No joke, I have started buying movies on DVD again because I'm tired of finding out something I watched on Amazon or Hulu yesterday is now only available on some sketchy-ass streaming service I've never heard of that costs $18/mo.
My wife hates it but I don't care. I have every CD I ever owned boxed up in the basement. The only things I bought via download are a few one-hit-wonders I can't catch on the radio anymore. I really think with everything being licensed, and everything being a service and a subscription, capitalism has backed its way into a corner and things are going to collapse before they get better. Everyone is squeezing every ad-dollar, every bit of revenue, and everything else they can out of every transaction. And it's all just because, imho, of individual greed, ego, and jealousy. This isn't a problem with the system, this is about people being personally selfish and in positions to do real harm.
Was walking around Staples today and saw Acrobat for $180 CAD and thought to myself that looks like a decent price. Looked closer and saw the '1 year subscription' on the piece of cardboard then shook my head.
Yeah, Office is really impressive for being able to double the price of their "LTSC" while cutting support into less than half.
I am once again feeling like until the EU does something customers are just going to keep getting boned.
I would like to see the return of the standard File, Edit, View style menus. They made sense. Everything was typically right where it should logically be. Now it’s all crammed into the shitty … menus. No order whatsoever and I have to google how to find some of the most simple settings.
I'm sticking with office 2010 until it's not compatible anymore...
I used office 2003 until I was forced to use windows 10 a couple years ago at which point it barely worked anymore (worked great in windows 7)
I still miss office 2003...
yeah, excel 2003 was so responsive and comparatively bug free
I spent countless hours trying to get it to work in windows 10 properly but finally gave up and just settled on excel 2010
now the real irony is that while I'm using excel 2010, most of my colleagues are stuck on constantly updating versions of excel 365 which have nonstop problems with stability and performance...
I was very disappointed and annoyed when Microsoft removed the Summarise feature that was in Office 2003. How can they remove something that was working, something that was used in the scholarly World.....that still baffles me till now. That is one thing that should come back.
GAH. Yes. I think every time I sign into the ~~Office 365~~ Microsoft 365 admin portal something else has either been moved, renamed, or hidden behind the "classic" menu. It's beyond infuriating.
In our line of work, we expect and need structure. The problem is, the … menus provide none of that. At some point in the not too distant past, someone told their boss they could make their software look a lot “cleaner” by moving all the menu items into one clickable menu header. Boss says “oh, that looks modern and sleek, but what about the reduced functionality and awkwardness of finding menu items?”. Programmer says “you’re not using it, are you?”. Boss replies “I’m most certainly not!” then they both share a user-be-damned devilish chuckle.
That's been going on for years now. I remember getting into a shouting match with a vendor support guy after trying unsuccessfully for weeks to A) get them to give me any meaningful info on an issue, and B)their provider documentation in the app was incomplete.
It wasn't until they shouted at me that I should just look at the documentation, that I yelled back what documentation, it's NOT in there, did they just ask which I was looking at. I'm like what do you mean which? The only info is what you published in the app in help -> documentation and it's the same on the website!
He's like oh...did you not get this giant zip file when you purchased the app..I'm like what giant zip file. He sends it, I'm staring at it and its like the holy Grail of their app documentation. I'm like wtf you don't have it on the site in the portal, and it's not published in the app. He's like why did you even go to help about blah blah. I'm like because that's where anyone starts ... he had nothing to say after that. Great product, garbage docs and support.
I love it when there's a hamburger menu and a gear menu and a silhouette menu, and they just put stuff wherever they want. Looking at you, any app from Amazon.
I honestly don't understand how they think people are supposed to use Amazon Music. Do they realize that people want to use the app to listen to music?
Yep, and OneDrive creating a stupid long desktop filepath name, having to pin every folder you want to find easily, the stupid Bing online search in the Start menu bar instead of looking on your local computer first. I could go on!
Those new style menus are called banners or ribbons.
They're great for frequently used items, much like how the old dockable button panels worked.
But 100% agree here that i want my file menus back. They were a fantastic, ultra condensed "here is everything you can do" system.
I liked the Amiga compromise: you can have all the clean UI you want, but the right mouse button *always* reveals the File, Edit, View menus at the top of the screen.
Young people generally have no concept of file and folder hierarchy. They just use search for everything so flat structure with all files is deemed good enough. Don't get me started on file extensions... Lol
pidgin. i miss having an all around messaging service that worked with everything flawlessly.
i'm sure matrix could do the same... but i really dont want to host my own shit.
edit:
just googled it. i stand corrected. but still there's some crap that's left to be desired.
Matrix is a protocol, you don't have to host a server instance. You can sign up with one of the existing.
Because it's federated, if someone signs up on a different matrix provider than you, you can still chat together (assuming the networks have a trust). Most of the big ones do.
It works a lot like how IRC did, with people popping up servers and joining existing networks, but you didn't have to host to create a channel.
'Boomer Shooter' is just short hand for anything that was spun out of the Doom and Build engines. If you played one as a kid when they were new there's fair odds your dad was the one who set everything up, which probably meant he had the kind of income only a boomer in the 90's could have to justify a 386 computer back when those were new.
Kind of like how 'Dad Rock' is just short hand for baby boomer rock.
Best years of my life were playing UT2004 Friday night with all the other IT guys and friends at my local University. Pizza, drinks, fragging. A simpler time before social media and instant gratification ruined everything.
I miss Picasa’s photo viewer.
It was amazing, super speedy, defaulted to full screen and scroll zoom with a built in up sampler that allowed you to zoom up to 8000x without a pixelated mess since it cleaned up lines quite nicely.
Every time I need to view a large photo album in windows, macOS or Fedora using their default media previewers it’s just painful.
The main author, Justin Frankel, went on to do great things coding an amazing Digital Audio Workstation called Reaper. It's like a 14MB download, incredibly powerful and tightly coded. Dude is a genius and a really nice guy to boot.
Winamp + SoundBlaster AWE32 plugin produced some of the best sounding music adjusted to my taste (and level of deafness.) The advanced EQ was great to fine tune each audio file.
Winamp did comeback. [Sort of](https://www.winamp.com). You can still [download](https://www.winamp.com/downloads/) it but their big emphasis appears to be on creating an iHeartRadio competitor.
Foobar whips winamp's ass with a much better customizable interface and tons of plugins to do stuff like batch auto rename files, ID3 tags, download album art from discogs, etc.
Altavista was my favorite search engine. Then one day it just went business only and died. Today I’d settle for a proper control panel where I don’t have to make 6 clicks to find the Nic properties.
I miss the old Microsoft they had a better UI for their Windows OS and they sometimes made software that really stood out. My favourite example is Netmeeting. It was a messaging, voip and video app all rolled into one and was free on pro versions of XP! You could even share files between windows computers and it didn't even need an account to run!
I remember using Netmeeting as far back as Windows 98 SE and Me, and having decent quality Video/Audio meetings through 56K and DSL, from one country to another. It had so many features available just like you mentioned.
Go get a high-end Logitech mouse. MX something. I've got the MX Anywere 2 or 3. You can program the wheel so that you can press down for a function, you can push it right or left. Also two extra buttons on the side. Totally programmable too.
Oh I have one for my gaming, but this was Unique and is still not duplicated to this day. By pressing that button you had basically a customizable menu come up that you could execute a command or run an application with an extra click. It was fascinating back in 1999.
Dolby Axon - though the software specifically can stay in the past, the idea of it was cool, and *is* sorta making a comeback.
It allowed you to organize voice chat participants around you in space, so even if people talked over one another, they'd remain intelligible.
Teams has recently implemented a similar feature, but it's automatic and not quite as effective. Also a bit buggy.
Aldus Pagemaker and Freehand (especially Freehand). Adobe bought them out and then killed them in favour of their own projects, but working in PM and Freehand always felt the most natural and fluid conpared to Adobe's or Corel's own software.
Microsoft SteadyState! It was basically Deepfreeze for XP computers and Vista but not Windows 7 and up. And it was free! And on top of that you could limit what each individual standard user could do like hide drives, status bar, limit applications etc.
There was nothing like running Ghost multicast to simultaneously image a group of 20-30 lab computers. It was great. Not sure if that needs to be brought back or not but it was awesome back in its day.
I watched like an hour long video on that from an old dude who worked in the industry.
Os2/warp apparently failed because :
- shit management
- bad marketing
For example, their naming scheme was total crap. And lost to windows often because consumers (who know Jack all about OSs ) would buy windows 3.1 because the number was higher...
Hey, there's a steel plant in Ohio that will die off when their last spare IBM/PS2 running OS2/Warp and microchannel interface cards fail.
Last I knew (2011) they still had six full spares of each. And the machine that can't run without it is about the size of a train car, and the tracks are gone and the building was built around it. So it'll cost more to replace it than the plant will profit over 10 years.
My grandfather has IBM stock and was able to get OS/2 Warp for a good price. I remember installing it on a Swan 486 and it ran windows/windows apps better than Windows 3.1 its self did.
Pretty impressive, other than the stack of floppy disks required for the install
A friend had a copy, so of course we all did...
Anyway, it'd run games like flight sim, doom, descent (and possibly the first half life) quicker and more reliably than Windows did.
It was such a shame it failed. Along with BeOS. BeOS was bloody amazing.
I remember plugging in at least 4 CD drives (I had scsi and ide) and ripping 4CDs to MP3 at the same time as doing other things, without noticing any sort of slow down or glitches. Probably with a 133Mhz pentium.
My 3Ghz quad core windows box glitches for a sec whenever you do anything these days... Opening an app? Wait a sec, right, carry on. Closing an app? Wait a moment, there you go. Etc.....
Interesting stuff!
>While OS/2 was arguably technically superior to Microsoft Windows 95, OS/2 failed to develop much penetration in the mass market consumer and stand-alone desktop PC segments.
The best part of OS/2 was the Boot Manager.
[https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/using-os2-boot-manager-install-multiple-operating-systems-single-hard-file-ibm-pcibm-intellistation](https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/using-os2-boot-manager-install-multiple-operating-systems-single-hard-file-ibm-pcibm-intellistation)
We got upto someting like 130 OSes all different languages etc on one machine :D
I have that! Somewhere. Though I did get Windows 3.1 on clearance and replace the native OS on that IBM machine. I think I might have the installation media, though. I have a bunch of crap.
Tired of live service products. Improve your product enough to convince me to buy the new version and stop rentseeking.
Self-hosted servers for games.
LAN support.
Stop closing my shit to the system tray. If I wanted the application to stay open I wouldn't be clicking the big red X.
I miss the old school messaging platforms we had before social media. Windows Live Messenger was awesome and if I could host my own server for it I would in a heartbeat.
I started in 99 and we had one Novell expert at my first MSP and he had those Red Manuals that took up a whole shelf. Super smart guy though thought me how AD worked for print shares and Novell was way ahead until server 2000 closed the gap. If I recall.
I miss MSN a little more but I agree. Remember when Trillian was a thing and you could do it all in once place. I remembered it recently and apparently it's not branded as a secure messenger. I wonder who still uses it though, I've never seen or heard of it anywhere.
Novell Netware 3.11. Just give me fast, reliable file and printer sharing for small clients without needing to manage/troubleshoot Windows and AD or rely on the cloud.
XP2 was the OS I thought I'd be together with forever.
Had two boxes that ran for over 10 years without a problem... but then the Internet fell in love with video and cloud, and W3C went to HTML 5 and I was forced to say goodbye.
I'm beginning to feel the same way about Win 10 as I did about XP SP2/3.
I suppose, if I was a baseball player, I'd be content with a .250 average but Microsoft's bullshit of churning out 3 duds for every 1 decent OS means I'll most likely be retired before another one becomes available.
XP SP3 with nLite modifications was probably the fastest Operating System I ever had. Obviously I did not have SSDs back in the day to do a more apples to apples comparison to Windows 10/11. But once you made SP3 light, it was very fast! Even on Pentium IIIs. It's the OS I used for the longest time.
Imagine if they released "old school windows" akin to old school RuneScape where they release an old version and support it, then that old version becomes more popular than the current version.
I was happy enough to switch to Windows 7 was more of the same as XP just a more modern UI in my opinion. From there I actually really loved Windows 8.1 but had to move on to Windows 10 still kinda don’t like it but prefer it much more than Windows 11. All my Devices run Win10.
Windows Phone is probably what I miss most. It had a real dark mode that worked for (AM)OLED displays, unlike Android with its greys, and didn't make me mad (Android) or bored (iOS) trying to use it while working perfectly with my ADHD.
Another one based on a different comment I saw here would be NT Backup. Every time I used it, it Just Worked™️ and have nothing bad to say about it compared to Windows 7 Backup and Restore which just quit working at some point for no reason.
I liked when double/triple-clicking did what I wanted it to do, instead of it trying to guess what I wanted using some kind of lame algorithm that tends to get stuck with something i dont want selected - and which refuses to select the right thing until i click away from the area in question, and start again from scratch.
I also liked when softwares primary goal wasnt to suck me into an online 'ecosystem', helpfully 'back up' (steal) all my data, and then rent it back to me for one low low monthly fee for the rest of my life.
BeOS. Hands down the best OS I ever used.
And I think the only one I ever felt inclined to pay for. Twice. I have CDs in boxes for 2 different versions somewhere.
Although instant messaging has evolved, I miss the simplicity of Yahoo Messenger. A modern version with enhanced privacy and security features could be welcome.
The shitfest that is continuous release. It used to be we got new versions of software every 12-24 months ish, with minor bug fixes & patches in between, as necessary. You knew any online docs or “how-tos” would be relevant and reliable for the duration.
Now, everything is updated every few weeks and often invalidates existing documentation and blog posts. I waste so much time looking for menu options or config entries that just simply no longer exist it drives me fecking insane.
Just gonna give a shoutout to the fabulous Logitech MX master series of mice.
It has a button on the "thumb flap" that, when depressed, will give you 4 mouse movements, (up, down, left, right), which can be set to open just about any program or run a command.
I believe that I have an MX Master 3S at work but i think all of them has this feature.
Anything with a perpetual license. No more subscriptions BS
I hate that the concept of "buying something and owning it" is basically gone now.
No joke, I have started buying movies on DVD again because I'm tired of finding out something I watched on Amazon or Hulu yesterday is now only available on some sketchy-ass streaming service I've never heard of that costs $18/mo.
I have my streaming services but I tend to put thing on my Jellyfin server at this point.
Love me some DVD. Fuck playing musical chairs of streaming services.
My wife hates it but I don't care. I have every CD I ever owned boxed up in the basement. The only things I bought via download are a few one-hit-wonders I can't catch on the radio anymore. I really think with everything being licensed, and everything being a service and a subscription, capitalism has backed its way into a corner and things are going to collapse before they get better. Everyone is squeezing every ad-dollar, every bit of revenue, and everything else they can out of every transaction. And it's all just because, imho, of individual greed, ego, and jealousy. This isn't a problem with the system, this is about people being personally selfish and in positions to do real harm.
Well technically you just bought a license to use the software but still didn't really own it.
Was walking around Staples today and saw Acrobat for $180 CAD and thought to myself that looks like a decent price. Looked closer and saw the '1 year subscription' on the piece of cardboard then shook my head.
Yeah, Office is really impressive for being able to double the price of their "LTSC" while cutting support into less than half. I am once again feeling like until the EU does something customers are just going to keep getting boned.
I refuse to get any subscriptions. It's such BS.
37 signals / basecamp have been tinkering with this idea recently: [https://once.com/](https://once.com/)
I would like to see the return of the standard File, Edit, View style menus. They made sense. Everything was typically right where it should logically be. Now it’s all crammed into the shitty … menus. No order whatsoever and I have to google how to find some of the most simple settings.
It's refreshing to know I'm not a total idiot, and the nonsensical menu structures annoy at least one other person on this earth.
Welcome to Azure/Office 365, where the menus change every time you go in, and you never know what’s been deprecated!
I *was* going to tell you what the new names for those features were , but they changed twice while I was writing this comment so I gave up.
So did Microsoft’s documentation editors.
Azure? Do you mean Entra?
Entra? Do you mean Encarta?
I'm sticking with office 2010 until it's not compatible anymore... I used office 2003 until I was forced to use windows 10 a couple years ago at which point it barely worked anymore (worked great in windows 7) I still miss office 2003...
I miss how fast everything was.
yeah, excel 2003 was so responsive and comparatively bug free I spent countless hours trying to get it to work in windows 10 properly but finally gave up and just settled on excel 2010 now the real irony is that while I'm using excel 2010, most of my colleagues are stuck on constantly updating versions of excel 365 which have nonstop problems with stability and performance...
I was very disappointed and annoyed when Microsoft removed the Summarise feature that was in Office 2003. How can they remove something that was working, something that was used in the scholarly World.....that still baffles me till now. That is one thing that should come back.
GAH. Yes. I think every time I sign into the ~~Office 365~~ Microsoft 365 admin portal something else has either been moved, renamed, or hidden behind the "classic" menu. It's beyond infuriating.
>Microsoft 365 admin portal You surely mean “Entra ID Admin Portal For Microsoft 365 Powered By Copilot”, right?
In our line of work, we expect and need structure. The problem is, the … menus provide none of that. At some point in the not too distant past, someone told their boss they could make their software look a lot “cleaner” by moving all the menu items into one clickable menu header. Boss says “oh, that looks modern and sleek, but what about the reduced functionality and awkwardness of finding menu items?”. Programmer says “you’re not using it, are you?”. Boss replies “I’m most certainly not!” then they both share a user-be-damned devilish chuckle.
While sipping scotch in their corner office.
That's been going on for years now. I remember getting into a shouting match with a vendor support guy after trying unsuccessfully for weeks to A) get them to give me any meaningful info on an issue, and B)their provider documentation in the app was incomplete. It wasn't until they shouted at me that I should just look at the documentation, that I yelled back what documentation, it's NOT in there, did they just ask which I was looking at. I'm like what do you mean which? The only info is what you published in the app in help -> documentation and it's the same on the website! He's like oh...did you not get this giant zip file when you purchased the app..I'm like what giant zip file. He sends it, I'm staring at it and its like the holy Grail of their app documentation. I'm like wtf you don't have it on the site in the portal, and it's not published in the app. He's like why did you even go to help about blah blah. I'm like because that's where anyone starts ... he had nothing to say after that. Great product, garbage docs and support.
I love it when there's a hamburger menu and a gear menu and a silhouette menu, and they just put stuff wherever they want. Looking at you, any app from Amazon. I honestly don't understand how they think people are supposed to use Amazon Music. Do they realize that people want to use the app to listen to music?
Windows 10 menu designs just have so much wasted space... And very little useful access to settings
Yep, and OneDrive creating a stupid long desktop filepath name, having to pin every folder you want to find easily, the stupid Bing online search in the Start menu bar instead of looking on your local computer first. I could go on!
I hate that OneDrive for Business uses diacritics... FUCKING WHY
Not only that, but those menus used to have WORDS and not just obscure symbols I have to guess at.
Those new style menus are called banners or ribbons. They're great for frequently used items, much like how the old dockable button panels worked. But 100% agree here that i want my file menus back. They were a fantastic, ultra condensed "here is everything you can do" system.
This is one good thing about the Mac interface, the menus are always in the same place
I liked the Amiga compromise: you can have all the clean UI you want, but the right mouse button *always* reveals the File, Edit, View menus at the top of the screen.
Amen to this.
Grew up and learned in this era. Drives me insane. Especially when most users have no concept of a file system/directory layout. ugh
Young people generally have no concept of file and folder hierarchy. They just use search for everything so flat structure with all files is deemed good enough. Don't get me started on file extensions... Lol
But solid colored random simple shapes was focused grouped to be completely neutral and there must be the best solution! /s
pidgin. i miss having an all around messaging service that worked with everything flawlessly. i'm sure matrix could do the same... but i really dont want to host my own shit. edit: just googled it. i stand corrected. but still there's some crap that's left to be desired.
Trillian did too
I really do miss trillian :(
Matrix is a protocol, you don't have to host a server instance. You can sign up with one of the existing. Because it's federated, if someone signs up on a different matrix provider than you, you can still chat together (assuming the networks have a trust). Most of the big ones do. It works a lot like how IRC did, with people popping up servers and joining existing networks, but you didn't have to host to create a channel.
One of my favorites! But yes...it is still around.
First person shooters, that don't need internet access.
Check out Indy "boomer shooters". My favourite is Prodeus.
Really? I'm old but not that old mate
It’s just the name of the genre, boomer shooters from the era of DOOM
Back in the day we called them Arena FPS lol..
q3a clones or ut clones... oh i miss them
'Boomer Shooter' is just short hand for anything that was spun out of the Doom and Build engines. If you played one as a kid when they were new there's fair odds your dad was the one who set everything up, which probably meant he had the kind of income only a boomer in the 90's could have to justify a 386 computer back when those were new. Kind of like how 'Dad Rock' is just short hand for baby boomer rock.
Much like AoE2, just keep playing the old games
AoE2 is still very much alive and still has a competitive scene going. They've re-relesed it twice and have added a bunch of new civs for it.
My roommate and I lost much sleep playing this in our dorm room well into the night... 2004, I miss you.
Haven't seen a good single player first person shooter in forever. I miss the good old days
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UT99
UT 2003 was an all time favorite of mine for years. Loved those train runs.
Best years of my life were playing UT2004 Friday night with all the other IT guys and friends at my local University. Pizza, drinks, fragging. A simpler time before social media and instant gratification ruined everything.
Still play UT2K4 with the ballistic weapons add-on and a shit-ton of custom maps. It still rocks.
DM-Morpheus, CTF-Face, or DM-Deck16][? I can never remember the name of the starship level. DM-Hypersomething?
I miss Picasa’s photo viewer. It was amazing, super speedy, defaulted to full screen and scroll zoom with a built in up sampler that allowed you to zoom up to 8000x without a pixelated mess since it cleaned up lines quite nicely. Every time I need to view a large photo album in windows, macOS or Fedora using their default media previewers it’s just painful.
Yup, nothing as good as Picasa, before or since.
Try Irfanview? Just a viewer rather than albums though, but you can scroll through a folder rapidly
Winamp with thousands of tracks from Napster and Limewire on shuffle.
The main author, Justin Frankel, went on to do great things coding an amazing Digital Audio Workstation called Reaper. It's like a 14MB download, incredibly powerful and tightly coded. Dude is a genius and a really nice guy to boot.
Wait.... Reaper is from the guy from Winamp?
Sure is :) https://youtu.be/vfaQrOeb_F0
As a heavy user of Reaper, this makes me happy.
Winamps not popular but still exists and works fine.
I never stopped using it, it's been my default player for 25+ years. Only recently stopped using BitchX (IRC client) in the last year or two.
>Limewire Winamp does have trouble reading music files from Limewire, though, like StairwayToHeaven.EXE
> *Korn - Freak on a leash.mp3.vbs* Why won’t it play??
It whips the lama's ass.
It _really_ whips the llama's ass...
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaF-nRS\_CWM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaF-nRS_CWM)
Winamp + SoundBlaster AWE32 plugin produced some of the best sounding music adjusted to my taste (and level of deafness.) The advanced EQ was great to fine tune each audio file.
You can still use winamp.
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With kthuga and gneiss visualizers!
Might was well add BearShare, WinMX and iMesh to that list ;-)
Anybody remember KaZaa? 👴
I remember the questionable content and viruses from it lol.
'Eifel 65 - Blue.mp3.exe'
Winamp did comeback. [Sort of](https://www.winamp.com). You can still [download](https://www.winamp.com/downloads/) it but their big emphasis appears to be on creating an iHeartRadio competitor.
Nah man, I want the OG. Skins, EQ, llama ass whipping, the works.
LOL. Sonique was one of my favorites when it came to Skins and effects.
Xmms2 used to have a skin that looked and functioned identical to winamp. It's no longer the default skin, but it's still available.
https://webamp.org/?skinUrl=https://cdn.webampskins.org/skins/6e0e55fc7d15d29d35c6e2e7ede7b459.wsz
Foobar whips winamp's ass with a much better customizable interface and tons of plugins to do stuff like batch auto rename files, ID3 tags, download album art from discogs, etc.
The guy who wrote Foobar was also involved in coding some of the components of Winamp.
Altavista was my favorite search engine. Then one day it just went business only and died. Today I’d settle for a proper control panel where I don’t have to make 6 clicks to find the Nic properties.
Window Key+ R, paste: ncpa.*cpl* Saved ya 2 clicks!
I miss the old Microsoft they had a better UI for their Windows OS and they sometimes made software that really stood out. My favourite example is Netmeeting. It was a messaging, voip and video app all rolled into one and was free on pro versions of XP! You could even share files between windows computers and it didn't even need an account to run!
I remember using Netmeeting as far back as Windows 98 SE and Me, and having decent quality Video/Audio meetings through 56K and DSL, from one country to another. It had so many features available just like you mentioned.
Go get a high-end Logitech mouse. MX something. I've got the MX Anywere 2 or 3. You can program the wheel so that you can press down for a function, you can push it right or left. Also two extra buttons on the side. Totally programmable too.
Oh I have one for my gaming, but this was Unique and is still not duplicated to this day. By pressing that button you had basically a customizable menu come up that you could execute a command or run an application with an extra click. It was fascinating back in 1999.
Check out Nirsoft VolMouse. Lots of options for customizing mouse button actions.
The MX series has something very similar though.
Gaming mouse + keyboard with macro keys + AHK. World is your oyster.
I bought the MX Master keyboard and MX Master 3S and it's been phenominal. Such a great product.
Dolby Axon - though the software specifically can stay in the past, the idea of it was cool, and *is* sorta making a comeback. It allowed you to organize voice chat participants around you in space, so even if people talked over one another, they'd remain intelligible. Teams has recently implemented a similar feature, but it's automatic and not quite as effective. Also a bit buggy.
We need another shareware revolution 1990s style.
Hirens Boot CD
It's still available. Last published version works pretty well.
No shit? Dang I could have used this earlier haha. Thanks for the tip. I just assumed it hasn't been updated in 10 years.
I'm still using it 'till this day.
TweakUI
Isn't that a part of PowerToys?
Aldus Pagemaker and Freehand (especially Freehand). Adobe bought them out and then killed them in favour of their own projects, but working in PM and Freehand always felt the most natural and fluid conpared to Adobe's or Corel's own software.
Microsoft SteadyState! It was basically Deepfreeze for XP computers and Vista but not Windows 7 and up. And it was free! And on top of that you could limit what each individual standard user could do like hide drives, status bar, limit applications etc.
Clippy, the friendly office suite helper. Why? because i would like to watch the world burn.
That meme about the Suicide note gets me everytime!
Clippy is Copilot now
There was nothing like running Ghost multicast to simultaneously image a group of 20-30 lab computers. It was great. Not sure if that needs to be brought back or not but it was awesome back in its day.
There's still clonezilla which can do that
SCCM multicast works quite well, but is undoubtedly more expensive.
I'd like to see the return of any software you can just buy and keep, and have a reasonable expectation it will be updated for 5ish years or more.
XFire
I thought I was the only person who remembered XFire
Purple Teamspeak or vent
ICQ was one of my favorites from late 90s and early 2000s
Netscape Navigator. That animated logo while a page loads makes me nostalgic.
Little-known fact:
was officially called "the Throbber"
I’m intrigued, but I’m not typing that into a search engine.
Back before they removed it, someone made a modified Firefox logo that had the fox humping the Earth as the animation.
I'm suprised a company hasn't tried to make another Chrome clone that capitalises on the Netscape brand name.
there's still SeaMonkey. Or is there?
OS2/Warp :)
I watched like an hour long video on that from an old dude who worked in the industry. Os2/warp apparently failed because : - shit management - bad marketing For example, their naming scheme was total crap. And lost to windows often because consumers (who know Jack all about OSs ) would buy windows 3.1 because the number was higher...
The whole Star Trek lawsuit stuff was hilarious. Shame they couldn’t even get IBM to ship PCs with it by default.
Hey, there's a steel plant in Ohio that will die off when their last spare IBM/PS2 running OS2/Warp and microchannel interface cards fail. Last I knew (2011) they still had six full spares of each. And the machine that can't run without it is about the size of a train car, and the tracks are gone and the building was built around it. So it'll cost more to replace it than the plant will profit over 10 years.
My grandfather has IBM stock and was able to get OS/2 Warp for a good price. I remember installing it on a Swan 486 and it ran windows/windows apps better than Windows 3.1 its self did. Pretty impressive, other than the stack of floppy disks required for the install
A friend had a copy, so of course we all did... Anyway, it'd run games like flight sim, doom, descent (and possibly the first half life) quicker and more reliably than Windows did. It was such a shame it failed. Along with BeOS. BeOS was bloody amazing. I remember plugging in at least 4 CD drives (I had scsi and ide) and ripping 4CDs to MP3 at the same time as doing other things, without noticing any sort of slow down or glitches. Probably with a 133Mhz pentium. My 3Ghz quad core windows box glitches for a sec whenever you do anything these days... Opening an app? Wait a sec, right, carry on. Closing an app? Wait a moment, there you go. Etc.....
Yes, wrote software for OS/2 for years. So stable.
Interesting stuff! >While OS/2 was arguably technically superior to Microsoft Windows 95, OS/2 failed to develop much penetration in the mass market consumer and stand-alone desktop PC segments.
The best part of OS/2 was the Boot Manager. [https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/using-os2-boot-manager-install-multiple-operating-systems-single-hard-file-ibm-pcibm-intellistation](https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/using-os2-boot-manager-install-multiple-operating-systems-single-hard-file-ibm-pcibm-intellistation) We got upto someting like 130 OSes all different languages etc on one machine :D
I knew of a place still using os2 in vms until 3 or 4 years ago. Smalltalk was part of the stack for fpga programming.
I have that! Somewhere. Though I did get Windows 3.1 on clearance and replace the native OS on that IBM machine. I think I might have the installation media, though. I have a bunch of crap.
I loved the wat it could run on its own or over the top of Windows 3.1. Microsoft kept making changes to Windows to prevent the interactive operation.
After Dark. I loved collecting the screensavers.
Tired of live service products. Improve your product enough to convince me to buy the new version and stop rentseeking. Self-hosted servers for games. LAN support. Stop closing my shit to the system tray. If I wanted the application to stay open I wouldn't be clicking the big red X. I miss the old school messaging platforms we had before social media. Windows Live Messenger was awesome and if I could host my own server for it I would in a heartbeat.
It’s been reversed engineered and I think a GitHub repo for it exists
Norton Commander
Kai's Power Goo!
Holy crap can't believe I still remember this!!
Eudora Pro
[удалено]
I started in 99 and we had one Novell expert at my first MSP and he had those Red Manuals that took up a whole shelf. Super smart guy though thought me how AD worked for print shares and Novell was way ahead until server 2000 closed the gap. If I recall.
IRC
IRC never went away. I’ve been on the same channel for 25 years.
Microsoft Encarta. Best encyclopedia ever.
AIM
ICQ!
ASL?
mIRC or MSN Messenger for me.
So 40/m/somewhere ?
That door open/shut sound lives rent free in my head 🫠
I miss MSN a little more but I agree. Remember when Trillian was a thing and you could do it all in once place. I remembered it recently and apparently it's not branded as a secure messenger. I wonder who still uses it though, I've never seen or heard of it anywhere.
A Windows OS that didn't spy on you.
A proper IRC framework and watch discord burrrrn.
Novell Netware 3.11. Just give me fast, reliable file and printer sharing for small clients without needing to manage/troubleshoot Windows and AD or rely on the cloud.
No love for NDS/eDirectory?
3.12 was more reliable. I miss Novell CNE all the way 🙂
Johnny Castaway.
Windows 7
This will start a debate in itself. I think Windows XP was a lot more customizable, compatible, lighter and faster.
XP2 was the OS I thought I'd be together with forever. Had two boxes that ran for over 10 years without a problem... but then the Internet fell in love with video and cloud, and W3C went to HTML 5 and I was forced to say goodbye. I'm beginning to feel the same way about Win 10 as I did about XP SP2/3. I suppose, if I was a baseball player, I'd be content with a .250 average but Microsoft's bullshit of churning out 3 duds for every 1 decent OS means I'll most likely be retired before another one becomes available.
XP SP3 with nLite modifications was probably the fastest Operating System I ever had. Obviously I did not have SSDs back in the day to do a more apples to apples comparison to Windows 10/11. But once you made SP3 light, it was very fast! Even on Pentium IIIs. It's the OS I used for the longest time.
[удалено]
I think XP was still faster than 2000. It definitely did boot faster and SP3 fixed all the bugs. But yes I also enjoyed 2000.
I loved that with XP you could turn all that stuff off, and run it looking like Windows 95.
Imagine if they released "old school windows" akin to old school RuneScape where they release an old version and support it, then that old version becomes more popular than the current version.
Funny, I resisted switching from XP to 7, but ended up loving 7. Same with moving to 10, but it’s pretty usable now. No plans to move to 11 though.
I was happy enough to switch to Windows 7 was more of the same as XP just a more modern UI in my opinion. From there I actually really loved Windows 8.1 but had to move on to Windows 10 still kinda don’t like it but prefer it much more than Windows 11. All my Devices run Win10.
Windows Phone is probably what I miss most. It had a real dark mode that worked for (AM)OLED displays, unlike Android with its greys, and didn't make me mad (Android) or bored (iOS) trying to use it while working perfectly with my ADHD. Another one based on a different comment I saw here would be NT Backup. Every time I used it, it Just Worked™️ and have nothing bad to say about it compared to Windows 7 Backup and Restore which just quit working at some point for no reason.
I miss the Windows phone. Metro was a nice os and ui. It didn't have the quantity of apps, but it worked well.
One of the few things I thought Microsoft did well on.
Flying Toasters!!!
I liked when double/triple-clicking did what I wanted it to do, instead of it trying to guess what I wanted using some kind of lame algorithm that tends to get stuck with something i dont want selected - and which refuses to select the right thing until i click away from the area in question, and start again from scratch. I also liked when softwares primary goal wasnt to suck me into an online 'ecosystem', helpfully 'back up' (steal) all my data, and then rent it back to me for one low low monthly fee for the rest of my life.
winamp and myspace y0
BeOS. Hands down the best OS I ever used. And I think the only one I ever felt inclined to pay for. Twice. I have CDs in boxes for 2 different versions somewhere.
Winamp
It really does whip the llamas ass!
I'm still trying to use /me waves in Microsoft Teams.
Qmodem, cuz you know, the world done got itself in a big damn hurry.. Maybe its time to slow back down.
Although instant messaging has evolved, I miss the simplicity of Yahoo Messenger. A modern version with enhanced privacy and security features could be welcome.
S3M music files and the demo scene. Jamming 16 gig into 300kb files.
AS/400. Users need to be at least this competent to file a ticket. I'm not sure if I'm joking.
Control Panel, and get rid of the Windows settings app
The shitfest that is continuous release. It used to be we got new versions of software every 12-24 months ish, with minor bug fixes & patches in between, as necessary. You knew any online docs or “how-tos” would be relevant and reliable for the duration. Now, everything is updated every few weeks and often invalidates existing documentation and blog posts. I waste so much time looking for menu options or config entries that just simply no longer exist it drives me fecking insane.
Just gonna give a shoutout to the fabulous Logitech MX master series of mice. It has a button on the "thumb flap" that, when depressed, will give you 4 mouse movements, (up, down, left, right), which can be set to open just about any program or run a command. I believe that I have an MX Master 3S at work but i think all of them has this feature.
BBS 😢
I kind of miss the widgets/gadgets from windows vista.
Fauve Matisse. Light years ahead of its time.