Next big things that never lived up to the hype, failed, or disappeared without a trace... What do you remember??

[Vapin' Joe]

Imagine windmills and electricity had come together in the 18th century and where we would we be now. Imagine the electric car took hold in the early 20th century, instead of being suppressed by oil interests. Where would we be by now?

Electric cars were suppressed by batteries not giving long enough run times, nothing else.

 

[ebikeerwidnes]

Imagine windmills and electricity had come together in the 18th century and where we would we be now. Imagine the electric car took hold in the early 20th century, instead of being suppressed by oil interests. Where would we be by now?

Suppressed by windmill interests???

 

[Sharky]

When I was working in IT in the 1980s/90s lots of "the big new thing" came along and then

went

mostly very technical and better than anything else
until another company came up with a better idea

I have recently heard that OpenVMS - an operating system - is being discontinued
it was always massively better than anything Microsoft came up with
(even when then recruited the person who wrote it!!)


but marketing won out as usual

sorry - probably means naff all to most people - but VMS being kicked out means ANOTHER load of my memories, expertise and experience is now as much use as if it was based on designing new Steam Trains

I too was in IT and it seemed like every ten years, everything changes. You learn one bit of software and just when you've mastered it, everything changes.

There was one bit of software, "The Last One". It was a programme generator, which was driven by user input via a Q and A dialogue. Never experienced it, but suspect that it wasn't the last piece of software.

Then Lotus 123, was really good and my favourite, but was pushed to one side by the Excel upstart.

 

[Hover Fly]

Olestra, the fat substitute that caused diarrhoea, thankfully never approved in Britain.

 

[Mad Doug Biker]

I thought you were in your 80s!

No, just you dear.


What makes you say so anyway?

 

[ebikeerwidnes]

I too was in IT and it seemed like every ten years, everything changes. You learn one bit of software and just when you've mastered it, everything changes.

There was one bit of software, "The Last One". It was a programme generator, which was driven by user input via a Q and A dialogue. Never experienced it, but suspect that it wasn't the last piece of software.

Then Lotus 123, was really good and my favourite, but was pushed to one side by the Excel upstart.

I agree - we had systems that generator "perfect code" and we would never need to use COBOL (etc) again

ended up costsing loads of time because you would end up having to start using the "generated code" instead of teh original thing to get changes and fixes done as fast as demanded

then the generated code became the source and it was always terrible


I think is was called Jackson Structured Programming - a concept of programming that was quite sensible
and software using it that was just awful

 

[Ming the Merciless]

No, just you dear.


What makes you say so anyway?

The way you express yourself. Like you have just done here. “No, just you dear” is very much what someone in their 80s might say.

 

[MadMalx]

[QUOTE="Sharky, post: 7629412, member: 32103]

Then Lotus 123, was really good and my favourite, but was pushed to one side by the Excel upstart.
[/QUOTE]

I never got back the time I spent installing Windows and various Office iterations. There was stuff I could do easily with Lotus I never figured out with Excel - external device control and data import.
And blue-screen Wordperfect was great - yellow text for bold, red for italics. Not being able to flit from one application to another really made me concentrate properly on the task in hand - research, data analysis, graphics, writing reports, were all separate activities.

 

[Sharky]

[QUOTE="Sharky, post: 7629412, member: 32103]

Then Lotus 123, was really good and my favourite, but was pushed to one side by the Excel upstart.

I never got back the time I spent installing Windows and various Office iterations. There was stuff I could do easily with Lotus I never figured out with Excel - external device control and data import.
And blue-screen Wordperfect was great - yellow text for bold, red for italics. Not being able to flit from one application to another really made me concentrate properly on the task in hand - research, data analysis, graphics, writing reports, were all separate activities.
[/QUOTE]

I had problems switching from lotus 123 to excel, when our firm changed it's default software. I used the excel option to recognise lotus short cut commands for a long time!

 

[Dadam]

I also am sure that Coffee - Bags were a thing at one point too.

Still are. I used to keep a couple in the work backpack for semi drinkable coffee for my weekly trips to client site where the choice was the world's cheapest instant or overpriced chain coffee.

 

[Dadam]

Zoom. I know it's still fairly popular, but at the start of Covid it was all anyone talked about, and became one of those words that was used to describe a generic term but was really a brand name. A bit like calling all vacuum cleaners "Hoovers". But now we have MS Teams and Google Meet. In my NHS, Teams is the default, and in my smaller off-shoot of the NHS, Meet is mandatory

Remember Skype and Webex from the generation before that though?!

 

[Dadam]

3D tv.
My cousin had one, awful.
You had to wear silly glasses and it wasn’t very good.

I had an argument in Curry's (or was it Comet) about them. They were adamant they were the future. I told them nobody wants to sit round watching a movie wearing stupid glasses. Once the novelty passes they'll live in a drawer for ever and the TV will be used as a normal one. The guy wouldn't have it but I was right.

Curved screen TV's were another. About a decade ago they were the next big thing in viewing with the retailers full of them, then they vanished overnight.

Big curved ultrawide monitors are a thing, especially for gaming or office work where you need a lot of windows open.

One of the offices I work in has ginormous curved monitors. I don't like them. I just use my laptop screen.

I love 'em. Looking at a 34" 21:9 one right now, it was an absolute gamechanger for WFH. I find flat ones above medium sized look wrong now, the edges are too far away. I use this AND the laptop screen! I keep perusing bigger ones online too!

 

[Dadam]

4GLs (4th generation languages). They were going to make all programmers redundant because any idiot now could build programs. That's what "they" said about every innovation in code generation from assemblers to compilers and now AI. It just bumped up the level of abstraction.

I agree - we had systems that generator "perfect code" and we would never need to use COBOL (etc) again

ended up costsing loads of time because you would end up having to start using the "generated code" instead of teh original thing to get changes and fixes done as fast as demanded

then the generated code became the source and it was always terrible

As you say the cost of generated code is losing the knowledge and ability to engineer the lower level to debug issues, especially concurrency and memory leaks. AI is amazing for prototyping but crap at engineering scalable and secure solutions. I've heard of companies laying off loads of developers then rehiring them at double the rate to fix the AI generated mess that nobody, least of all the LLM, has the first clue is doing, or how to fix.

I think is was called Jackson Structured Programming - a concept of programming that was quite sensible
and software using it that was just awful

Oh I'd forgotten about JSP! We did it at uni. It was ok, and a lot of the concepts have moved into other methodologies and notations like UML.

 

[ebikeerwidnes]

4GLs (4th generation languages). They were going to make all programmers redundant because any idiot now could build programs. That's what "they" said about every innovation in code generation from assemblers to compilers and now AI. It just bumped up the level of abstraction.



As you say the cost of generated code is losing the knowledge and ability to engineer the lower level to debug issues, especially concurrency and memory leaks. AI is amazing for prototyping but crap at engineering scalable and secure solutions. I've heard of companies laying off loads of developers then rehiring them at double the rate to fix the AI generated mess that nobody, least of all the LLM, has the first clue is doing, or how to fix.



Oh I'd forgotten about JSP! We did it at uni. It was ok, and a lot of the concepts have moved into other methodologies and notations like UML.

We had a system that connected to our

and it was all done in a 4GL on PCs and done in a few weeks when normal systems of that size would take months

so clearly it was THE FUTURE


yeah - well
it worked fine on 1 PC
except that the comms to our system wasn;t included in the time estimate - that was just down to me and apparently I didn;t count
and taking the comms data and inserting it into the data stream to the main system was "missed out " as well - that was the development team that I had worked for first

and when they went over 3 PCs it totally overloaded the whole site comms with its inter PC comms so it all had to be isolated
and even then ran l

 

[Electric_Andy]

Remember Skype and Webex from the generation before that though?!

Ah sorry, I was thinking of Skype but said Zoom instead. I guess that's another one that failed so much that I forgot it. But it was sort of a lightbulb invention at the time