogle.com)
And I second Apollo-- 3rd Party Reddit apps in general (I used Joey). They made Reddit more accessible and usable. Since they effectively pulled the plug on those I haven't been back since... unless I was really, really bored
or was looking at porn.“All your favorite Inbox features will come to Gmail” - Google, before killing it. I’m still waiting.. :D
And yeah, now my reddit usage is basically just following links other people send me (similar story to Twitter..) Oh well !
My gods, I know I've seen the site before, but I never realized just how many things Google has actually killed that I've used for ever, including the fitbit stuff. I just kind of stopped using things and then realized that they died.
Inbox was too good for its own good.
I remember it came out while I was working for a company that used the Google suite.
I was 300% more efficient than my colleagues and with half the amount of headache thanks to how organized my emails were.
Such a disastrous day when they killed it.
Honestly wouldn’t be surprised if google killed Inbox because it meant we didn’t spend enough time in our mailboxes 😄
I miss the days when things were goo to be good rather than to force our eyeballs on ads and money making schemes.
I SO miss autosnoozed bundles from Inbox. Game changer. I was pleased to see that there are others out there that miss that platform.
For someone who tried it, but never got it: What did you like about Inbox so much?
I have never been much of a power user when it comes to email, so I am far from the target audience of this one. I do read lot of people state how much they miss it though.
Modern e-mail is a firehose of information. Receipts, travel confirmations, newsletters, personal messages, etc, all coming into one place.
What Inbox did so well was pulling the important data out of those emails and presenting it to you.
So, for example let’s say you had a trip coming up. You probably have airline confirmation emails, hotel emails, etc - Inbox would bundle all of that information up into a Trip card that put all the important info right at your fingertips.
Other e-mail services offer things like spam filters, labels, etc that can help you sort through your mail, but nothing as seamless or powerful as how Inbox worked out of the box.
I didn't realize that it did that level of bundling. I can certainly see how that would feel like a big gap to fill after the plug was pulled. Suffice to say, I am glad I didn't get into it - if only to not miss it now.
I just read some news that may interest you. https://www.shortwave.com/blog/android-launch-best-of-google-inbox-reincarnated/
Hey, thanks for sharing.
I’ve actually been trying Shortwave on my iPhone for a couple months now. It’s pretty good; the bundles work well, for example.
It doesn’t feel quite as intelligent or powerful as Inbox was, but to be honest at some point I wonder how much nostalgia clogs my memories of Inbox. All I know is that back then, I was always at “Inbox Zero.”
I also kind of feel like I haven’t really given it a fair shake, since I haven’t been using it as my primary mail app and I never took the time to clean everything out for a fresh slate start.
TL;DR: Shortwave is definitely worth a look for fellow Inbox missers
I miss the fun visuals of disk defragmentation.
Its different, but you can still see some fun visuals with WinDirStat. It shows you a visual representation of the size of files on a specified drive.
Personally prefer SpaceSniffer as it doesn't have that weird gradient thing that WinDirStat does with the blocks.
I've found TreeSize to be much faster than at least WinDirStat. It also has a treemap chart.
Well lets keep this thread going, I'm a fan of WizTree it's real fast and I can use it to analyze network drives.
I just tried it, and... wow, that is fast. 2 million files in:
5:51 @ WinDirStat,
1:50 @ TreeSize,
7 seconds @ WizTree.
And I thought the factor of 3 is a huge improvement lol
Coincidentally Linus Tech Tips just namedropped WizTree in a recent video of useful Windows system tools.
Surprised no one mentioned Defraggler, it's rather similar to the old windows derangementer.
Because defragmenting itself is becoming obsolete with the unyielding rise of SSDs.
Doesn't mean you can't miss it!
That's true, computers seem to mostly come with SSDs now, so you will still miss defragmenting if all you have is an SSD (least I hope no one is defragging their SSD).
That said, HDDs won't go away anytime soon since SSD's cost more and still take everything down with them when they die. There's lots of people who use HDD's for cheaper, safer storage for archives that don't need speed and things that use a lot of space (like games). New tech is still being developed to make them faster as well. They'll probably keep ticking along as an archive/cheap storage until we reach some insurmountable wall or some new tech comes out that makes both SSDs and HHDs obsolete.
SpaceSniffer is by far my most used utility these days. Hell, many times when I'm bored I'll just fire it up and look for things to delete.
Me too. I've been playing some tech-nostalgia games lately and it makes me miss it even more.
Hardspace Shipbreaker has the Data Miner mini app in it to recover found hard drives and it's got this great little animation and sounds to go along with it.
I've been living in the command line way more often lately and the loading asci indicators, syntax highlighting, etc just is so satisfying.
I was never quite sure what it did when I was a kid, but my dad had told me to run it every now and then, so I did, and watched i bemusement.
Having learned about FAT and realizing the point years later, when my stomach rumbles in the company of others I still tell people that I'm defragmenting.
Not a full program, but the browser extension StumbleUpon. It had various categories you could subscribe to and use it to jump to random websites. It was a great way to explore the internet back when it felt smaller and less dominated by the large companies today.
Try https://www.wiby.org :)
surprise me!
Wow.... it's so weird "going back in time" like that. Seeing these pages that are stuck in time, a reminder of the early internet -- before we really knew what it was going to become, and everybody had to have flashing animated under construction gifs. What's interesting is just how many of the pages that I stumbled upon with that have been updated quite recently, even though they still have the Netscape icons at the bottom and a sign guestbook link. One has a little image that says "are you ready for the year 2000" on the same page as a "Stand with Ukraine" animated flag that alternates between that text and presumably the Ukrainian version of that text.
Yeah, some folks have seen what the internet has become and either remembered or never forgot that we are still free to make websites. I think some of the new wave of webweavers like the old buttons and images, almost like historical artifacts.
I really don't know how to thank you enough for sharing that link. I've just lost many hours to the 'surprise me...' button. I'm relatively young, and I've never had this big a wave of nostalgia. Most of these sites are exactly what I remember the web was like when I first started to explore it. It's like opening a time capsule.
I've been so depressed recently thinking of everything we've lost on the Web through the centralisation, enshitifcation and hyper commercialisation of the vast, vast majority of it. So much creativity, so much information and so much hope has been lost. This is the perfect antidote. I'm honestly emotional seeing this stuff, I thought nearly every vestige of this period had been lost.
Personal favourites:
If anyone has more ways to find what's left of this era, please let me know.
I'm very glad :) A lot more websites are out there, seemingly immortal, waiting to be found. One way is randomly traversing Angelfire, Tripod, Geocities, and Archive Team pages. Plus https://www.wimp.com has an archive. And then there's https://cloudhiker.net. Happy archeological surfing :)
It took me to explodingdog.com and hit me with a double dose of nostalgia
StumbleUpon is what first came to mind for me as well. It was an amazing tool that I'm sad never got a reliable replacement (to my knowledge at least). But the amount of fascinating or off-beat content it'd take you to was staggering. Poetry, excerpts from books, short stories, art / illustrations, futurism & Sci-Fi - at the time I was really into writing and I discovered so much that I likely wouldn't have otherwise. Plenty of weird stuff too, but that's beside the point.
StumbleUpon was awesome. It allowed me to discover so many things like Don Hertzfeldt's animations, the original short for that crazy movie 9, Blokfone and so many others when I was young. My brother showed it to me and we would stumble for hours finding crazy websites or YouTube videos before YouTube was owned by alphabet.
There is an alternative called Cloudhiker.
It's almost a 1:1.
Apparently the project "Stumbled" was rebranded into this. I don't know the history behind the change but I'm glad to see that it has survived! Thanks for sharing this.
Not so much a program, but I do miss degaussing my old CRT monitor.
I bet you natively heard that sound once you read the word.
Boi-oi-oi-oi-oi-oi-oi-oi-oi-oing
Definitely heard it!
I absolutely did! Thank you for that; I love that sound!
Old computer sounds in general.
The degauss/satisfying tiss sound as a CRT was turned on, in the old days the beeps, clunks and buzz as floppy drives were checked for boot disks, clicky clicky hard drives...
A simple yet very satisfying one came later with Voodoo1/Voodoo2 3D cards that would give you a loud click as the relay switched the output from your 2D card to the Voodoo, that click was then followed by the spinning 3DFX logo letting you know you were about to play some awesome 90s PC games.
I dunno, computing was a lot more immersive back then. If you're from that era you probably think computers are absurdly quiet these days, at least I do. You really notice things like fan noise etc now when previously that stuff was often very minor compared to the other noises.
I remember older monitors and TVs would make this deep electrical "thunk" sound and having to wait for the tube to warm up for the picture to fade into existence.
Then one day I got a new (to me) CRT monitor that would make a static sound for a while and then it would "thunk" and the picture would just suddenly appear! I thought "wow, we are living in the future!"
I know exactly what you mean! later CRT's seemed to be such different beasts to older ones, particularly in computer monitors. I suppose they were, they took that tech to it's limits, an expensive computer monitor in the late 90s was genuinely nice to use.
I miss my time as a schoolboy when I’d get in trouble for sticking magnets near CRT monitors. I’d do that for a more satisfactory degaussing experience once I figured that out. Before, I just liked the pretty ring of color.
Building the web was so much simpler back in the days of Homesite. My heyday with it was during the Allaire days, before Macromedia acquired it. It was an awesome text editor built specifically for HTML.
I also have very fond memories of the old multimedia CD-ROM encyclopedias like Encarta. Microsoft also put out some encyclopedias narrowed to specific subject matter. The one that comes to mind is Microsoft Complete NBA Basketball. I spent countless hours combing through that thing, reading all the entries and watching all the videos.
Man Encarta, I remember booting that up to write my papers back in middle/high school.
Speaking of building the web, some of these aren’t necessarily software, but man I remember the multiple Xanga blogs I had and my old DBZ Angelfire site.
I clearly remember when I made the move to hosting my own sites and writing them with Dreamweaver. Good times!
Macromedia had so much cool stuff going on.
I tinkered with dreamweaver way in it's early days, and when I wanted to dabble in graphics I would use fireworks. It was the best of both worlds, with raster and vector tools. I would tell people it was a combination of photoshop and illustrator.
When adobe absorbed all the Macromedia stuff, they discontinued fireworks. I hung onto my aging old version for a long while, until such a time when I stopped doing graphics because I suck at it lol
Yeah, it’s really a shame Macromedia got swallowed up. Fireworks especially was a terrific program. It’s too bad Adobe wasn’t interested in keeping it alive. As far as I know now that Flash is gone the only product of theirs that is still around is Dreamweaver.
Have you got a chance to try out Krita? It's the only graphics program I've seen that does a good job on both vector and raster graphics.
I think Affinity Designer has some raster tools as well, but I can't remember ever trying to use any of them.
I think Krita came onto the scene right around the time I gave up on any kind of graphic work and started doing exclusively backend work professionally.
In the odd case that I want to spit out some of my terrible graphic design, I just go to photopea.com these days and I don't have to install anything or care about it much.
I used to spend a ton of time reading random pages of the Encyclopædia Britannica CD-ROM on my family's living room computer. Wikipedia now is way better than that CD-ROM ever was, but the memories are special.
And so popular was Encarta, they even released a hardback encyclopaedia with the Encarta name on it!
Pouring one out for good old Encarta. I remember learning a lot of things just by messing around with it.
Oh wow didn't even think of these, Encarta was pure joy.
And I've had so many Geocities sites for the fun of it, typed out in notepad, but Homesite made 1 weeks worth of coding drop to a day.
OMG original Homesite! That's a blast from the past! I had "acquired" a serial number for it and made so many pages using it. Trying this, moving that, experimenting tiles backgrounds, etc.
mIRC and specifically the NoNameScript extension. I miss those days.
Wow, good memories of NoNameScript.
iTunes. It's never been amazing on Windows, but on macOS its earlier versions was pretty great. It gradually got worse over time as its focus became more and more diffuse. I still use Music (what iTunes became on macOS) because my old local iTunes library carries over and I prefer Apple Music over Spotify, but it's definitely not as nice as it once was.
Also Firefox. It used to be this zippy little speed demon of a browser, but somewhere around version 4.x or 5.x (whenever the big redesign came) Mozilla shifted directions and it started noticeably accumulating cruft and that snowballed for over a decade nearly unaddressed. While it's made strides in returning to its former glory in the past few years it's still not the titan it once was, feeling notably more clunky than alternatives built with Blink and WebKit.
I'm asking this sincerely: Have you used Firefox recently?
I daily drive it, but regularly pop into Edge (Chromium) and Chrome. I can't really say I've ever perceived a speed difference. I'm curious if that's just a me thing though (e.g. my computer isn't fast enough for the difference to be pronounced, I just don't care, etc...).
Agreed. If anything, whenever I'm forced to take out Chromium, it feels a bit slower to load; and the RAM usage is definitely worse.
I don't really know why people still care about browser speeds today anyway; browsers, in general, are ridiculously fast to the point where it doesn't really matter.
Websites, on the other hand, in a lot of cases feel slower and more bloated then ever.
I do, as a secondary browser on macOS and primary browser on Windows and Linux.
Web browsing speed is ok, but it has a general lagginess to it with e.g. there being white flashes when some UI elements are shown/hidden or resized. It just doesn't feel as tight and polished as other browsers. It's probably the least bad under Linux, worst on macOS, and somewhere in the middle under Windows.
It's been my primary browser on Android and Windows for the last two years. The #1 browser spot has regularly changed over the years and I'm happy to say that it once again belongs to Mozilla.
Not a you thing. Got tired of Chrome a year ago and switched back entirely to Firefox like the old days... it's lightning fast.
There's a few little niggles that I'm mostly just living with, nothing major. I can't remember the last time I started Chrome, I moved specifically when Firefox announced their new privacy measures and I've just been quite dissatisfied with the direction Google in general have been going so it was time to leave Chrome.
My Firefox takes forever to load, while Chrome opens near instantly. I have tried disabling extensions, cleaning out the history, cookies, etc, , and reinstalling, but for some reason it is just a slow turd on my machine.
This is probably due to the whole XUL/electrolysis thing.
Firefox didn't originally have an API for plugins/extensions; it had extensions but they basically just directly modified the guts of Firefox. This meant that they didn't exactly know what they could or couldn't change, since plugins were essentially just another component of Firefox as far as anyone else was concerned.
At some point, they wanted to 1) switch Firefox's UI system from XUL to HTML (newcomers didn't know XUL which reduced the number of devs that could contribute to Firefox, and Firefox already supported HTML for displaying webpages, obviously), and 2) switch to a multi-process architecture (called 'electrolysis') so that if one tab froze up, it wouldn't freeze up the entire browser (remember those days? ugh), improved security, and also let them properly use multiple CPU cores for another performance boost.
The problem was, doing so took years and they wanted to do so whiile maintaining backwards compatibility with the plugin ecosystem (which would make it take even longer). It also broke a bunch of plugins despite their best efforts (because, again: plugins were like out-of-tree kernel modules, it was not possible to change Firefox internals without affecting the plugin "API"), which pissed off the community a whole lot (for example, vimperator was permanently broken).
Chrome never had this problem because they designed it for multi-core architecture in the first place, whereas Firefox was written before multi-core CPUs (like XUL, which was used in the original Mozilla browser in the 90s).
Winamp 1.x-2.x (with visualizations)
Foobar2000:
Trillian:
mIRC:
Google Reader:
going older...
Norton Utilities for DOS:
Borland dev tools:
Borland tools were the best
Turbo Pascal was the first language I learned after BASIC. I also had the C/C++ compiler that came with a big poster of the OWL object model.
Google reader... Ahhh it still hurts. I just gave up on feed reading after that.
Aperture.
Apple defined an entirely new genre of software (batchable, non-destructive photography adjustment combined with catalog management), and it was glorious. And then for some inexplicable reason, they just abandoned it, and left us to far inferior options like Lightroom and its ilk.
Just remembered another awesome one: ICQ. Instant messaging was so cool in a world before text messaging.
For some reason, my 40-year-old brain still has a space carved out for my ICQ number: 1590438. So, there's that in case anyone here wants to add me. 😆
Uh oh!
I also remember my ICQ number AND password, but sadly, ICQ seems to have been purchased and sold over and over into some Russian honey-pot hellscape.
Holy carp! I read that and immediately remembered mine! 4213537
Mind. Blown.
(I have the worst memory and can't remember most of my past)
That was a huge part of my life though. Met quite a few people IRL through it!
I MUST change my Slack message sound to "Uh oh" now.
I have used it as my SMS tone since I've owned a cellphone. I think if I put it on slack, I'd quickly tire of it. But I'm still jealous of the idea!
ICQ was a huge part of my late teens into University, before MSN took over. I do miss it, although the more I reflect on it the more I think I just have a lot of nostalgia for that era of my life.
My 40-year-old brain also dedicates a precious neuron to remembering 15547907! What did I just walk over here to get? No idea. An arbitrary number on a defunct system? Locked in forever!
16574000 here, a little younger than you but I get the feeling that number will be burned into my head forever.
That's actually pretty tempting... I brushed off XMPP recently, too.
Huh. Apparantly there is a new ICQ.
It looks a bit fishy to me, but to be fair pretty much every proprietary messaging platform feels fishy to me.
Recently, I have been very nostalgic about Netscape Navigator. Although I guess it's really more the Internet of its era than the program itself. A time when visiting a website was exciting, and not a chore that requires you to endlessly answer popup questions about captchas, cookies, newsletters, logins, ads and whatnot.
I've been thinking whether a modem browser could be modified to better mimic that experience in the modern web. Blocking ads is relatively easy, but getting rid of the other annoyances, and turning websites into just plain readable articles without any extra css or javascript, while maintaining functionality, seems tougher. Maybe an AI could help here.
The thing I miss about Netscape was that it was a suite of useful applications.
Technically it still lives on as SeaMonkey.
Interesting! For me, Netscape's switch from a browser to a larger software suite actually marked the end of the golden era and the point when my internet experience started to turn sour. It was probably also the first example of what I would have called feature creep that I encountered.
I understand now why they did it, but at the time I remember having been very annoyed about Navigator 3.0 suddenly bloating itself with email and news clients, html editors, and address books, none of which I thought were particularly good (or I just didn't need them), and which also seemed to make the browser less stable. I stayed with the standard edition for a while and refused to switch to Netscape Communicator when they started calling the suite version that. But in the end, the worsening performance of the browser drove me to switch to Opera sometime in 1998, which I think I continued to use until Firefox was launched.
Oh, that took me back. IE was nice and all but I strongly preferred Netscape.
I know there's plugins and addons that could do away with annoyances, but it would be great to have that just right out of the box.
Came here to say this, you hit the nail on the head. It was a different kind of Internet when I was keying in any web address I saw, just cos it was fascinating.
Weirdly, I'd have to say the old MS Paint. The program is so bare bones, but that actually made it convenient in some ways. I actually never used Vista, our family computers used Windows XP and I then got a MacBook. When I got a chance to finally use the newer versions of Paint post-Windows 7... I don't know, it just felt off to me. It focused too much on being "smooth" with the brushes, but that actually makes things harder on a micro-level.
Looking it up, this article outlines the issues I had with it. Under the "bad" section it lists the automatic anti-aliasing, automatically selecting lines/shapes, bucket tool not working properly on brushes, and no pixel brushes. All minor inconveniences, but together they can just add up and get frustrating.
I haven't used it in years, but paint.net scratched the old ms paint itch for me.
It's free, but I don't think there's a Mac version.
Total Commander
My first PC was a 386 with Norton Commander, so that was just how I learned to use a computer. And Total Commander took that split interface into the Windows world for me for many years.
Incidentally, the developer of Total Commander just released the first release candidate for version 11 today.
I don’t remember which commander-style program I used to use in the DOS days, but I totally hear you. I think there are a few options that works as Finder replacements in macOS today but I haven’t really bothered. Brings back memories!
I guess I missed out on Total Commander, but I'm also nostalgic for Norton Commander. I vaguely remember being pretty resistant to switch to Windows 95 because I couldn't use NC as well anymore, or maybe not at all (not 100% sure I'm remembering that right). I can't say that I miss it today, looking back at how limited it was, since I'm very happy with Directory Opus. I also miss DOS being the base operating system. Jokingly typing "format c:" and hovering over the return key was silly fun (I was ~10 after all).
As a long time Linux fan I miss Compiz desktop effects. The desktop cube and wobbly windows were what made me fall in love with my desktop. Honorable mention to the window going up in flames after pressing "x".
The other software that I miss is the Amarok music player. Lots of comments about Winamp on this thread, but Amarok was just next level.
If you are using Gnome, there is Burn My Windows that has a bunch of window open/close effects. There is also the aptly named Desktop Cube extension to give you all the desktop-induced vertigo you can stand! Now if only they had a 4D-hypercube desktop...
(Oh right... we can't forget wobbly windows!)
KDE has the wobbly windows effect, or did, as I had it enabled not more than a couple of years ago.
I seem to have grown up a bit (or replace with gotten boring) since my last machine upgrade because this time I've left pretty much everything stock in KDE on Manjaro.
Ahhhhh yeah, KDE. I used it a number of years ago, but eventually got overwhelmed by all the customization options, coupled with the fact that all the customizations had to be redone when some new change rendered the original config files incompatible. I've just stuck with Gnome and whatever the distro defaults are. (I am kind of looking forward to checking out PopOS's new COSMIC desktop, though.)
Oh man, I used to be really into enlightenment. Come to think of it, i bet it still exists.
I agree! In fact sometimes I still fire up the Trinity DE (based on KDE 3.5) to use Amarok on it.
Oh yeah! Amarok (especially version 1.4) is still the sunny pinnacle of what a music player should be in my mind! I still miss so many of its features even though I mostly use Spotify on my phone these days. The moodbars were one of my favorite features! And the dynamic playlists! And being able to do more than thumbs up a song! Ah, I may have to go dig out my old HDDs and get lost in the music and nostalgia...
While I'm thinking about it, I don't know if I've ever heard why @Amarok has that as their handle. Is it because of the music player or is it directly a reference to Inuit mythology?
The music player was named for this album just like my handle. There is an easter egg in the Amarok software with a message from the developer if you play that CD. The release milestone names are all Oldfield references.
Amarok was a proper cratedigger's music tool, but we all stream now. These tools have become obsolete technology. I have a 2TB collection of audio files on the server but I haven't touched it or updated it in years.
Miranda-IM. Don’t think it is that well know, but it was a multi protocol IM client for windows with a minimalist vibe. Used for ICQ and MSN (I think) back in the day.
I remember Miranda IM! Apparently they're still kicking around as Miranda NG, but I remember that tiny little program that was incredibly versatile. I had it for AIM, yahoo!, and GTalk?MSN?XMPP? one of those...
Eudora for email and Free Agent for UseNet
I might be the first one to say this, but...
{bold}emphasized words{/bold}except I don't remember the exact syntaxI've just started using GnuCash as my wife has been slowly building a small business from home that finally broke the Time-to-pay-tax bracket in the UK.
What a joyful accounting program. I highly recommend anyone doing basic small accounting to look at it. And thank you for contributing to it.
GnuCash is a solid application that offers true double-entry book-keeping, something Quicken does not offer (or didn't last time I used it in earnest).
It was fun to contribute to -- it served my needs in my small business, and also scratched my programming itches at the time. We still use it, today.
I was mulling this question over and then remembered this program with the distinctive blue background that I loved.. WordPerfect!
Thought I might be the first but thought I'd check first.
Flash games as a whole. Nostalgia plays a role, but I want people to be empowered by their tools again to make fun little games as easy as flash did.
I do miss flash. The fancy websites with voice. If it was just something to show off your brand I thought it was ok. (nrg.be derbauer.de, …)
I actually mastered flash and created games and dynamic sites with it, but for some reason I ended up in backend development 😵💫
I just miss buying software by paying for it once and not worrying about it until they created enough useful features in newer versions that I felt like an upgrade was justified. Fuck this subscription businesses.
I'm specifically looking at you, Adbobe.
There used to be this webapp called Meebo that aggregated all of the chat apps into one. I used it to talk to my friends on AIM, Google Messenger, and IRQ. It even had an Adobe Air version of the program that is reminiscent of modern desktop chat like Telegram. It looked like it was getting big with mini game integrations and apps but one day, it shutdown.
I feel like you mean ICQ or IRC but you've split so cleanly in the middle that I just do not know.
I meant ICQ but I did also use IRC through a different service. Thanks for the correction.
In a previous life as an Operations Manager for a payphone company I had to plan routes for techs and the best damn thing in the world was Microsoft Streets & Trips. Upload a couple of hundred stops and it would optimize routes, revealed bundles of stops in cities I've never been in that would be a single day's tasks, etc. As someone that grew up using Mapsco it was magic.
There are a couple of smaller online services for this now and I'm sure there are multi-million dollar systems for companies that actually need it, but for a little payphone company with about 10k payphones, it did the job and did it well.
Paul Allen and Bill Gates were into all things to do with trips and traffic as the company they formed before Microsoft was called Traf-o-data.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traf-O-Data
Seems somewhat connected.
ResEdit taught me a lot of how to practically design software UI. Back in the pre-OSX days MacOS had applications with resource forks (no idea how this was actually structured, I just remember how the app worked 30 years ago) and ResEdit let you browse that. There was a bunch of random code I didn't understand but there was a paint-like editor that let you edit parts of the UI and you could see your changes in real time!
I could change the style of the menu bar and it would change what menu bars looked like in that application. I could see that a menu bar was made up of a square that stretched to be the grabby bit and 2 squares with triangles in them for the end.
I later ended up working in software as a designer for years and I I totally loved ResEdit because it was the first place where I learned how things actually were put together. I'm glad there's things like open sourced projects and open repositories as well as a lot more instruction to help the curious kids today.
That is absolutely fascinating! I wish I had something like this when I was tinkering with... uh, an oldish Windows 3.1 comp where I tinkered with just about everything. Not the same, I know.
I spent countless nights as a kid on my Mac Classic editing my own pixel art (created in MacDraw), audio clips, and text into resource forks with ResEdit to create my own modded versions of games like SimEarth and Prince of Persia. Editing the triggers and responses in the Mac port of Eliza led to some particularly fondly-remembered shenanigans.
All the fun I had back in those days with HyperCard and ResEdit were the primary driving factors in me deciding to pursue software engineering in school and as a career.
foobar2000
I used to use it when I was a windows user, but I've been using OSX for 15 years, where it has to be run through Wine, and doesn't quite work 100% right.
Also I both listen to way way less music than before, and listen to music primarily through searching random crap on Youtube.
But I really miss those days where I would put a lot of effort in to setting up foobar and getting it looking nice, and curating your library, and having all the cute album art show up, and spending a lot of time downloading music and setting up a nice library of mp3s. At some point in my life I stopped listening to music as much, stopped downloading music, and don't have it in me to make a music player pretty again. I truly miss it.
Foobar2000 is still going strong for me! Fell in love with it and haven't looked back since.
The closest I could find to my preferences is Clementine in Linux, but are there other media players that you'd recommend?
I use Plexamp now since it runs on all of my devices, and gives me cloud access to my entire music library. But it's not a free tier of their service, and music on Plex is kind of 'eh' without it in my opinion.
I'd otherwise still be running foobar2000 in Wine on Linux. I haven't found any other music player that works as well for me.
I thought XFire was really neat back in the day. AIM of course, Teamspeak, Vent…all your gamer classics.
I miss forums too, like real forums where you spent ages making the perfect signature to impress the community.
PCTools and Microsoft Defrag on DOS
LiteStep - anyone?
I remember this, basically like a desktop environment replacement for windows? I recall trying it but finding it a bit too janky for real use personally.
I had to look up what this was, and I am now fervently wishing for it to make a comeback-- Windows 11 desktop gripes, anyone?
LiteStep, then bb4win for me. A lot of the people I talk to to this day are from the LiteStep IRC.
The customization ability of windows has just plummeted over the years.
Totally. Started with LiteStep on Win98 and absolutely loved it, then when I got out of college and starting working at Amazon I used bb4win on the XP machine they gave me. (I still loved LiteStep but it could be occasionally hinky, and I just needed a DE that was minimal and worked and stayed out of my way, which is like BlackBox's whole deal.)
I helped with bb4win, I kept them as close to the nix version as possible.
Rockbox
I had completely forgot about this! It transformed my gen1 ipod into av actual movie player.
The video quality was mostly a visual suggestion with audio, but still!
Still have my old Sansa Clip with Rockbox running on it for about 12 years now and still going pretty strong except the screen has some weird burn in
mIRC. I was an awkward kid and it was the only place I made friends. Also learned basic scripting which got me into coding.
My favorite era was definitely back in the old BBS days. I had an IBM PS/2 80 to play around on and ran everything in DOS.
Telix - I spent a lot of time dialing up local BBSes with this. I remember being excited the first time I connected to something faster than 2400 bps. I can still remember the Hayes commands and the modem handshake sounds.
Norton Utilities - Amazingly, these used to actually be useful and not just massive system resource hogs.
Gunship - I played this a lot. I wasn't very good at it, but I didn't let that stop me.
Edit:
Tiny Elvis - This was a Windows 3.1 program. A little icon-sized Elvis would appear on the desktop and occasionally make comments like "Hey man, check out that cursor! Boy, that sucker's HUGE!" followed by some sweet Elvis dance moves. It was based on the SNL Tiny Elvis skit.
This? https://archive.org/details/win3_TELV150
Had to find an example of that one. I feel like it'd be really east to port. :)
I'm glad to see someone else mention Telix.. The amount of macros I had on that beast for playing Galactic Empire or Infinity Complex was insane. I still have 5.25 floppy with my macros on it, but no drive.. heh
Also Gunship --- I have stories..
Others I remember fondly
Xtree - (file management pre windows)
QEMM - gotta squeeze as much
4DOS - Helped a lot in my scripting of things
Fractint - Used this to create fractals and other fun trippy stuff.
Cthugha - "An Oscilloscope On Acid"
Tiny Elvis just reminded me, I had these tiny strippers - male and female - who would come out and do strip dances in the bottom right corner. I forget the name of the program.
I didn't have them out of lechery, it was just so novel seeing an animated gif with a transparent background dancing around on my desktop.
I had the Neko one - little cat that would sit on your window or crawl around the taskbar. It is exactly as you say - it was very unusual for the time and felt a bit magical or like breaking some fundamental rules of the world.
A little cat would be super cute! I kind of want one now. I wonder if they are still a thing...
Yes, it felt like we were in the future or something.
Google searching away, it seems like they were able to rescue the old source code for Neko and that person just straight compiled it for other newer targets like 64 bit Windows. The app does seem to work on my PC but has bugs in regards to my multiple monitors (likely related to not understanding that the 2 monitors run at different resolutions). More info is at the link below and the github source code is at the second link.
https://virtuallyfun.com/2010/03/27/neko-x64/
https://github.com/neozeed/neko98
Neko also has their own Wikipedia page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neko_(software)
Just last night I was talking to someone about how I miss playing team-based games where you could press
yto type in the global chat anduto type in the team chat. It was such a thrill to be mid-game, hityoru, and know that you had to type as fast as possible because someone could be coming around the corner to frag you. I never really got into talking on the mic in team-based games, and eventually dropped them all together.We played team/clan FPS all through the late 90s into the 00s. Voice chat (Ventrilo? I think) came around towards the very end of that and honestly few of us really felt that comfortable with it, we were all so used to text chat in games.
It's era defining for me, I still don't particularly want to speak in games and I suppose that makes me a boomer :)
Thats how I learned to touch type as a kid! (though not fps's, it was the days of AOE2 and star wars empire at war for me, still had to type fast.
Good old fashioned keybinds like "guarding the flag at [location]" etc.
It may not count, but I miss old YouTube. You could actually find a lot of informative videos on it back then. Now it's just a trash for clicks platform that relies on mostly aweful influencers. Granted some today aren't bad, but Jesus do people like Logan Paul get a lot of attention sometimes.
I think it counts. While you can still find that informative stuff, you'll have to dig for it and/or unfuck your algo.
Warpath - It was a shareware game from the 90s where you fly around in a spaceship and extract resources from planets and try to spread your empire. You could upgrade your ship capacity, fuel etc. I sunk a ton of hours into it. I think it's still available on the devs website which hasn't been updated in awhile. System requirements:
ICQ - I'll never forget hanging out, chatting on ICQ. Blew my mind back then.
Lots of DOS Games - Street Rod II, Pharoah's Tomb, Prince of Persia, Crosscountry Canada, and so many more
A lot of the answers in this thread hit me pretty hard. I miss the old internet a lot.
One I haven’t seen mentioned, and is probably a lot less popular, but was — for a long time — the instant messaging platform of choice for the multiplayer games I played (that weren’t on Steam) was this program called Xfire. I just googled some old images of the client and it actually makes me emotional. So many memories with old friends were made through Xfire’s chat client. It was one of the default programs I would always have open for close to a decade.
I miss old Firefox browser where the addons were so powerful, they were pretty much apps on their own. The browser and every aspect of it was customizable. Addons like tabmixplus, AIOS, downthemall were really something. Now their just a shadow of their old selves.
And I miss the whole paradigm of customizability. So few programs offer a customizable interface these days. In the 2000s, you could really personalise a lot of applications to your tastes and liking. Now it's either you like it or you don't. Not a single aspect can be changed to suit your taste.
Oh yeah, tons. Hotline Connect, Napster, KaZaA, Morpheus, LimeWire...
I seem to remember there was a lot of efforts to continue development on LimeWire after the company went out of business. I'm sure that one of them still exist.
I really miss the simplicity of Microsoft VB6.
As someone who used to support VB6 business-critical apps decades after VB6 was in vogue, I don't.
It seemed pretty good for creating a simple GUI program on windows quickly, I do appreciate that. Once they grew beyond simple programs, and started running in to bugs, or needing changes, or outliving the author, or needed anything that modern applications need, it become a huge headache.
I know that Microsoft made a VB.NET at some point, keeping the VB6-style syntax but modernizing it and making it native with C# libraries. I'm not sure if that's still supported, but it seemed like a cool successor.
I completely disagree with all of your remarks about VB6. My company wrote and maintained many applications for large government agencies in Canada. Ontario legal aid, Canada Immigration, Ontario Health Insurance Plan (OHIP) and many others. Many of them were successfully migrated to VB.NET and eventually C#.NET.
I really miss iGoogle. I know it wasn't the best RSS feed, and sure there might be others. But it was my homepage for so long. I would use it for news, catchup on the latest comics I subscribed too. And it had my Gmail and Messages all built in. One neat little package now handled terribly.
For some reason what came to mind was a software called interactive physics that my high school physics teacher gave me a copy of. It looks like it's still available and still looking very retro. It lets you set up 2d objects like balls and ramps and levers and springs. You can draw them any shape you want. Then you push play and see how gravity and collisions happen on your creations.
Another one that comes to mind is Encarta, the encyclopedia software. Sure Wikipedia has more breadth, but there was something it that brings me nostalgia. Maybe it was just having that amount of knowledge available at my fingertips for the first time. This was before Internet encyclopedias.
Showing my age here but
Lotus 1-2-3 for DOS. Without mouse support, you performed functions by performing /slash commands. For example, saving a document was /FS (The slash opened the dropdown menu, F was for File, S for Save). To copy a cell was /EC. I probably had a hundred of these slash commands memorized. Now in my 40s, I cant figure out how to create a graph in Excel without a youtube video. The world has passed me by.
Basically vi editor. Still widely used in Linux circles.
Weird one but windows movie maker. It was perfect for slicing up a video quickly and not having to bother learning a "real" software like davinci resolve (which I use now). There's a trim tool in one of the built in photo apps but it's not as useful.
I just looked on a Windows PC and it looks like they still have a video editor they bundle with Windows, at least as of Windows 10.
Launching it pulled up a prompt to download a more advanced editor called Microsoft Clipchamp which they offer for free but it says it has in-app purchases and the Windows Store doesn't tell you what those are.
The purchases are for upgrading to the Pro version, which lets you edit/export 4k video and lets you use their library of "premium" stock images and clips. There's no real reason to buy it because if you need the Pro features often enough to buy the subscription then you're probably already using something else.
The basic free version though is completely fine for quickly trimming/slicing clips and making simple edits, you're just limited to 1080p.
This is goofy, but I miss Neopets.
The most annoying thing about this: As far as I know, Neopets.com is one of the only mainstream, still existing, still updated, still visited websites of the early 00s that essentially hasn't changed in format or technology since it started. So, if I knew the password or email I used for neopets in 2003 when I was 11 years old, I could easily log in for a few minutes and get a huge rush of nostalgia. Including some exclusive "paintbrushes" that I probably worked to obtain for years as a child. Because games made us WORK for rewards back then! (Oh God, I sound like a boomer.)
In seriousness though, it's weird looking back and realizing that no one told my 11 year old self that it would be useful to retain access to your old email accounts, because the internet would suddenly become very important when I turned 16. No one told me, when Gmail came around (I was 12) that I should transfer all of my accounts to that email address, because we would apparently be using Gmail for at least the next decade. I'm lucky I grabbed my firstnamelastname@gmail.com when I did.
I really hope there wasn't an "in-between" generation that got caught between my situation of losing a neopets account and when email addresses became a legitimate cornerstone/requirement of existing in society. I suspect there were at least a few of those people.
Proxomitron
AI Roboform (doing just fine with Bitwarden, thankyouverymuch, but still nostalgic - felt like magic at the time)
Ah, the control we had. Today i need a dozen tools/extensions to even scratch the surface of what it could do.
I miss an old macOS music player called Ecoute. Also miss Quicksilver (I use Alfred now) and Growl (a customizable notification interface for macOS before Apple Sherlocked it). In fact, there was a whole cohort of really thoughtfully designed, single-purpose macOS apps back in the pre-iOS era that were just a delight to use. I think a lot of the devs who were actively designing and building macOS exclusive software and taking full advantage of Apple’s APIs and HIG either are no longer working or have shifted to iOS or cross-platform dev work. But it was lovely while it lasted.
I rarely dipped into the macOS environment, but from what little I saw with my inferior Windows ports, they seemed pretty cool! I should put up an emulator to see what I missed out on.
I miss Microsoft Money. It really handled everything the way i do my finances, Now i am forced to use Quicken, which sucks in comparison, especially since its now only subscription based only.
When I finally stopped using Microsoft Money I moved to MoneyWiz which is actually pretty good, although I'm not sure if it's Mac only.
WordStar. I still have the command set embedded in my fingers.
I thought that name sounded familiar: https://www.theverge.com/2014/5/14/5716232/george-r-r-martin-uses-dos-wordstar-to-write
Looks like you're not the only long-time fan.
Whippersnappers.
I miss Beagle Bros.And the first version of A guided tour of Macintosh and the 128k Mac’s variable speed drive.
Well, I remember I used copywrit.com quite a bit in the past. And was always confused whether I should use copywrit.com or copywrit.exe.
Hitting PgDn in Procomm Plus would initiate a download window, and had a characteristic sound when you pressed it.
Print Shop / Print Master were an endless source of cards, spit out in a distinctive voice by my Epson 9-pin dot matrix printer. I still remember learning the style "Art Deco" from that program.
I also remember doing a piranha report in grade school, using BASIC to print out an ASCII representation of the fish. I think I was the only kid that knew how to do such things at the time.
Jumpman (Joe) had an easter egg where if you jumped into the right side of the screen on the first level, you'd reach the easter egg level.
Loderunner and Montezuma's Revenge (no DOS, direct load into the game from floppy) also took up a lot of my time. As well as all of the Sierra ______ Quest adventures.
Print Artist Pro, used it from the late 90's to like 2012 or so. It was a bargain basement version of a graphics program. But I could use it to make magic for my sewing patterns. I used it primarily for applique. You could also use it to format text and make forms and marketing materials. I suspect they still make it. Now I use Paint or Gimp, but I really miss the simplicity of how that program worked.
I used to love using TuneUp Utilities on Windows XP to customise the hell out of everything. Really made it feel like my PC.
Old Mac user here. I miss the days of Eudora email and downloading totally legitimate files from Hotline.
I still have Eudora (Windows) folder backed up somewhere and I last I checked I could still launch it to see my downloaded POP mails complete with attachments.
When I started using computers, it was some hand-me-down with Windows 95 on it. Then my first new computer was a Gateway machine (remember the Cow?) running Windows 98 which then got upgraded to Windows XP. For me, XP was the pinnacle of computing. Sure, it had its imperfections, but it was a blast theming it and it ran fast. My favorite programs at the time were:
YES. This.
I was looking to see if someone was going to name Windows 95 / XP.
:’-)
Turbo Pacal
Jasc Paint Shop Pro 7
This was my introduction to photo editing, before I started using Photoshop. It was pretty powerful for what it was. Great for pixel art/spritework. I was made aware of it from people on the Palace visual chat, because it was known for being great for making avatars. Animation Shop 3 was included and was also invaluable for making animated gifs.
Speaking of which...
Palace Visual Chat
This was more popular in the 90s but I used it in the very early 2000s. People could create their own visual chats (palaces) and host them much like IRC. There was a built-in scripting language so you could do a lot with it, even create games, if you were creative and talented enough.
I don't know how to say this without being weird, but I'm pretty sure the first time I was exposed to the concept of "sex" was in a Palace chat room when I was about 10 years old in the early 00s. Luckily, I'm fairly certain the people exposing me to this concept were other minors, based on how juvenile I remember the messages being, but who knows. It's just a hilarious memory for me, nothing traumatic, thank god.
I feel like it's worth mentioning in the context of this conversation, because I'm particularly fascinated by the ways millennials may have been impacted, simply by existing as children on the early-mid era internet. Specifically, existing on the internet before all of the (largely ignorant) adults at the time realized that the internet needed to be heavily moderated and/or age restricted for children.
On another note, looking back at how I was spending my time on the internet around the year 2000, I wish I had been a bit older when that era happened. I certainly enjoyed the earlier days of the internet as a kid born in 1992 (trust me, it was amazing,) but in hindsight it seems more fun/interesting to have experienced the "golden age of the internet" if you will, as an older teenager or adult. I spent most of my time as a kid in the 00s making pixel art. Which was genuinely great, but there was so much more going on at that time.
(I've gone a bit off-topic with my reply here, but your mention of the Palace was so nostalgic that I reverted to the age of ten and had a lot of thoughts about it.)
I was pretty young myself, during that time I was roughly 14-16, though largely avoided the adult-themed/sex roleplay Palaces, I was there primarily to chat and play games with Final Fantasy/JRPG nerds like myself. But looking back it's definitely interesting to think about how unrestricted and open it all was. I miss the more wild west days of the Internet, but yeah, it wasn't super kid-friendly.
I feel similarly about wishing I had been a little older at that time. The connections I made with people weren't super meaningful, and by the time I reached college, Facebook had just come out. There was still optimism in my mind about everything getting better online at that time, but it quickly faded by around 2009 or so. The new social media paradigm never 100% clicked with me, especially how it evolved over time.
Probably one of the younger people here but I really miss Kidzui. It was this browser for kids that had curated content like YouTube videos, flash games and such. Even had your own avatar to customize which is still cool imo. I believe it ran from 2007-2012?
That and also Souptoys Toybox. Neat little program that opened up a toybox on your desktop, I remember making interesting things with it
I miss the Windows 7 GUI. Aero theme. Things looking cool as opposed to flat UI.
I also miss how older Windows stuff tended to have a lot of light gray to the windows which didn't hurt my eyes as much as the strict black or white dichotomy we have on everything computers nowadays.
I know everyone said it already, but just to repeat it repeatedly - Winamp
also op consider this for a browser : https://browser.kagi.com/
How the frick does it do that?
I would, but I'm not in the iOS ecosystem.
Inn
AOL proggies (and aol)
IRC
Prodigy
aMSN, the better MSN client.
As much as we lament the impermanence of the Web, it's really the stuff that came out before the internet that has been truly lost to time. I wish I could have experienced services like Prodigy or GEnie.
I think I mentioned this before, but PhotoImpact, an image editor bought and destroyed by Corel. It's still kilometres ahead of everything else in usability and having paradigms that make sense for most things. But since the last version is so old, it then has a bunch of incongruently missing features and bugs. It's very sad.
Pretty sure the OG fruity loops convinced my 16(Edit, 😭) year old self I could be a DJ.
It's still around as FLStudio. And I believe if you purchased the license for it back then you might be able to still get the latest version. Their licensing is really generous.
I miss total commander back in dos days. These days I use Directory Opus in Windows, paid for licence. Always been impressed with it.
MacPaint and MacWrite. Going from the complicated world of DOS on an "IBM compatible" PC to the amazing graphic interface of a Mac Plus was mind bendingly exciting.
"Look at this mouse! I just have to click on commands, I dont have to know a single DOS command! Isn't this cool?!"
Course, most of my friends and family were thoroughly stuck in the PC world and mocked my little Mac as a toy, that no one would take seriously. Fast forward 35 years and how's Apple doing now, my friends? :)
Hotline and Carracho: these were simple client/server systems that anyone could set up and run. They had FTP-like filing sharing, chat, and bulletin boards all built into one. You found servers you liked through trackers.
SoundJam MP: MP3 player for Macs, much like Winamp only with a more flexible skinning system. It was eventually bought by Apple and became the core of iTunes (albeit with a very different UI).
Arboretum Realizer: A plug-in for SoundJam MP (and Winamp I think) that algorithmically added back frequencies that were removed by MP3 compression, producing a dramatically richer and fuller audio experience.
Pirch 98: My client of choice in the late 90s back when IRC was still a thing. Yes I know it’s technically still around, but let’s be honest - it’s long dead.
Google Talk. Simple and lightweight.
The Simpsons Cartoon Studio
For some reason this popped into my mind when going through this thread. Most apps I loved back then were already mentioned. (Encarta, paint, dreamweaver).
I also loved Flash, mostly to create stuff. It was so easy, even to create games with physics. It is how I learned about physics in games.
I don’t know why, but my first thought was the Beagle Bros software and AppleWorks. I think it’s because I miss the thrill of buying big box software, where every piece of software seemed to be new and game changing and mind blowing for me (was a teenager at the time).
There was this old school windows flash game called Egg where you just make an egg jump higher and higher to different nests. I really miss it!