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| |_| \_\ |___| |_| |
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| . s o . |
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|__________________________|
/____________________________\
/______________________________\
» dig up a name « search the catacombs
» wander by decade · the most mourned · dead internet statistics · the wake · visitors log
rest in peace, signed off
:: the digital graveyard ::
« back to all categories · 1155 graves in this section, sorted newest first
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1991-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Publisher 📖 1991 - 2026 microsoft's cheap desktop-publishing app for anyone who was not a designer. it shipped alongside word and excel in office starting 1991, taught a generation of school computer labs how to lay out a bulletin without opening a real page-layout tool, and got quietly retired on 13 october 2026 when micr |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Struckd 📖 2016 - 2026 two founders in zurich shipped a phone app in july 2016 that let you assemble a 3d game by dragging pieces around, with no code anywhere in it. by april 2021 people had made over a million games on it and the user base was somewhere around six million, grown without paid marketing. unity bought the |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
TV Time 📖 2012 - 2026 tv time started as tvshow time, a paris startup that shipped a tv-episode tracking app around 2012. an american company called whipclip acquired it in december 2016 and rebranded the whole product to tv time in may 2017. it grew to over twenty million registered users and became the biggest tv-track |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Microsoft SharePoint Designer 📖 2006 - 2026 frontpage died in 2006 and left two children. expression web took the general web design work and died young. this one took sharepoint, and it survived because it was the only way to build a workflow without opening visual studio: you picked a condition and an action, and it published to the list. m |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Microsoft 3D Viewer 📖 2016 - 2026 3d viewer arrived in the windows store on 11 march 2016 under the name view 3d. after two renames it shipped in the box with windows 10 as the place your machine opened a 3d model. it was one leg of the creators update program built around paint 3d and remix 3d, and it outlived every other part of t |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Tenor API 📖 2015 - 2026 the tenor api was the gif search endpoint that powered the discord picker, the whatsapp gif tab and a long bench of other chat clients. it grew out of riffsy, the gif keyboard startup founded in february 2014. google bought tenor in march 2018. on january 13, 2026 google announced the public api wou |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Fornjot 📖 2020 - 2026 hanno braun spent almost six years alone on a boundary-representation cad kernel, funded by github sponsors who mostly gave him eight dollars a month. forty-five releases and never a 1.0. he quit on 19 june 2026 and posted a list of his own mistakes instead of a thank-you note, naming the biggest on |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Samsung Max VPN 📖 2018 - 2026 samsung max was the data-saving vpn samsung shipped on galaxy phones from 2018 onward, born from the corpse of opera max after opera killed its data-saver in 2017. samsung bought the discontinued service, rewrapped it in a galaxy ui, and let it sit on the play store for eight years with somewhere ov |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Sway 📖 2014 - 2026 dormant sway was microsoft's bet that the future of presentations was a single scrolling web page instead of a slide deck. the bet did not win. it sat in the office 365 launcher for eleven years while everyone kept opening powerpoint. the "create new" entry was removed from the copilot create tab in march 2 |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
StatHat 📖 2011 - 2026 patrick crosby was okcupid's cto when he started stathat in 2011, a service that took a number out of your code and drew you a graph of it. the go team blogged about it that december, because running go in production was still rare enough to be news. it lasted fifteen years. on 4 march 2026 it gave |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Lens 📖 2014 - 2026 microsoft lens was the office team's document scanner. it started as office lens on march 17 2014 for windows phone, then expanded to ios and android on april 2 2015. it cropped and de-skewed whiteboards and printed pages, ran OCR, exported to word, pdf, onenote or onedrive. it was free and one of t |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
ArcMap 📖 1999 - 2026 on 1 march 2026 esri switched off the application that had been the default way to look at a map on a work computer since the last week of 1999. it arrived with arcinfo 8 to replace a command line and left on a schedule esri had published five years ahead, having run on every windows from 98 to 11. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2024-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Panels (MKBHD) 📖 2024 - 2025 panels was marques brownlee's paid wallpaper subscription. it launched in september 2024 at $11.99 a month or $49.99 a year, hit number one in the ios and google play photos categories on launch week, and then spent the next fourteen months failing to find a sustaining audience. brownlee announced t |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1982-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
HP-UX 📖 1982 - 2025 forty three years is a long run for an operating system, and this one spent most of it underneath things that were not allowed to stop, bank ledgers and telephone switches. hp shipped the first version in 1982 for the series 500 and carried it across four processor architectures before parking it on |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Boxcryptor 📖 2011 - 2025 two people in augsburg wrote a tool to encrypt their own dropbox folder, then posted it in dropbox's own user forum on 5 august 2011. a thousand downloads landed in the first week and secomba gmbh followed. dropbox bought the technology in november 2022 and took it inside its business product. secom |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Google Tables 📖 2020 - 2025 tables launched in september 2020 as an area 120 experiment, a work-tracking grid that was google's answer to airtable. in 2021 it moved out of beta and was promoted to google cloud as a paid product. area 120 was largely wound down in the 2022-2023 reorganization. on september 11, 2025 google sent |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Adobe Aero 📖 2019 - 2025 adobe shipped an ar authoring app at the 2019 max keynote and quietly walked it off six years later. by 2025 the company had rotated its compute budget toward firefly and the generative side, and aero was the cost line that did not survive that math. the .real files stopped opening for everyone on t |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Mesh 📖 2021 - 2025 microsoft mesh was the post-altspacevr, post-hololens attempt to bolt avatars and shared 3d spaces onto teams. it spent its first two years as a preview, reached general availability inside microsoft teams in october 2024, and was retired on december 1 2025 as the company moved budget and headlines |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Windows 10 📖 2015 - 2025 windows 10 shipped 29 july 2015 as a free upgrade from windows 7 and windows 8.1. it was the version microsoft said would be the last, the one that would just keep updating. peak install base cleared 1.6 billion machines. mainstream support ended 14 october 2025 with the install base still in the hu |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Office 2019 📖 2018 - 2025 office 2019 shipped on 24 september 2018 as the last office release microsoft told the press was really meant to be bought once and used forever. the reality was that microsoft had already spent five years pushing the subscription model. office 2019 was the version corporate it departments installed |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Windows on Windows 📖 1993 - 2025 for thirty-two years every 32-bit windows nt release shipped a subsystem whose only job was to keep programs written for windows 3.1 running. it was called windows on windows, it ran through a process named wowexec.exe, and it was already legacy support when it arrived in july 1993. the 64-bit trans |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Apple Clips 📖 2017 - 2025 apple clips was apple's attempt to compete in the casual short-video space against snapchat in 2017 and against tiktok in the years after. it shipped on 6 april 2017 with live titles for dictated subtitles and a stack of ar sticker overlays. it never broke into the social-video conversation. apple s |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Yahoo Smart TV 📖 2008 - 2025 yahoo smart tv (originally yahoo connected tv) was the widget layer that lived on the back of internet-enabled samsung and lg and vizio and sony televisions starting ces january 2009. the platform was built on the konfabulator desktop widget engine yahoo had acquired in 2005. weather widgets, stock |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Adobe Premiere Rush 📖 2018 - 2025 adobe premiere rush launched on october 15, 2018 at the adobe max conference as a stripped-down version of premiere pro for mobile creators who were shooting on phones and posting to instagram or youtube. it ran on ios, android, mac, windows in a creative cloud subscription tier of its own. adobe pu |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Nova Launcher 📖 2011 - 2025 nova launcher was the answer for fourteen years to the question "which third-party launcher should i use on android". one developer, kevin barry, kept it shipping from ice cream sandwich in 2011 to september 2025. branch bought the code in 2022, then quietly told barry to stop working on it. when he |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Funtoo Linux 📖 2008 - 2025 daniel robbins built gentoo, resigned from it in 2004, and spent the next sixteen years on a second source-based distribution that carried the same ideas forward. he announced the end of funtoo in july 2024, changed his mind three weeks later, and kept it running as a private hobby for another year. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Kinja 📖 2004 - 2025 kinja was nick denton's attempt to make gawker media a platform rather than a set of blogs. launched april 2004 with meg hourihan from pyra labs as the technical co-founder, the original pitch was a news aggregator with personal subscription feeds. by 2013 it had pivoted into the comments-and-cms la |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Clear Linux OS 📖 2015 - 2025 on 18 july 2025 intel posted a forum thread titled "all good things come to an end" and finished a ten-year-old linux distribution the same afternoon. clear linux had spent that decade at or near the top of nearly every distribution benchmark published, because intel compiled the whole userspace wit |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
12ft.io 📖 2020 - 2025 12ft.io was one text box. you pasted a paywalled url into it and it fetched the page while identifying itself as a search crawler, because a publisher who wants to be indexed has to serve googlebot the article it hides from readers. thomas millar built it in 2020 and named it after the line about a |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Pocket 📖 2007 - 2025 pocket started on august 6 2007 as read it later, a firefox extension that nate weiner wrote so he could save articles for the train. by 2012 the rebrand to pocket had landed with venture funding from foundation capital and ios and android apps were out. mozilla bought the company on february 27 201 |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Math Solver 📖 2019 - 2025 you pointed a phone camera at a line of handwritten algebra and it returned the answer with the working underneath, free and with no account to make. microsoft had been selling a math program since the mid 2000s and giving one away since 2011, and the solver was the last shape that effort took. the |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Fakespot 📖 2016 - 2025 saoud khalifah got burned by a fake-reviewed amazon order and built a browser extension that graded any product page on its review credibility. mozilla bought it in may 2023 to bolt onto firefox as the review checker feature. two years later the whole product was retired in the same memo that killed |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Windows Maps 📖 2014 - 2025 windows maps was microsoft's built-in mapping app, released on 20 november 2014 as the unified successor to the older bing maps app and the leftover pieces of nokia's here maps for windows phone. it shipped preinstalled with windows 10 in july 2015, ran on xbox one and later xbox series consoles, an |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2022-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Intel Unison 📖 2022 - 2025 the goodbye arrived as a pop-up inside the app: "it was a great run, but intel unison is approaching its sunset at the end of june 2025." intel had bought an israeli startup for the technology and shipped it in 2022 as the phone-to-pc bridge that also worked with iphones. it died in the same stretch |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Khoros 📖 2019 - 2025 khoros was an austin texas enterprise social-customer-experience SaaS, formed by the january 2019 merger of lithium technologies and spredfast. lithium ran community-forum software for big brands since 2001. spredfast did social media management since 2008. the merged company sold a stack covering b |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Netvibes 📖 2005 - 2025 netvibes was a french personal start page. tariq krim launched it in september 2005 as an ajax-heavy dashboard where you could stack rss feeds and other widgets in one browser tab. dassault systèmes bought the company in february 2012. the consumer product coasted through the 2010s while the rss lay |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Fauna 📖 2012 - 2025 hundreds of paying customers. that is the figure fauna's own farewell letter reached for in march 2025, against the eighty thousand development teams its marketing had been claiming. the database underneath was serious work: a document store you reached as a cloud api, with its own query language an |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Tome 📖 2020 - 2025 tome was the ai presentation tool that opened in 2020 as a story-format slide builder and pivoted hard into generative ai in 2022. it reached twenty million users in eighteen months and raised eighty-one million dollars at a three-hundred-million valuation. revenue never followed. arr stayed under f |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
EA Origin 📖 2011 - 2025 i installed origin around 2011 because i wanted to play battlefield 3, and there was no other way. ttnet broadband at home, mass effect 3 on the same client a year later, then ea trying to sell me a season pass through a popup. origin ran for almost fourteen years as the launcher you opened only whe |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
DreamLab 📖 2015 - 2025 3.7 million phones downloaded it and nearly half a million people kept an account. dreamlab did its work at the only moment a smartphone is both plugged in and ignored, which is the middle of the night, and imperial college london fed it drug molecule combinations to grind through until morning. it |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Zelle (consumer app) 📖 2017 - 2025 zelle launched the standalone consumer mobile app in june 2017 for people whose bank had not yet bundled zelle into its own app. by 2025 nearly every major us bank had built zelle directly into its existing mobile banking interface. early warning services pulled the standalone app from the app store |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Visual Studio App Center 📖 2017 - 2025 app center was microsoft's attempt to package every step of mobile app delivery (build, test, distribute, analytics, push, crash reports) into one cloud service. it descended from hockeyapp, a stuttgart startup microsoft bought in december 2014. app center retired on 31 march 2025. the underlying fe |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
MathB.in 📖 2012 - 2025 susam pal built it in one night in march 2012 and ran it alone for thirteen years. what finally stopped him was moderation: every time a stranger pasted something dodgy, a regulator took his server offline and handed him a seven-day deadline. on 16 march 2025 he switched it off and published a fork- |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Windows Subsystem for Android 📖 2021 - 2025 windows subsystem for android was microsoft's attempt to let a windows 11 pc run android apps, the way a mac can now run iphone apps. it shipped in 2021 leaning on amazon's appstore instead of google play, which meant a lot of the apps people actually wanted were missing. barely anyone used it, and |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Create React App 📖 2016 - 2025 a hundred and three thousand stars, twenty-six thousand forks and two thousand four hundred open issues, all of it still sitting on github today. the react team deprecated its own starter kit on 14 february 2025, published one final version the next morning and has not pushed a commit since. the pac |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
ElephantSQL 📖 2013 - 2025 twenty megabytes and five connections, free, forever, with no card on file. that was tiny turtle, and for about a decade it was the fastest way to put a real postgres database behind a prototype. 84codes announced the end in february 2024 and gave everyone eleven months, which is a longer runway tha |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Meta Spark 📖 2017 - 2025 meta spark was the free desktop tool that let anyone build an augmented reality filter and publish it into instagram and facebook. it opened at f8 in april 2017, went to open beta that december, and by 2020 had more than 400,000 creators across 190 countries working in it. meta announced the end on |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Trendalyzer 📖 2005 - 2025 trendalyzer was the software that made statistics move. a foundation in stockholm built it, and a bubble chart with a time slider turned two hundred years of national income and life expectancy into something you could sit and watch happen. google bought it in march 2007 and the developers moved to |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Google Jamboard 📖 2017 - 2024 jamboard was google's swing at the conference-room hardware market, a 55-inch 4k touchscreen sold for around 5,000 dollars plus a free ios and android app for sketching together remotely. the hardware shipped to enterprises in 2017 and quietly aged out as remote work moved to miro and figjam. google |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Windows Mail and Calendar 📖 2012 - 2024 the metro-style mail and calendar apps that shipped with windows 8 in 2012. they were the default for twelve years across four windows versions. on december 31 2024 microsoft revoked their ability to send or receive mail and replaced them with new outlook. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Repod 📖 2019 - 2024 emmett harper and travis osterhaus' social podcast player, launched around november 2019. an episode-first ios app with an upvote-and-comment feed shaped closer to reddit than to apple podcasts. picked up press for the "scissors button" clip-sharing feature. never displaced the incumbent podcast app |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
InVision 📖 2011 - 2024 invision was the design tool that a lot of software teams ran their prototypes through in the middle 2010s. you uploaded screens, wired them together into something clickable, and shared a link so people could comment right on the mockup. at its peak it was valued near two billion dollars and sat at |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Delve 📖 2014 - 2024 delve was microsoft's 2014 bet that the office graph could power a facebook-style feed of the documents and people you needed to see inside office 365. it shipped on september 8 2014 as part of the office 365 enterprise rollout, with a mobile app following in january 2015. the product never caught. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Delicious Library 📖 2004 - 2024 wil shipley posted in november 2024 that amazon had shut off the feed delicious library used to look up items, and that nobody had told him. he pulled the app from the mac app store the same day and took the website down with it. the app was twenty years old and had won apple design awards in 2005 a |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2023-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Ondsel 📖 2023 - 2024 open core ventures, the fund started by gitlab's sid sijbrandij, put money and a founder behind a simple proposition in january 2023: take freecad, the open source cad program, and sell the commercial layer around it. brad collette built the company, shipped a nicer flavor of freecad called ondsel e |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2022-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Omnivore 📖 2022 - 2024 omnivore was the open-source, agpl-licensed read-later app jackson harper and hongbo wu shipped in 2022. it was free, had no ads, ran on web and ios. the read-it-later crowd took it seriously for about eighteen months, long enough to become the inheritor brand for people churning off pocket and inst |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Paint 3D 📖 2017 - 2024 microsoft paint 3d was the app microsoft put in the windows 10 start menu in april 2017 to make 3d modeling feel as normal as the classic paint program. it shipped with remix3d.com as a community library and a workflow that pushed finished models into mixed reality viewer. nobody used it for actual |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Mover 📖 2012 - 2024 mover.io was an edmonton startup founded around 2012 by eric warnke and others, building a web tool that moved files from any cloud storage provider into any other one. microsoft acquired it october 21 2019 to feed the sharepoint and onedrive migration funnel. the free consumer tier wound down throu |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Postbox 📖 2008 - 2024 postbox was a paid desktop email client written by the mozilla developers who had been running thunderbird until mozilla lost interest in it. it launched at a conference in september 2008 and spent sixteen years selling an application most of the world had stopped paying for. em client bought the co |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
WordPad 📖 1995 - 2024 wordpad was the windows accessory that ran for 29 years and did not survive windows 11 24h2. microsoft shipped it with windows 95 on 24 august 1995 as the replacement for microsoft write. it sat in start menu accessories opening rtf files and the readme.rtf bundled with shareware. microsoft announce |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Socratic 📖 2013 - 2024 socratic started in 2013 as a website where students posted math and science questions and other people answered them, then became a phone app that read a problem straight off the page and pushed back an explanation. google bought the ten-person company in march 2018. none of the original code survi |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Kaspersky (US) 📖 2005 - 2024 the russian antivirus that became one of the third-place consumer AV brands worldwide, then got kicked out of the united states specifically. the commerce department signed a 20 june 2024 order banning kaspersky sales in the us starting 20 july and banning software updates starting 29 september. rat |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Fig 📖 2020 - 2024 fig was the ide-style autocomplete for the terminal, founded 2020 at y combinator by brendan falk and team. the pitch was vscode-grade popups for command-line invocations, with flags and arg types as you typed. amazon acquired the company in august 2023. the standalone brand sunset on 1 september 20 |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Visual Studio for Mac 📖 2017 - 2024 visual studio for mac was microsoft's attempt at running its flagship ide brand on macos, built on top of the xamarin studio lineage that started life as monodevelop in 2003. it shipped to general availability in may 2017 alongside visual studio 2017. seven years later vs code had taken over the cro |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Lobe 📖 2015 - 2024 lobe was a san francisco startup founded in 2015 by mike matas and adam menges, with markus beissinger on the ml side. it built a free desktop app that let you train an image classifier by dragging a folder of pictures into a window. microsoft acquired it in september 2018 with the usual promise abo |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Mibbit 📖 2007 - 2024 mibbit was a browser irc client that gave you a real channel session over a websocket gateway without installing a desktop program. jimmy moore launched it november 2007, by july 2009 firefox 3.5 was treating irc:// urls as the mibbit handler by default. the format expanded into yahoo messenger and |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1988-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Finale 📖 1988 - 2024 finale was the music notation program phil farrand wrote for coda music software in 1988, the first tool that let you play a midi keyboard and watch the notes land on a staff. for thirty five years it was the default for engraved scores in american publishing and academia, with a reputation for doin |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Skiff 📖 2020 - 2024 skiff was the end-to-end encrypted email and docs startup two stanford students built in 2020 and launched publicly in november 2021. the pitch was a privacy-first stack you could actually use, with encrypted email at the core and encrypted docs bolted on the same crypto. by late 2023 the user base |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Newton Mail 📖 2013 - 2024 the paid consumer email app for people who wanted read receipts and snooze functions on every platform they touched. cloudmagic launched the original in 2013 and renamed it newton on 15 september 2016. the first shutdown came in september 2018. essential products bought it, ran it a year, then folde |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Cloud9 IDE 📖 2010 - 2024 cloud9 was a browser-based development environment built in amsterdam by rik arends and ruben daniels around 2010. the pitch was a real ide that ran in chrome with terminals, debugger, git, multiple language runtimes, all stored on the server side. amazon bought the company on july 14 2016 and rebui |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
CentOS Linux 📖 2004 - 2024 centos was red hat enterprise linux with the red hat taken out. same published source, same behavior, no support contract and no invoice. for fifteen years it was what you put on a server when nobody was paying for the server. red hat, which had owned the project since 2014, announced on 8 december |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
abload.de 📖 2006 - 2024 every image link on a german hardware forum between 2006 and 2024 had a decent chance of pointing here. a small team that started the site in their school and student days ran it on donations for almost eighteen years and switched off uploads in december 2023. they refused to sell it or make it paid |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Scientific Linux 📖 2004 - 2024 fermilab needed red hat enterprise linux without the red hat invoice, on thousands of machines, for experiments that outlive any support contract. so the lab rebuilt it from the published source and gave it away, and cern and desy helped keep it running. for most of two decades the data coming out o |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2023-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Apple Pay Later 📖 2023 - 2024 apple pay later was apple's first attempt to compete with affirm and klarna directly. the service was announced at wwdc 2022, opened as a US-only preview in march 2023, hit general availability in the united states in october 2023, and was killed on 17 june 2024. apple replaced the in-house product |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
OtterTune 📖 2020 - 2024 andy pavlo spent close to a decade on the idea that a database could tune itself, first as a research system at carnegie mellon and then as a company selling it against amazon rds. the service ran for three years and raised twelve million dollars. in june 2024 it was switched off and the entire staf |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Adobe Photoshop Mix 📖 2014 - 2024 adobe shipped photoshop mix in june 2014 as part of the post-touch split, a free ipad app for cutting layers out of one photo and dropping them into another. it landed on android in 2015, hung around the late 2010s as a working but unloved creative cloud companion, stopped getting updates in 2021. t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Adobe Photoshop Camera 📖 2019 - 2024 adobe announced photoshop camera at MAX 2019 as a free AI camera app powered by adobe sensei. it shipped as a public preview in late 2019, hit general availability in june 2020 with billie eilish lenses as the marketing hook, racked up 2.45 million downloads in 45 days. then it sat there. adobe ende |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Adobe Photoshop Fix 📖 2015 - 2024 photoshop fix was the retouching corner of the post-touch app split. adobe shipped it for iOS in october 2015 with face-aware liquify, healing brushes, smoothing, color controls, push to photoshop CC for the finish. android followed in 2016. it stopped getting updates in 2021, ios was delisted that |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Xamarin 📖 2011 - 2024 miguel de icaza and nat friedman had already built the same thing twice when attachmate bought novell in 2011 and cut the mono team loose, so on 16 may 2011 they started it a third time under a name they owned. the pitch was one c# codebase compiled down to a real iphone app and a real android app, |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Neofetch 📖 2015 - 2024 a bash script that did one thing: print an ascii logo of your linux distribution next to a list of what your computer was running. it existed so you could post a screenshot. dylan araps wrote it on the last day of 2015 and stopped updating it in 2020, and the repository was archived on 26 april 2024 |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1990-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Hobbes OS/2 Archive 📖 1990 - 2024 hobbes outlived the operating system it served by about two decades. it started in 1990 in a graduate computer lab at new mexico state university and turned into the place every remaining os/2 user went for drivers and for everything ibm had stopped shipping. the university announced in january 2024 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
RadioPublic 📖 2016 - 2024 prx (the boston public-radio distributor behind this american life and the moth) formed radiopublic as a public benefit corporation in may 2016 and launched the ios and android apps on 21 november 2016. jake shapiro ran it. acast acquired the company in february 2021 and ran the app for three more y |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Mint 📖 2007 - 2024 the free budgeting app that aggregated every us bank account and credit card into a single dashboard. aaron patzer launched it at techcrunch40 in 2007 and won the $50,000 prize. intuit bought it in 2009 for $170 million and ran it for fifteen years before deciding credit karma should swallow the use |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Flurry 📖 2005 - 2024 a hundred and fifty billion app sessions a month moved through a company almost nobody outside the trade could name. flurry sold mobile software before it sold measurement, and after the pinch media merger its sdk sat inside a very large share of the app store, free of charge, because the developers |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Today's Plan 📖 2014 - 2024 canberra built a training platform that worldtour teams trusted with their riders, and it still did not reach ten years old. today's plan read your ride data and periodized a season down to the individual workout, which is why bora-hansgrohe and ineos used it and why auscycling opened it to every me |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
yuzu 📖 2018 - 2024 yuzu was an open source nintendo switch emulator, released in january 2018 by the people who had already written citra for the 3ds. it ran current games on a pc and took patreon money for early access builds. by may 2023 it was the name attached to the tears of the kingdom leak. nintendo filed suit |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Citra 📖 2014 - 2024 ten years of open source work on making a nintendo 3ds run on hardware it was never written for. citra started in april 2014, grew into the reference 3ds emulator, got an android build in 2020 and reached the point where it booted the console's home menu. it was never sued and never named as a defen |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
BlueGriffon 📖 2008 - 2024 bluegriffon was daniel glazman's third attempt at the same idea: a wysiwyg web page editor built on mozilla's rendering engine, written from scratch after he walked away from nvu in 2006. it announced itself on 12 august 2008 with a paragraph tracing its own descent from netscape gold, shipped its f |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Stream (Classic) 📖 2017 - 2024 microsoft stream launched on june 20 2017 as a corporate video-sharing service for office 365 tenants. it replaced office 365 video, which itself had only shipped in 2014. for five years it was the place where the recording of the quarterly all-hands ended up and where the training department upload |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Weaveworks 📖 2014 - 2024 5 february 2024, a linkedin post from alexis richardson: weaveworks will be closing its doors and shutting down commercial operations. the company had raised $61 million, was turning over more than $10 million a year, and had a buyer who walked at the eleventh hour. it had also invented the word git |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Windows Mixed Reality 📖 2017 - 2023 windows mixed reality was microsoft's bet that VR would land on the desktop through a fleet of cheap partner headsets running on the same windows runtime as everything else. acer, dell, HP, lenovo, samsung, asus shipped HMDs starting october 2017 with the fall creators update. nobody bought them. by |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Comixology 📖 2007 - 2023 comixology launched july 2007 as an online pull-list community for comic readers. by 2010 it had pivoted into digital comics sales with the guided view per-panel reader built around the ipad screen. major media called it the itunes of comics through the early 2010s. amazon acquired it in april 2014 |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
iMacros 📖 2001 - 2023 press record, fill in the form once, and the browser would do it again every morning for the rest of its life. mathias roth wrote the first version in 2001 at iopus, a small german software house in walldorf, and it was the first macro recorder built specifically for a web browser rather than for a |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Flattr 📖 2010 - 2023 peter sunde left the pirate bay and built a button that did the opposite of what the pirate bay did. you put a small monthly budget into flattr, you clicked the button under things you liked, and at the end of the month your budget was split between everyone you had clicked. it opened to the public |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Olive AI 📖 2012 - 2023 olive ai was a US healthcare automation SaaS founded in columbus ohio in 2012 by sean lane as crosschx, a patient identity verification product. it rebranded as olive in 2017 and pitched an AI workforce for hospital revenue cycle work: claims, prior authorization, patient access, eligibility checks. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Windows MultiPoint Server 📖 2010 - 2023 a school buys one tower and six monitors instead of six towers. every station hangs off a usb hub with its own keyboard, everyone logs into a separate desktop, and the licensing works out cheaper per seat than any other windows arrangement. microsoft shipped that as a product in february 2010 and so |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Windows CE 📖 1996 - 2023 on 16 november 1996 microsoft put the word windows on a kernel that shared no code with windows, and then spent twenty-seven years selling it to people who would never look at the screen. the handheld pcs it launched on failed. pocket pc grew out of the same kernel and failed later. what survived wa |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Ad-Aware / Lavasoft 📖 1999 - 2023 ad-aware found the software installed on your machine to watch you rather than to break it, back when antivirus vendors did not consider that their department. it was free, and the routine was to run the scan and delete whatever came back. 450 million downloads later the company was sold to a fund t |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Google Optimize 📖 2016 - 2023 google's free a/b testing tool. tied to google analytics, ran as a chrome-extension visual editor where you could swap copy or layout chunks on a live site without touching the code. launched 2016, killed september 30 2023. google said its testing capabilities were not where they wanted them to be a |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
goo Map (goo地図) 📖 2000 - 2023 on 1 july 2023 ntt resonant was absorbed into ntt docomo and stopped existing. nineteen days later a help-center article gave the date its map would close, and on 27 september goo地図 went off, four days short of twenty-three years. no reason was published. what went with it was a stack of old tokyo k |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Ventrilo 📖 2002 - 2023 ventrilo was a windows voice-chat client released by flagship industries on august 3 2002. it became the default voice-chat program for world of warcraft guilds and other mmo and shooter communities through the 2000s on the back of low latency and low cpu use. the product stopped meaningful developm |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Rome Tools 📖 2020 - 2023 sebastian mckenzie had already written babel and yarn when he raised $4.5 million in may 2021 to build the one tool that would replace the entire javascript toolchain. rome shipped its rust rewrite in november 2022 and laid everyone off within months. it was declared discontinued on 1 september 2023 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
iTunes Movie Trailers 📖 1999 - 2023 apple launched trailers.apple.com in 1999 as a quicktime showcase tied to the broader push for the quicktime video player. the site became the front door for studio trailers on the web through the early 2000s. the trailer release calendar a known ritual for film fans, the quicktime download a side-e |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Hopin 📖 2019 - 2023 hopin was the purest artifact of the pandemic economy, a virtual-events platform that a sick young founder built in his flat in 2019 and that the lockdowns turned into the fastest software unicorn anyone had seen. by august 2021 it was valued at seven and three quarter billion dollars. then the offi |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Teddit 📖 2020 - 2023 reddit's api repricing killed it and the developer said so in the first paragraph of the notice. teddit was a front-end: it fetched reddit for you and handed the thread back as plain html, with the javascript and the install-our-app banner thrown away on the trip. one anonymous person hosted it and |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
RememBear 📖 2018 - 2023 dave carollo posted the goodbye on 19 july 2022 and gave the product exactly one year. most dead software gets a fortnight. remembear was tunnelbear's password manager, it was well built, and it shipped in april 2018 into a market where everybody who wanted one already had one. the company said as m |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
TweetDeck 📖 2008 - 2023 tweetdeck was the free multi-column twitter client that journalists and community managers ran in a browser tab for over a decade. iain dodsworth shipped it in july 2008. twitter bought it in may 2011 for around forty million dollars and let it sit. on july 3 2023, elon musk's company locked the fre |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Universal Analytics 📖 2012 - 2023 universal analytics was google's second analytics engine, announced in october 2012 and built around analytics.js and a user id that could follow a person across devices rather than a browser across pages. for about a decade it was the free default measurement layer of the open web, installed on a s |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
MetroHero 📖 2015 - 2023 two software engineers who rode the washington metro to work built a better dashboard than the agency that owned the trains, and ran it for seven years out of their own pockets. they switched it off on 1 july 2023, one day after wmata finally announced a performance tool of its own. the source code |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Apollo for Reddit 📖 2017 - 2023 christian selig made the best reddit client of the 2010s as a side project that turned into his only job. for almost six years apollo was the reason a lot of iphone users opened reddit at all. then in april 2023 reddit announced new api pricing and gave selig roughly thirty days to either pay or shu |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Reddit is Fun 📖 2010 - 2023 rif was the android reddit client. andrew shu (u/talklittle) shipped the first version in april 2010 and ran it as a one-developer product for thirteen years. by 2023 it had more than ten million installs and a few million monthly users. reddit announced the new paid api on april 18 2023 with prices |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Sync for Reddit 📖 2012 - 2023 sync for reddit was a single-developer android client for reddit, started by ljdawson in 2012 as a free app then expanded into paid pro tiers. it was one of the two dominant third-party reddit clients on android alongside reddit is fun, with a million-plus install base on google play. in june 2023 r |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
BaconReader 📖 2011 - 2023 reddit set the price at twenty-four cents per thousand api calls and every third-party client did the same arithmetic. baconreader was the odd one in that group, not an indie side project but a product line that a kansas city app shop sold to sprint in 2013, so a phone carrier owned a reddit client |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
PlaceIMG 📖 2013 - 2023 148,700,000 images, served from a side project a michigan web agency put up in 2013 and then mostly forgot about. you asked for a size in the url and got back a real photograph cropped to fit, so a layout could be checked before anybody had decided what would actually go in the box. it ended up in t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
bit.io 📖 2019 - 2023 fifteen thousand people and thirty thousand postgres databases, built on the idea that making a database should cost one click and no signup. databricks bought the team on 1 may 2023 and said plainly that it was buying the onboarding flow rather than the postgres. the databases went dark on 29 june, |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Adobe XD 📖 2016 - 2023 adobe XD was adobe's answer to sketch, announced as project comet at adobe MAX in october 2015 and shipped as a public beta on march 14 2016 under the 'adobe experience design CC' name. it offered vector ui design, click-through prototypes, repeat grid, plugin support. the product was bundled in cre |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Grasshopper (Google) 📖 2017 - 2023 area 120 was google's in-house incubator, and grasshopper was the one thing it made that a beginner could name. it taught javascript in puzzles small enough to finish on a bus, cost nothing, sold nothing, and passed 1.6 million installs on android alone. google announced the end in march 2023 and sw |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
GeekTools 📖 1998 - 2023 in 1998, finding out who owned a domain meant knowing which of dozens of registry servers to ask. geektools answered that from a web form by choosing the server for you, and it kept answering for twenty-five years. the farewell note says the job is finished, because every modern command line whois c |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Windows Genuine Advantage 📖 2005 - 2023 windows genuine advantage was microsoft's anti-piracy system for windows XP and vista. launched july 25 2005, the notifications tool followed on april 25 2006 and started turning pirated desktops black with a translucent "this copy of windows is not genuine" watermark in the lower right. it was rena |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
AdFly 📖 2009 - 2023 linkvertise, a rival in the same trade, bought adfly in 2022 and spent six months telling its publishers to move. adfly was the url shortener that paid: every short link opened a full-page ad with a five second timer and a skip button, and whoever made the link got half of what the advertiser paid. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
OverDrive Media Console 📖 2009 - 2023 libby killed it, and libby was built by the same people in the same building. the overdrive app carried a public library's ebook and audiobook collection onto a phone from 2010 onward and passed five million installs on android alone. its last update shipped in december 2020, thirty months before it |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Google Street View (app) 📖 2015 - 2023 google gave street view its own app on 3 september 2015, mostly so that ordinary people would contribute photo spheres to the map. for seven years that app was the only consumer route into street view's imagery pipeline. in 2021 it gained photo paths, which let you walk a road with a phone and hand |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Anchor 📖 2015 - 2023 Anchor was the podcast hosting app that promised anyone could start a show in three taps. spotify bought it in 2019 for around 150 million dollars, ran it as a brand for four more years, and quietly renamed the whole thing spotify for podcasters in march 2023. the host service still runs. the brand |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Deletionpedia 📖 2008 - 2023 deletionpedia opened in february 2008 as a wikimorgue. a bot watched english wikipedia's deletion log and kept a public copy of every article that got removed, together with the stated rationale and a link to the argument that ended it. the first version ran seven months and collected around sixty t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Snap Camera 📖 2018 - 2023 snap camera was snap inc's free desktop app for windows and macos, released in september 2018. it registered a virtual webcam on the operating system and applied snapchat ar lenses to the raw camera feed in real time before handing the filtered output to any app that could accept a webcam source. zo |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Tweetbot 📖 2011 - 2023 tapbots, a tiny two-person studio, shipped tweetbot for iphone on 14 april 2011. it cost real money in a category where every other app was free. an ipad version arrived in 2012, a mac version a few years later. tweetbot built a cult around chronological timelines, granular muting, and read-position |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Twitterrific 📖 2007 - 2023 the iconfactory shipped twitterrific for the mac on 15 january 2007, less than a year after twitter launched. it introduced the word "tweet" to describe a single post, and the bird icon that twitter eventually used for itself. the iphone version won an apple design award in 2008. the app ran for six |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Echofon 📖 2007 - 2023 echofon started as twitterfox, kazuho okui's 2007 firefox extension for browsing twitter without leaving the page. it renamed in 2009 alongside a sibling iphone app called twitterfon, and built a small loyal base on mac and ios for the next decade. the desktop side died on october 31 2012 when naan |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Windows 8 📖 2012 - 2023 microsoft shipped a tablet interface to four hundred million desktop machines that had no touch screens and took the start button off the taskbar for the first time since 1995. forty million licenses moved in the first month and us windows device sales still fell twenty-one percent against 2011. win |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
LeaveHomeSafe 📖 2020 - 2023 hong kong put a printed qr code on every restaurant door in november 2020 and told you to scan it before sitting down. by january 2022 the same app carried your vaccine pass, which meant it stopped being a diary and started being a lock. the scanning rule went on 13 december 2022, the vaccine pass r |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Dark Sky 📖 2012 - 2023 dark sky was a weather app that told you when it was about to rain in the next ten minutes. it cost three dollars and ninety-nine cents and people kept it on their home screen for nearly a decade. apple bought it in 2020 and folded the forecast into the system weather app. the standalone shut on jan |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
HTTPS Everywhere 📖 2010 - 2023 a browser extension from the electronic frontier foundation and the tor project that rewrote http links to https before the request left your machine, using a hand-maintained list of rules for tens of thousands of domains. it launched as a firefox beta on 17 june 2010, back when running a site over |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Twitterfall 📖 2009 - 2023 in february 2009 a national newspaper projected it onto the wall of its own newsroom, one month after two computer science students at the university of york put it online. twitterfall did exactly one thing: it poured live tweets down the screen for whatever search term you gave it. it outlasted eve |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Web Platform Installer 📖 2009 - 2022 standing up a windows web server in 2009 meant hunting down iis, the .net framework and a compatible sql server express from three different download pages in the correct order. webpi put the whole thing in one window with checkboxes and worked out the dependencies for you. version 5.0 in february 2 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Clara.io 📖 2013 - 2022 exocortex stopped developing clara.io in 2015 and left it running for another seven years. it was a full 3d modeler inside a browser tab with no plugin to install, and it rendered through v-ray in the cloud. the company renamed itself threekit and raised a series b on the adjacent product. the old s |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Google Web Light 📖 2015 - 2022 a google proxy that rewrote your page before it reached a phone on a slow connection. it threw out most of the weight and served what was left about four times faster over 2g, starting in indonesia in 2015 and reaching brazil and india after that. google retired it on 19 december 2022 on the grounds |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
LGTM.com 📖 2017 - 2022 github bought semmle in september 2019 for the query engine underneath lgtm.com and spent three years folding it into code scanning. the free public instance was analyzing more than 80,000 open source projects on every commit, and on 16 december 2022 all of it went: the badges, the query console, th |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
GitHub Atom 📖 2014 - 2022 atom was github's open-source text editor, themable with javascript and css the same way a web page was. then microsoft bought github, and vs code already existed under microsoft running on the same electron runtime atom had open-sourced. the math stopped working. june 2022 sunset, december 2022 arc |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Atom 📖 2014 - 2022 github announced atom on 26 february 2014 and open sourced it that may, a text editor written in javascript and css so that anyone could rewrite any part of it without leaving the language they already knew. the desktop shell it needed was spun out as electron and went on to carry slack and vs code. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Arctype 📖 2019 - 2022 clickhouse hired the team in october 2022 and the product got two months. the only surviving copy of arctype's goodbye is a screenshot somebody took of the email and put on imgur, because the letter was never posted anywhere else. the app itself kept working offline after the servers went, which is |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Heroku Free Tier 📖 2007 - 2022 for fifteen years heroku was where you pushed a side project to find out if it worked. one git push, one.herokuapp.com url, no card on file. salesforce closed the gate on november 28 2022 citing fraud and abuse. the free dyno was a hobbyist on-ramp, and turning it off made deploy-by-default cost fiv |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
COCOA 📖 2020 - 2022 forty-one million downloads, and for roughly four months of that run the android build could not deliver a single exposure notification to anybody. cocoa was japan's contact-tracing app, written first by volunteers and then adopted by the health ministry, and the defect that hollowed it out shipped |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
HotLog 📖 2001 - 2022 on 10 october 2001 a moscow company called info-stars switched on a hit counter. you pasted its code into your footer and hotlog told you how many people arrived and where from, and later how deep they went before leaving. by the volume of requests hitting its counters it was one of the five largest |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Thai Chana 📖 2020 - 2022 thailand downgraded covid to a disease under surveillance on 1 october 2022, dissolved the committee that had run the response the day before, and switched off the check-in registry that every shop in the country had been legally required to use. thai chana went live on a sunday morning in may 2020 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Bibliogram 📖 2019 - 2022 cadence made the first commit on 19 december 2019 and gave the thing away. for two and a half years bibliogram did one small job: you pasted an instagram link and read the posts with no account and no app. instagram spent those years closing every door the program used, and by july 2022 there were f |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
YouTube Go 📖 2016 - 2022 youtube go was a second youtube app, written for phones and connections that could not carry the real one. it told you the size of a video in megabytes before you agreed to download it, and it could hand a saved file to a phone sitting next to you with no network involved at all. it was announced in |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
StrawPoll.me 📖 2013 - 2022 fifty million polls went through one address between 2013 and 2022, most of them settling an argument that lasted four minutes. strawpoll.me was a form with three boxes and a bar chart, and it never asked you to make an account. fandom closed it in the first week of august 2022 and said the reason w |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Windows DVD Maker 📖 2007 - 2022 windows dvd maker was the burn-to-disc app vista shipped in 2007 to help home premium and ultimate users put their slideshows on a tv-ready dvd. windows 8 dropped it from the install image in 2012, and microsoft officially retired the product on 26 july 2022. clipchamp and the photos app video edito |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Google My Business 📖 2014 - 2022 for eight years the free dashboard where a business claimed its own google listing had a name and an icon of its own. you fixed your opening hours in it, answered the reviews, and read the panel that told you how many people had searched for you and then asked for directions. google renamed the whol |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
G Suite legacy free edition 📖 2006 - 2022 on 19 january 2022 google emailed a set of customers it had stopped accepting nine years earlier and told them the free years were over. the tier began on 28 august 2006 as google apps for your domain and let anyone put real gmail on a domain they owned at no cost. the backlash was loud enough that |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Google Kormo Jobs 📖 2018 - 2022 kormo was a blue-collar jobs marketplace from google's next billion users org. it launched in dhaka in september 2018 and expanded into jakarta in march 2019. india followed in august 2020 after the indian jobs market made room. peak reach was about 4.5 million job seekers across the three markets. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Prezi Classic 📖 2009 - 2022 prezi classic was the original flash-based presentation editor built by prezi in budapest between 2009 and 2022. peter halacsy, adam somlai-fischer and peter arvai incorporated the company on 20 may 2009, opened public beta a few months later, and grew it into the main powerpoint alternative of the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
COVID Alert 📖 2020 - 2022 six million nine hundred and forty eight thousand people downloaded it. sixty three thousand of them ever typed in the one-time key that told the app they had tested positive, which is under one percent of the installs. canada's exposure notification app ran for twenty three months on the google and |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Google Chrome Apps 📖 2010 - 2022 google spent a decade teaching web pages how to install themselves, then decided the open web could manage it without the extra layer. a chrome app ran in its own window with no address bar and could reach usb hardware, which no ordinary page was allowed to do at the time. by google's own count abou |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Google Native Client 📖 2008 - 2022 native client let a web page run compiled c and c++ at close to full speed inside a sandbox, years before anybody else managed the trick. the catch never went away. it existed in chrome and nowhere else, so building on it meant building for one browser and telling everyone else to go install it. goo |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1988-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Adobe Font Folio 📖 1988 - 2022 thirty-four years separate the two ends of this product. in november 1988 it was three hundred postscript typefaces on a 45-megabyte external drive for $9,600, sold to people who attached it to a printer. on 1 june 2022 adobe stopped selling it, because by then the same foundry library came with a c |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Adobe Presenter 📖 2006 - 2022 a startup called presedia built a powerpoint-to-flash plug-in, macromedia bought the company in january 2003, and adobe inherited the product at the end of 2005 along with everything else macromedia owned. under three owners and four names it kept doing one job, which was turning slides into narrate |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Koronavilkku 📖 2020 - 2022 a million people downloaded this on the day it opened, in a country with a population of 5.5 million. finland's institute for health and welfare built it to warn you that you had been near somebody infectious without ever learning who either of you were, and 64,000 people used it to report their own |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Apple Xsan 📖 2005 - 2022 xsan was apple's enterprise san cluster filesystem, a relabeled stornext from quantum that let multiple macs read and write to the same fibre channel volume at the same time. it shipped on 4 january 2005, ran through seven major versions, and reached its functional end on 21 april 2022 when apple di |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
macOS Server 📖 1999 - 2022 apple's standalone server app ran for twenty-three years. it started in march 1999 as mac os x server 1.0, the unix-side answer to applesharetalk and the small office file room. by the high sierra era the features anyone actually used, caching and file sharing, already shipped inside base macos. the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Findicator 📖 2009 - 2022 statistics finland closed its own service on 15 march 2022 and put the reason in writing, which almost nobody does: findicator was technically outdated and deficient in accessibility. it had run since 2009, built together with the prime minister's office, about a hundred charts in three languages co |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
YouTube Vanced 📖 2017 - 2022 youtube vanced was an unofficial youtube app for android that did the two things google charges a subscription for, removing the ads and carrying on playing after the screen went dark. it was never in the play store. you turned off a warning and installed an apk, and for five years an enormous numbe |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Instagram Hyperlapse 📖 2014 - 2022 hyperlapse was an iOS-only instagram app that turned shaky phone video into smoothed-out timelapses without any external rig. it launched in august 2014 with an in-house video stabilization algorithm and became briefly inevitable for travel and skateboarding clips. then it sat unmaintained while pho |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
ZDNet Downloads 📖 1996 - 2022 hotfiles.com came first, in 1996, calling itself the zdnet software library and promising top rated shareware picked by people you trust. the address moved to zdnet.com/swlib, then to downloads.zdnet.com, then into the cnet download.com machinery after cnet bought zdnet in 2000. the last working pag |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Chartio 📖 2010 - 2022 atlassian bought chartio on 26 february 2021 and gave it almost exactly one year. the product was a way for people who could not write sql to drag columns out of a company database and get a chart, which by the end of it meant 280,000 accounts and ten and a half million charts. none of that came acr |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Outline.com 📖 2017 - 2022 nobody ever said what happened. the reader that could strip any article down to its sentences, and incidentally walk past a great many paywalls, simply stopped answering at the end of february 2022. ten days later hacker news was asking where it had gone, and by 31 march the domain was sitting on se |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Android Things 📖 2015 - 2022 december 2020: google quietly rewrote an faq page to say that the console for its internet-of-things operating system would stop taking new projects on 5 january 2021 and would be turned off entirely a year after that, with every build configuration and factory image deleted. it had been announced a |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
BlackBerry OS 📖 1999 - 2022 the operating system that ran the phone every executive kept in a belt holster. it made email in your pocket feel like a decision instead of a toy, and then apple turned the phone into a sheet of glass and the physical keyboard became a memory. rim held on through a full qnx-based reboot that arrive |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
AngularJS 📖 2010 - 2022 angularjs was the framework google shipped to define what a single-page web app looked like. misko hevery wrote the first version at brat tech in 2009. google adopted the project, released the 1.0 in october 2010, and built a developer ecosystem around the framework's mvc pattern, two way data bindi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1990-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Asymetrix ToolBook 📖 1990 - 2021 paul allen founded asymetrix in 1984 and toolbook was its large idea, hypercard for windows, with an object-oriented scripting language called openscript that read like hypertalk and ran to over a thousand commands. it shipped in 1990 against windows 3.0 and never quite became the thing people built |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Sourcetrail 📖 2015 - 2021 eberhard gräther spent a month shipping a feature he had estimated at two hours, because first he had to work out what chrome was already doing. sourcetrail was the tool he built so that nobody else had to: a graph of your code on one side, the code itself on the other, both moving together. it sold |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Firefox Lockwise 📖 2018 - 2021 firefox lockwise was mozilla's standalone-mobile-app version of the password manager already inside firefox. it shipped as test pilot "lockbox" on 26 july 2018. mozilla renamed it lockwise in march 2019, then closed it on 13 december 2021 by folding the feature back into the main browser. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Google Toolbar 📖 2000 - 2021 google toolbar was how google moved from a website you typed into to a thing that lived inside your browser. it had a search box and a pagerank meter that webmasters obsessed over. it also added a popup blocker that briefly made internet explorer usable. then chrome arrived and the toolbar's reason |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Mesosphere DC/OS 📖 2016 - 2021 kubernetes won and this is what the losing side looked like. mesosphere raised something near $126 million to sell the idea that a datacenter should behave like one computer, and for a couple of years the biggest production clusters in the world agreed. then google's scheduler got good enough, the e |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Silverlight 📖 2007 - 2021 microsoft silverlight launched on september 5, 2007 as a browser plug-in to compete with adobe flash. it ran rich internet applications through a subset of.net inside a sandboxed runtime. it had a brief moment as the streaming back-end behind netflix instant video and the nbc olympics feeds in 2008 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
jQuery Mobile 📖 2010 - 2021 jquery's touch-optimized ui framework for mobile web apps. it shipped october 16 2010, on top of the jquery core that already powered half the web. the final stable release was 1.4.5 in october 2014. the jquery team archived it on october 7 2021 after seven years of soft deprecation. responsive boot |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
MonoDevelop 📖 2003 - 2021 monodevelop started in 2003 as a port of a windows ide to linux, so that people writing c# outside microsoft had somewhere to write it. it worked well enough that it stopped being itself. the same codebase was rebranded as xamarin studio in 2013, then rebuilt into the core of visual studio for mac a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Backup and Sync 📖 2017 - 2021 for four years there was exactly one google program that put your drive files and your photo backups under the same folder on your own disk. it shipped on 12 july 2017 to merge two clients google had been maintaining separately, and then google merged it again, this time into drive for desktop, whic |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Zeroshell 📖 2006 - 2021 two hundred thousand installations and one maintainer. fulvio ricciardi wrote a linux distribution that turned a spare pc or a raspberry pi into a router with a captive portal and a deep packet inspection firewall, all of it configured through a web page and none of it needing a shell. he shipped th |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Adobe Business Catalyst 📖 2004 - 2021 business catalyst was an australian all-in-one hosted CMS that adobe bought in '09. for the next decade it shipped as the dreamweaver-adjacent answer for small-business sites that wanted hosting and an e-commerce backend in one product. adobe announced the EOL in march '18 and gave a multi-year migr |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Adobe Prelude 📖 2012 - 2021 onlocation died because video went tapeless, and prelude shipped on 7 may 2012 to do the job tapeless footage actually created: pull the card, tag every clip before premiere ever opened it. nine years later premiere could do that unaided. adobe took prelude off its own website on 8 september 2021 an |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Adobe Brackets 📖 2014 - 2021 brackets was adobe's mit-licensed code editor for front-end web designers, written in the same web languages it edited. it shipped 1.0 in november 2014 with live-preview as the headline feature. adobe stopped contributing in march 2021 and archived the github repo on september 1 2021. vscode had alr |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Hyper-V Server 📖 2008 - 2021 on 24 august 2021 a microsoft program manager answered a forum question about whether there would be a hyper-v server 2022. the answer was no, 2019 was the last one, and that reply is the entire public record of a thirteen year old product ending. what died was a windows server core install with one |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Lightweight Portable Security 📖 2011 - 2021 the defense information systems agency stopped funding the program in 2021, no other agency volunteered to take it over, and the air force research laboratory's program office was decommissioned that august. for a decade it had handed out a free bootable linux that ran entirely in ram and left nothi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1989-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
F-PROT Antivirus 📖 1989 - 2021 eleven viruses is what version 1.13 could find at the end of 1990. two months later the number was 157 families and better than 250 variants, and the dos scanner one man wrote in reykjavík had a heuristic engine in it before the big vendors shipped theirs. friðrik skúlason gave the thing away free f |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Fitbit Coach 📖 2013 - 2021 fitstar was a video workout app from 2013 that changed the next session based on how the last one went, which in 2013 was enough to sound like the future. fitbit bought it in march 2015 and renamed it fitbit coach in the autumn of 2017 at eight dollars a month, on the theory that a company selling w |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Google Tour Builder 📖 2013 - 2021 tour builder arrived around veterans day 2013 out of google creative lab and google earth outreach, built so that someone who had served could lay their deployments on the globe and walk a family through them. you dropped places into an ordered list, attached photos and text to each one, and earth f |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
SQL Server Compact 📖 2000 - 2021 on 26 october 2000 microsoft shipped a version of sql server small enough to run on a handheld, and spent the next decade renaming it. sql server ce became sql server mobile became sql server compact, under two megabytes on disk, free to redistribute, one .sdf file per database. version 4.0 arrived |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Treasuremytext 📖 2003 - 2021 a maintenance notice went up on treasuremytext.com some time in 2020 and never came down. eight months later the same page was replaced by a goodbye that gave users until 31 december 2021 to request a copy of their own messages. the service had been taking sms since september 2003, from a liverpool |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Google Expeditions 📖 2015 - 2021 expeditions turned a cardboard viewer and a teacher's phone into a class trip to the reef or the surface of the moon. google shipped it in 2015 as part of the cheap-vr push and signed up millions of students. in 2021 it pulled the app and folded the good tours into arts and culture, where you look a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Google Poly 📖 2017 - 2021 poly opened on 1 november 2017 as a place to find a 3d model without paying for one. you browsed a library of objects, mostly low-poly and mostly cheerful, and pulled them into a unity or unreal project through an api that arrived a month later. tilt brush and blocks published straight into it, whic |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Mindspark Interactive Network 📖 1999 - 2021 iac's toolbar unit changed its name six times in twenty-two years and never once changed what it sold. the products were free cursors and avatar dolls and greeting cards, and every one of them wanted a browser bar that moved your searches to ask. antivirus vendors filed the whole catalog as potentia |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Smiley Central 📖 2002 - 2021 an emoticon pack for your email was the delivery vehicle. focus interactive shipped smiley central in 2002 as a free download that dropped a few thousand animated faces into outlook and messenger, and dropped the mywebsearch toolbar into your browser at the same time. ask jeeves paid $501 million fo |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Sawmill 📖 1998 - 2021 a one-line news post on the front page of sawmill.net, dated 17 may 2021, reads: unfortunately sawmill has gone out of business. [email protected] will continue to be monitored for any questions. five years on it is still the newest item on that page, sitting above a version announcement from febr |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Bintray 📖 2013 - 2024 gradle counted over a million git repositories on github with jcenter in their build files. jfrog announced the shutdown on 3 february 2021 and bintray went dark on 1 may, with jcenter held back as a read-only mirror the company said it would keep indefinitely. indefinitely turned out to be three ye |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Jexia 📖 2015 - 2021 four million euros arrived in 2019 and a third of the staff were gone by march 2020. jexia was a dutch backend-as-a-service, the kind of platform a small team rents instead of standing up its own database and login system. the faq announcing the end went up on 15 march 2021 and gave customers six we |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Madefire 📖 2011 - 2021 madefire spent ten years building a digital comics platform around motion books, a format that animated panel transitions and added audio cues to traditional comics. it ran the back-end for the bespoke apps of boom, archie, scout, titan, and others. on 7 april 2021 the company entered an assignment |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Yahoo SiteBuilder 📖 2003 - 2021 yahoo sitebuilder was a windows desktop application bundled free with yahoo small business hosting plans. it shipped around 2003 as a drag-and-drop site editor that pushed pages directly to a yahoo-hosted webaccount, originally built on top of the older sitebuilder for windows from the yahoo store / |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
buddybuild 📖 2015 - 2021 vancouver, 2015. a team out of microsoft and amazon built the thing every mobile developer wanted: one place that took your repository and handed back a tested build with crash reports attached to it. apple announced the purchase on 2 january 2018 and put them in the xcode engineering group. the fre |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Windows Embedded Automotive 📖 1998 - 2021 for twenty-two years there was a windows machine in the dashboard and most of the people driving it never found out. microsoft's auto pc shipped on 4 december 1998 running windows ce 2.0 and got renamed three times on its way to becoming the operating system under ford sync and under fiat's blue&me. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Ninja Counter 📖 2004 - 2021 at around two in the morning on saturday 25 january 2020, every function of ninja tools stopped at once. the cause was a hardware fault in the storage under the virtualization platform, and it was the first serious outage in the suite's sixteen years. a month later the operator published a list of e |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Ekiga 📖 2000 - 2021 ekiga, first known as gnomemeeting, was a free software voip and video calling app for the gnome desktop, built by damien sandras out of a graduation thesis around the year 2000. it spoke the open sip and h.323 protocols and shipped as the default voip client in ubuntu, which put it on a lot of linu |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Tilt Brush 📖 2016 - 2021 google bought tilt brush in '15 then shipped the htc vive's killer app the next april. for five years it was the cleanest demo of why room-scale vr might matter. in january '21 google quietly stopped updating it and dropped the code on github as open brush. the community now maintains a better versi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
auウィジェット 📖 2012 - 2021 「auウィジェットを削除いただきますようお願い致します」. please delete the au widget. that sentence is the last thing kddi ever published about a product it had been building into au android handsets since 2012, free and with nothing to sign up for, six panels that sat on the home screen and filled themselves in. it ran for e |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Tucows Downloads 📖 1993 - 2021 tucows downloads was the shareware mirror canon. founded in 1993 in flint, michigan as 'the ultimate collection of winsock software', it grew to over thirty thousand titles distributed through a worldwide network of partner mirrors. on 21 january 2021 tucows inc shut the downloads business cleanly a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Pixlr Editor 📖 2008 - 2021 ola sevandersson wrote pixlr in sweden alongside a full time job and put it online in the late summer of 2008, a photoshop-shaped image editor with layers and a clone stamp that ran in a browser tab with nothing to install. autodesk bought the suite on 19 july 2011 and sevandersson went with it. inm |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Endomondo 📖 2007 - 2020 endomondo was the run-tracker app people in europe defaulted to before strava took the gps-fitness audience worldwide. under armour paid 85 million dollars for it in 2015, kept it for five years next to mapmyrun and myfitnesspal, then announced it was closing while it kept the other two. the export |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Adobe Flash 📖 1996 - 2020 the plugin that ran the interactive web from 2000 to 2010. flash games, flash animation, flash banner ads, flash-based websites with intro animations. steve jobs wrote a letter in 2010 saying iphone would never support flash. he was right. adobe announced the end in 2017 and finally killed it on 31 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Zumi 📖 2007 - 2020 in poland's largest cities the aerial photos went down to ten centimeters a pixel, enough to make out houses and cars. onet opened zumi in april 2007 as a map of the country joined to a directory of about a million businesses and places. the last working homepage was captured on 1 december 2020, and |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Google Trusted Contacts 📖 2016 - 2020 five minutes was the whole design. somebody on your approved list asked where you were, you had five minutes to say yes or no, and if you said nothing the app answered for you. that silence clause is the only reason the thing existed, and it is the exact feature google maps location sharing does not |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Twitter Fabric 📖 2014 - 2020 fabric was twitter's bid to matter to mobile developers. it launched in october 2014 around crashlytics, the crash reporter twitter had bought the year before, and by the time google took it off twitter's hands in january 2017 it sat inside apps running on 2.5 billion active devices against twitter' |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Growl 📖 2004 - 2020 growl was a notification system for mac os x, written by christopher forsythe and a volunteer team from 2004 onward, and for most of a decade it was how a mac application told you something had happened. it had bindings in a dozen languages and support from almost every third-party app worth install |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Firefox Notes 📖 2017 - 2020 eighteen thousand seven hundred and eighty people still have this installed. mozilla switched off the sync and pulled the android app on 1 november 2020, six weeks after the announcement and three months after laying off 250 staff, then left the extension sitting on its own add-on store with a final |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Swift 3D 📖 2000 - 2020 boulder, colorado, 4 april 2000: electric rain starts shipping swift 3d at a hundred and thirty-nine dollars, and for the next five years it is how a flash designer gets a rotating three-dimensional logo onto a web page. the last press release the company ever issued went out in march 2010. its own |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Adobe PhoneGap 📖 2008 - 2020 phonegap let web developers wrap html, css and javascript in a native webview and ship it to ios and android as a real installable app. nitobi shipped the first version at iphonedevcamp in august 2008. adobe bought nitobi on 3 october 2011, contributed the core to apache cordova, and shut down its h |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Panic Coda 📖 2007 - 2020 coda was panic's all-in-one mac web-dev app, the one that bundled an editor with sftp and a terminal so the freelancer who wrote one-page html sites for clients could do everything without alt-tabbing. it shipped in april 2007, won an apple design award the same year, and quietly stopped being for s |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Adobe Fuse 📖 2014 - 2020 fuse built people out of a parts library. you chose a head and a body, dressed the result from a wardrobe, and pushed it to mixamo, which put a skeleton inside it and taught it to walk without you knowing anything about rigging. mixamo shipped it on steam in november 2013, adobe bought the company i |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Tinycards 📖 2016 - 2020 two hundred thousand decks, made by users, covering everything from spanish verbs to pokemon stats. duolingo built tinycards in 2016 as its first product that was not a language course, shipped it on ios, took thirteen months to get it onto android, and switched the whole thing off on 1 september 20 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Jing 📖 2007 - 2020 jing was the free half of camtasia. it lived as a small yellow sun stuck to the edge of your screen, and when you pulled it out you could grab a still or up to five minutes of video, which went up to screencast.com and came back as a link on your clipboard. the video was a flash file. once adobe sch |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Facebook Lasso 📖 2018 - 2020 facebook noticed teens leaving instagram for tiktok and shipped a copy in november 2018. lasso did 15-second music dances, hashtag discovery, the whole format. it never crossed 10 million downloads outside mexico. facebook killed it on july 10 2020, then launched instagram reels worldwide three week |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Tellme 📖 1999 - 2020 tellme was the answer to a question nobody asks anymore. you wanted weather or stock quotes read aloud to you by a computer, and you wanted it without paying directory assistance fees. microsoft bought it in 2007 and tried to graft it onto bing, then quietly put it down in 2012 when smartphones made |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
iBooks Author 📖 2012 - 2020 ibooks author was a free mac app for building interactive ipad textbooks with quizzes and embedded video and 3d widgets. apple launched it at a new york education event in january 2012. the eula on day one said you could only sell the output through the ibookstore. apple walked that back in two week |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Spacewalk 📖 2008 - 2020 jim whitehurst stood up at red hat summit in june 2008 and said the satellite code was going to the community. what came out of that was spacewalk, the project that patched and rebuilt whole fleets of linux machines from one web interface. red hat ran it in the open for twelve years as the free half |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Container Linux 📖 2013 - 2020 a linux distribution with no package manager, built on the premise that a server is disposable and its operating system should update itself without asking permission. coreos shipped the first release in october 2013, when docker was seven months old and nobody had settled yet on what a cluster was. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Wunderlist 📖 2010 - 2020 wunderlist was the berlin todo app that figured out how to make a list look pretty on six platforms at once. microsoft bought it in june 2015 for somewhere between 100 and 200 million dollars, then announced its retirement in 2017, then finally pulled the plug in may 2020. the team built microsoft t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Forefront Threat Management Gateway 📖 1997 - 2020 twenty three years and three names for one job: sit between an office and the internet, and decide what gets through. it arrived as microsoft proxy server on windows nt 4.0 in january 1997 and spent the whole of the 2000s as isa server before the forefront brand renamed it one last time. microsoft s |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
MSQRD 📖 2015 - 2020 msqrd was a belarusian ar-selfie app built at a 48-hour minsk hackathon in late 2015 and downloaded fifty million times inside a few months. facebook bought the whole team in march 2016 to get a face-tracking product in-house before snapchat's lens studio locked the category up. once spark ar shippe |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Yapta 📖 2007 - 2020 a fire in the pioneer square office on launch morning did not stop yapta's public beta in may 2007. the add-on kept watching an airfare after you bought the ticket, so you could claim a voucher when the price fell, and a year later it had 350,000 registered users. by 2012 the company was selling the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
IncrediMail 📖 2000 - 2020 incredimail was email for people who wanted email to be fun. it wrapped your messages in animated backgrounds and little cartoon characters that danced when mail arrived. serious computer people made fun of it and installed thunderbird instead. it ran for twenty years on the strength of everyone who |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Rapportive 📖 2010 - 2020 rapportive was a gmail extension that put a person's face and linkedin profile in your inbox the instant you typed their address. it was the first gmail plug-in to reach millions, and linkedin bought it in 2012 for around fifteen million dollars. then microsoft bought linkedin, the tool became sales |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Aurasma (HP Reveal) 📖 2011 - 2020 the augmented reality app from autonomy's cambridge office that every classroom worksheet and museum exhibit told you to download for a few years. point the camera at the marker. watch the dinosaur. hp acquired autonomy, kept aurasma running, renamed it hp reveal in 2017, then turned it off in febru |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
YouTube Doubler 📖 2007 - 2020 "thanks for all the fun, but after 12 years of good times it's time to say good bye." that line replaced youtube doubler somewhere between 12 and 14 february 2020. the site put two youtube embeds side by side and let you set a start offset on each, then handed the result a short link. the domain is |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Hudson 📖 2005 - 2020 a java continuous integration server that one engineer at sun wrote in 2005 and most of the java world ended up running. oracle inherited it along with sun and decided the name was an asset worth defending, so in january 2011 the developers voted to leave and took the code with them under a differen |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Jumpshot 📖 2010 - 2020 two friends from tulane built jumpshot in 2010 as a tool for unclogging a slow windows machine. avast bought it in 2013 and kept the name, which by 2015 meant a business selling the browsing history of avast's free antivirus users by the click. pcmag and motherboard published the mechanics on 27 jan |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Windows 7 📖 2009 - 2020 windows 7 shipped october 22 2009 as the apology for vista. it sold over 630 million licenses and held the worldwide desktop crown from 2011 through mid 2018. when microsoft pulled mainstream support in january 2015 the install base refused to move forward. extended support ended january 14 2020 and |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Security Essentials 📖 2009 - 2020 microsoft security essentials was a free antivirus microsoft released on 29 september 2009 under the codename morro. it was deliberately plain. it took no money and it never put a countdown on your desktop, which was enough to make it the most installed antivirus product in north america by march 20 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Remix 3D 📖 2016 - 2020 microsoft opened a free 3d model library in october 2016 because paint 3d was about to arrive on every windows 10 machine in the world and would need somewhere to put its output. the demand it was built for never showed up. the notice went out in july 2019, uploads were switched off a month after th |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
installCore 📖 2009 - 2020 ironsource built a wrapper that let any freeware download carry passengers. the developer got paid per install, the person at the keyboard got a next button that had already agreed to something on their behalf, and by august 2012 the thing was moving 100 million installations a month. antivirus vend |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network) 📖 1992 - 2020 forty five million pages went into the migration and microsoft redirected every one of them. msdn began in september 1992 as a quarterly cd-rom subscription with a sixteen-page tabloid newspaper in the box, went online in 1998 carrying more than 250,000 pages, and spent two decades as the place a wi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Adobe Encore 📖 2003 - 2019 encore was the DVD authoring tool inside the adobe video catalog. you finished a film in premiere, you opened encore, you laid out a menu with chapters and a music loop, you burned a disc that played on any standalone dvd player. it shipped from 2003 through CS6 in 2012, sat as installable extra con |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
BlackBerry World 📖 2009 - 2019 blackberry world was rim's app marketplace for blackberry os and later blackberry 10 devices. it launched as blackberry app world on april 1 2009, it rebranded to blackberry world on january 21 2013 with the bb10 release. the store closed to new downloads on december 31 2019, the residual login serv |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Turbolinux 📖 1992 - 2019 turbolinux was the linux distribution built for east asian languages from the start. it began as pacific hitech in salt lake city in 1992 selling shovelware cd-roms, opened a tokyo office in 1993, then pivoted to a chinese and japanese first linux distro through the late nineties. it was the dominan |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Mozilla Thimble 📖 2012 - 2019 one and a half million projects had to move house. thimble was mozilla's teaching editor, markup on the left and the finished page on the right, redrawing itself every time you touched a tag. mozilla gave it a full year of notice and handed the projects to glitch in december 2019. glitch stopped hos |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
X-Ray Goggles 📖 2014 - 2019 hover over anything on any page and the goggles showed you the tag holding it up. click, type over it, publish the result at a mozilla address, send the link to a friend who would believe the headline for about four seconds. mozilla foundation shipped it in 2014 for classrooms and switched it off on |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1987-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
StuffIt 📖 1987 - 2019 stuffit was the mac's .sit. born as shareware in 1987 under raymond lau, a stuyvesant high school student in queens. aladdin systems took it commercial. allume then smith micro inherited it through the 2000s, until smith micro announced end of life in december 2019. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Chainer 📖 2015 - 2019 chainer came out of a tokyo company in june 2015 with an idea nobody else had shipped: build the computation graph while the code runs, instead of describing the whole network first and handing it to a compiler. every framework anyone uses today works that way now. on 5 december 2019 preferred netwo |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Message Analyzer 📖 2013 - 2019 the retirement notice is still sitting on microsoft's own documentation site and it is unusually blunt. message analyzer was retired on 25 november 2019, the download packages came off microsoft.com the same day, and the notice states that no microsoft replacement is in development and that anyone w |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Mozilla Lightbeam 📖 2011 - 2019 the firefox extension that drew a constellation of every third-party tracker following you across the web. atul varma built it in 2011 as an experiment named collusion. mozilla adopted it, ford foundation funded it, it was renamed lightbeam in 2013. mozilla removed it from the addon store in october |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
RawGit 📖 2013 - 2019 4.2 billion requests in its final month, run by one person who had a handful of minutes a week for it. rawgit let you point a script tag straight at a file in a github repo and get back the right content type, which is why it ended up pasted into a decade of tutorials and answers. ryan grove sunset |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Mobango 📖 2006 - 2019 mobango was a uk-registered mobile content portal that ran out of london from 2006. you uploaded ringtones and wallpapers and small java games through a wap browser, and the same account worked from a pc on the regular web. mauj mobile, a subsidiary of the indian people group, bought it in 2010 and |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Google Datally 📖 2017 - 2019 datally was google's android data-saver aimed at emerging markets where mobile plans were small and metered. it shipped out of the next billion users group on november 28 2017 after a five-month philippines beta as triangle. the app routed every other app's traffic through a local vpn so it could me |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Apple Dashboard 📖 2005 - 2019 dashboard was the floating widget plane that lived behind a keystroke on every mac from 2005 to 2019. apple shipped it with tiger, disabled it by default in yosemite, and finally removed it in catalina. widgets came back to macOS in sonoma four years later under a different name, doing the same job |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
iTunes 📖 2001 - 2019 itunes died on a mac, but it died for everyone who ever owned an ipod. by 2019 it had bloated into several products glued into one window. the catalina release pried it apart into separate apps. on windows the brand limped on out of inertia, then fragmented quietly in 2024. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Jaunt VR 📖 2013 - 2019 100 million dollar bet on the idea that hollywood was about to need a cinematic vr studio. arthur van hoff and others founded jaunt in september 2013. disney, sky and axel springer were among the investors. the company built the jaunt one camera, ran a 360 video distribution app, and ran out of cine |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Sony Sketch 📖 2014 - 2019 twenty-three million sketches sat on sony's servers the week the company switched the online half of the app off. the drawing tools stayed on your phone and still work, but syncing went, and so did every artist you followed. sony posted the notice on 23 april 2019 and set the date for 30 september, |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Find My Friends 📖 2011 - 2019 find my friends was apple's app for watching where your contacts were. it arrived on 12 october 2011, a few hours ahead of ios 5, and for its first four years it was a separate download you had to go and fetch from the app store. it worked on standing permission rather than check-ins, which is exact |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
TinyPic 📖 2004 - 2019 tinypic was the no-account image host you used because nothing else was simpler. you uploaded a file and copied the [img] tag straight into your forum post. photobucket bought the company in 2006 and ran the brand as a free counterpart to the paid main service. when the ad money stopped working in 2 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Google Trips 📖 2016 - 2019 google trips was a mobile app that turned the reservation emails in your gmail into a day-by-day trip itinerary, with offline maps and city guides for two hundred destinations. it launched in september 2016 and ran for just under three years before google killed the standalone app on august 5 2019 a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
MapR 📖 2009 - 2019 the warn notice came first. on 13 may 2019 john schroeder told his staff and the state of california that mapr would close and lay off 122 people by 14 june unless money arrived, and the deadline slid to 3 july while the company hunted for a buyer. hewlett packard enterprise took the technology and |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Green Recorder 📖 2017 - 2019 one person maintained it, unpaid, for two and a half years. mohammed hanny sabbagh wrote the first linux desktop recorder that could capture a wayland session, shipped fourteen releases, and then said he was no longer interested in chasing bugs through ffmpeg and gnome's screencast layer on his own |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Google Hangouts on Air 📖 2011 - 2019 hangouts on air was the thing the white house used to do president obama town halls inside a chat window. it was also the thing every solo creator used to run a free webinar with seven people and zero budget. google moved it from google+ to youtube live in september 2016 when google+ started its rea |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Back to My Mac 📖 2007 - 2019 apple shipped it with leopard in october 2007 as the feature that made two macs on two different networks behave like they were sitting on the same one. it found the other machine and punched through the router without asking you anything. apple said in august 2018 that mojave would not carry it, th |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Ambrosia Software 📖 1993 - 2019 rochester, new york, a year out of RIT, and andrew welch turned an asteroids remake he had written for the mac into a company. ambrosia sold shareware on something close to an honor system for a quarter of a century: the demo crippled nothing, it just reminded you that you had not paid, and enough p |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Amazon Storywriter 📖 2015 - 2019 amazon storywriter was a free cloud screenwriting app amazon released in 2015 as part of the amazon studios pitch pipeline. it handled the master scene formatting so writers did not have to buy final draft, and a submit button sent the screenplay directly into amazon studios' pile for consideration. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Drive.ai 📖 2015 - 2019 frisco, texas got the first self-driving passenger service in the united states that any member of the public could ride, in may 2018, and the vans were painted a deliberate orange so that nobody could fail to notice them. drive.ai came out of andrew ng's stanford lab in 2015 and raised about sevent |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
SpiderNode 📖 2016 - 2019 702 commits landed on mozilla's spidernode in the first three months of 2017 and then the graph went flat. it was node.js rebuilt on spidermonkey, the javascript engine inside firefox, using a shim that impersonated v8's api well enough for node's c++ to compile against it. the reason it existed was |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Ghostbin 📖 2013 - 2019 644,000 pastes were sitting on ghostbin at the end of 2018, which is when dustin howett told people the site would either close or change beyond recognition. it went read-only on 6 june 2019 and stopped answering altogether after late august. the code survived, renamed spectre and open-sourced so th |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1990-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Serif PagePlus 📖 1990 - 2019 serif wrote pageplus in nottingham in 1990 and sold it for under a hundred pounds, at a moment when the professional alternative cost about as much as the computer you ran it on. for most of the nineties it was how a british parish newsletter or a school prospectus actually got laid out, and serif k |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Peel Smart Remote 📖 2009 - 2019 a hundred and twenty million registered users and a hundred billion remote commands, and almost nobody chose to install it. peel came preloaded on samsung and htc phones with infrared blasters, first as watchon on the galaxy s4 and then under its own name from the s6 onward. by 2017 it was serving l |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
TouchDevelop 📖 2011 - 2019 microsoft research asked whether you could write a working program on a phone using only your thumbs, and then spent eight years answering yes. touchdevelop started on windows phone 7 in july 2011, moved to the browser, ended up in classrooms and on the first micro:bit editors, and was switched off |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Stringify 📖 2014 - 2019 comcast bought an automation app in 2017 and spent two years working out that it did not want to run one. stringify let you draw a whole flow across your devices and services rather than wiring up one trigger at a time, which made it the answer for anyone who had outgrown ifttt. the email went out o |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Antergos 📖 2012 - 2019 alexandre filgueira released cinnarch in may 2012 as an arch linux derivative for the cinnamon desktop, then renamed and expanded it to antergos in 2013 with a graphical installer called cnchi. it was the friendly way to get arch on a laptop for about seven years. on 21 may 2019 the maintainers post |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Excelsior JET 📖 2000 - 2019 a company in novosibirsk spent nineteen years selling the one thing java desktop developers actually wanted, which was a way to ship an application as a real executable with no runtime for the user to install first. it compiled bytecode ahead of time and carried a licensed java se runtime for the cl |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
LucyPhone 📖 2010 - 2019 six million minutes on hold by 2013, every one of them served by a robot so that a person did not have to. two brothers in richmond, virginia built it in 2010 out of a private prototype they called botlr, gave it away free because nobody would pay for it, and then found the money sitting on the othe |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Adobe Shockwave Player 📖 1995 - 2019 shockwave was the heavier cousin of flash. you needed it for certain web games and certain interactive sites that required a real 3d runtime. by 2019 nobody had it installed and adobe stopped shipping it. director, the authoring tool behind it, kept stumbling for one more year before that also went |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Hacking Team 📖 2003 - 2019 a hacker calling himself phineas fisher took over the company's twitter account on 5 july 2015 and posted a torrent of four hundred gigabytes pulled straight off the internal network. inside were the source code and the invoices of a milan firm that sold governments a way into other people's phones, |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Google Image Charts 📖 2007 - 2019 you made a chart by writing a url. size, type and the numbers themselves all went into the query string, and a google server sent back a png you could drop into an img tag or an email. it came out of a 20 percent project in zurich on 6 december 2007. google deprecated the image half of the chart api |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Google Pinyin 📖 2007 - 2019 four days after it shipped in april 2007, users found sogou's dictionary sitting inside google's one, and google china admitted it had used "non-google database resources". the input method survived that, got an android version with cloud sync in 2009, and then aged out quietly after google left the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Wallet 📖 2016 - 2019 microsoft wallet was a contactless payment app for windows 10 mobile, a phone platform that had almost nobody on it. it launched on june 21 2016 for insider builds, opened to the public on august 16, was rebranded microsoft pay in august 2017, and was retired on february 28 2019 with the rest of win |
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| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Onavo 📖 2010 - 2019 onavo was the israeli mobile analytics company that facebook bought in october 2013 and used to watch what competing apps were doing for the next five years. the consumer product was a free vpn called onavo protect that routed traffic through facebook's servers, which meant facebook could see which |
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| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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High Fidelity 📖 2013 - 2019 high fidelity was philip rosedale's second swing at the metaverse. founded 2013, $70 million across four rounds, an open-source vr stack with blockchain-tracked virtual goods, peaked at maybe a few hundred concurrent users. in january 2019 the company laid off a quarter of its staff and pivoted away |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Adobe Story 📖 2010 - 2019 adobe story was the screenwriting app inside the creative cloud subscription. fountain-style formatting in the browser plus metadata that flowed into premiere pro for scheduling and production planning. it sat in the part of cc most subscribers never opened. discontinued january 22 2019. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Mozilla Test Pilot 📖 2016 - 2019 the firefox program where mozilla shipped half-finished features to a hundred thousand opt-in users and watched what happened. it ran from may 2016 to january 22 2019. send, containers, lockbox, page shot, activity stream, color, snooze tabs, tab center, and min vid all passed through. mozilla shut |
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| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Pagedraw 📖 2016 - 2019 four points on hacker news the night it went up, and 343 five weeks later when a stranger resubmitted the same unchanged page. the notice underneath was the unusual part: jared pochtar and gabriel guimaraes told their own users that pagedraw had been the wrong product, and that you could get ninety |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Sorenson Squeeze 📖 2001 - 2019 every web video team of the flash decade had a machine in the corner running batch jobs in squeeze overnight. sorenson media shipped it on 29 october 2001 as an encoder for the web and quicktime, added a dedicated build for macromedia flash mx in march 2002, and spent the next fifteen years being th |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
CoveritLive 📖 2007 - 2018 coveritlive was the live-blogging widget every news site embedded for years to cover apple keynotes and election nights. founded in toronto in 2007 and bought by demand media in 2011, the product was sold to scribblelive in 2014 and finally shut off on december 31, 2018. when twitter and built-in cm |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Macaw 📖 2014 - 2018 invision bought the people who made macaw in january 2016 and the program stopped changing that same month. it kept its download link for almost three more years, a working app nobody was maintaining, until support ended on the last day of 2018 and the button came off the homepage. the promise was a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Cydia 📖 2008 - 2018 jay freeman, the developer known as saurik, shipped cydia in february 2008 as a graphical front end to apt for jailbroken iphones and ipod touches. through the early years it was the only way to install software on an iphone that apple had not signed off on, ringtones, system tweaks, themes, emulato |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Layar 📖 2009 - 2018 layar was the june 2009 amsterdam augmented-reality browser founded by raimo van der klein with claire boonstra and maarten lens-fitzgerald. the app let third parties publish layers of points of interest visible through a phone camera. the world economic forum named layar a technology pioneer for 20 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Aviary 📖 2007 - 2018 aviary was the photo editor inside other apps. tap edit on flickr or twitter around 2014 and the surface underneath was aviary's. adobe bought the company in september 2014, folded what it could into creative cloud, then ended support on december 10, 2018. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
JRockit 📖 2000 - 2018 a java virtual machine written by students out of stockholm that was faster than sun's on server workloads, mostly by refusing to interpret anything. bea bought the company in 2002 and oracle bought bea in 2008, which meant oracle owned two jvms and then, a year later, owned java as well. the tools |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Xbox SmartGlass 📖 2012 - 2018 the second-screen app that microsoft shipped in 2012 as the answer to what your phone should do while the xbox was on. it turned an ios or android or windows phone handset into a controller for xbox 360 dashboards, a remote for netflix on the console, a text-input surface for the on-screen keyboard, |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Fine Uploader 📖 2010 - 2018 eight thousand github stars did not produce a second maintainer. andris valums wrote the original upload library in 2010, a wisconsin company called widen bought the copyright in 2012 and renamed it, and ray nicholus carried it for nearly seven years after that. by august 2018 the homepage itself wa |
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| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Quizzle 📖 2008 - 2018 one of the first american sites to hand out a credit score without charging for it, launched in 2008 out of dan gilbert's group of companies, the same group that owned quicken loans. the score was free because a person checking their credit is a person about to borrow, and the lead was worth more th |
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| RIP |
|1990-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
DragonDictate 📖 1990 - 2018 nine thousand dollars in march 1990 bought a copy of dragondictate and a headset microphone, and in return you had to talk like a machine, leaving a gap after every single word so the recognizer could find where one ended. thirty thousand words wide, and good enough that people who could not use a k |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
SuperSU 📖 2012 - 2018 every rooted android phone needed something standing between apps and the su binary, deciding which ones got to be root and which got a denial. from march 2012 that something was usually supersu, written by a dutch developer who signed his work chainfire. it passed a hundred million installs on goog |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Adobe Edge Inspect 📖 2012 - 2018 adobe edge inspect was a desktop and mobile pair that let a web designer push the same url to a phone, a tablet, and a laptop at the same time and watch the layout reflow live. it shipped in september 2012 as part of the new edge creative cloud bundle, replaced an experimental tool called adobe shad |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Java Web Start 📖 2001 - 2018 java web start shipped with java 2 standard edition 1.4 in march 2001. it defined a small xml file called a .jnlp that a web page could link to. when a user clicked the link the local jvm downloaded the application bundle and ran it as a desktop app outside the browser chrome, with version-check upd |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
JavaFX 📖 2008 - 2018 javafx shipped as javafx 1.0 in december 2008 under sun microsystems, with its own javafx script language and a promise to make rich java client apps competitive with flash and silverlight. oracle inherited it in the 2010 sun acquisition, killed the script language for the 2.0 release, and finally p |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
OpenLava 📖 2011 - 2018 ibm's lawyers won. on 18 september 2018 a us court handed ibm a permanent injunction against teraproc, and a free job scheduler that research sites had been running since 2011 stopped being something anyone could legally ship. the source had already come down two years earlier under a dmca notice. t |
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| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Phase One Media Pro 📖 2011 - 2018 on 30 august 2018 phase one stopped selling media pro and pointed everybody at capture one instead. the program had been a mac shareware gallery called iview in the late nineties, then iview mediapro out of london, then microsoft expression media, then media pro. three owners in twelve years, and ea |
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| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Moves 📖 2013 - 2018 moves tracked your whole day without asking you to wear anything or press a start button. protogeo built it in helsinki, then facebook bought the team in 2014 and let the app coast. four years later it went off quietly with two other unloved apps, and the collected data had ninety days to disappear. |
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| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
StumbleUpon 📖 2002 - 2018 you installed the browser toolbar. you set up a few interests. you clicked the stumble button. you got taken to a web page somebody else had liked, matched roughly to your interests. you clicked stumble again, and got another. for a stretch in the late 2000s this was how a lot of people found new si |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Smyte 📖 2014 - 2018 twitter announced the acquisition at six in the morning pacific time on 21 june 2018 and smyte's api stopped answering roughly thirty minutes later. the service was screening fraud and abuse for npm and gofundme among others, several of them on multi-year contracts, and nobody had been warned. twitt |
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| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Appcanary 📖 2015 - 2018 github shipped free security alerts for vulnerable dependencies in november 2017, and seven weeks later it hired the two people who had been selling that as a product. appcanary kept an agent on your servers, read the package list, and told you when something on it became a published vulnerability. |
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| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Docker Cloud 📖 2016 - 2018 sixty days of notice was the whole story here. docker announced on 20 march 2018 that the cluster and application management services in docker cloud would stop on 21 may, and everyone running production workloads on it had two months to find somewhere else. the product had launched in march 2016 on |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Storify 📖 2010 - 2018 storify was the way a newsroom turned a twitter thread into something a reader could scroll. every embed depended on a service that adobe eventually owned, then closed, taking every story with it. journalism schools spent the early 2010s teaching it as a verb and the late 2010s sending students to w |
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| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Gemnasium 📖 2011 - 2018 github shipped free security alerts for dependencies at the end of 2017 and gemnasium's churn doubled within months, because nearly all of its paying customers were github users. the french team had been watching more than 600,000 projects for 20,000 developers, mailing them whenever something in a |
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| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Polymer 📖 2013 - 2018 polymer was google's bet that the browser's native web-components spec would eat half of what react was doing. you wrote custom html elements with shadow dom and two-way binding, polymer wrapped the rough edges. it powered the youtube web rewrite and the 2017 google earth redesign. on 2 may 2018 the |
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| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Xmarks 📖 2006 - 2018 xmarks was the bookmark sync utility for the years when firefox, chrome, safari and internet explorer all still mattered and none of them synced with each other. it started in 2006 as the firefox extension foxmarks, hit fifteen million downloads by 2009, almost shut down in late 2010 for lack of rev |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Office Mix 📖 2014 - 2018 microsoft's startup business group built a powerpoint add-in for teachers in 2014. it added screen recording, inking, narration, and interactive polls to a slide deck and shipped lecture-style "mix" videos. the customer preview launched on may 8 2014 and never graduated to a full product. retirement |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Microsoft PowerPoint Viewer 📖 1997 - 2018 a .ppt file was useless on a machine without powerpoint on it, and microsoft's answer was a small free program that could put one on screen and print it, and nothing else. powerpoint 2003 added package for cd, which wrote the viewer onto the disc beside your slides with an autorun file, so a present |
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| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack 📖 2006 - 2018 twenty million people downloaded it in its first twelve months, by hand, one at a time, because microsoft deliberately refused to push it through windows update. it was a 26 megabyte add-in that taught office 2003 and the versions before it to read and write the x-suffixed formats that arrived with |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Kephost.com 📖 2008 - 2018 752,593 images is what archive team managed to pull off kephost.com before the end, out of a library taking nearly two thousand uploads a day. the hungarian one-click image host ran from 2008, sent its registered users a message on 22 april 2018 saying the site would close on the 27th, and closed on |
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| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Tor Messenger 📖 2015 - 2018 tor messenger was the tor project's attempt at a secure-by-default chat client. it was an instantbird fork that forced every message through tor and turned on off-the-record encryption by default. it shipped eleven beta releases over two and a half years. it never reached stable. when instantbird it |
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| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Mollom 📖 2008 - 2018 mollom read every comment before it posted and decided whether a person had written it. when it was confident it let the text through or dropped it silently, and when it was not it asked for a captcha, which meant an ordinary poster on a well behaved site could go years without seeing one. dries buy |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Excel Viewer 📖 1997 - 2018 seventy-four megabytes, and all it would do was show you a spreadsheet. nothing could be edited or saved, and a macro-enabled file would open but the macro would never run. microsoft kept the thing alive for twenty-one years so a machine with no office license could still read what somebody had mail |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Adobe LiveCycle 📖 2004 - 2018 adobe livecycle was the enterprise pdf-forms server that ran inside banks and government agencies for about a decade. adobe rebranded it to experience manager forms in 2014 and ended core support for the last release in march 2018. the brand died but the underlying engine survived under the aem name |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
EZappli (BREW) 📖 2003 - 2018 a licensing contract ran out and took the platform with it. kddi announced on 28 april 2016 that the agreement with qualcomm needed to run ez app distribution on au handsets would end on 31 march 2018, and that the service would end with it, by which point 3G users were down about 40 percent on 2013 |
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| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Firefox Marketplace 📖 2012 - 2018 on 29 march 2016 mozilla switched off payments and every platform except firefox OS, which had itself been cancelled a few months earlier. what remained ran for two more years as a store for a phone nobody was manufacturing. the closing notice went up on 28 february 2018 and the site was gone on 30 |
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| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Adobe Muse 📖 2012 - 2018 muse was adobe's bet that designers would build websites in a tool shaped like indesign. for six years it shipped indesign-style page layouts that compiled to html. designers built fixed-pixel sites nobody could maintain. adobe quit developing it in 2018. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
ALPass (알패스) 📖 2001 - 2018 estsoft gave away a windows password manager in august 2001 that filled in your korean website logins for you, back when every site wanted an account and most wanted an identity number attached to it. it stopped being a standalone download on 4 april 2012 and moved inside the company's browser toolb |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
RequestBin 📖 2011 - 2018 the oldest archived copy of requestb.in carries a donate box asking for help to "prove that we can sustainably run these kinds of public services for the community", over a footer reading copyright jeff lindsay, 2011. runscope switched the public instance off on 20 march 2018 and said ongoing abuse |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
KeepVid 📖 2006 - 2018 on 17 march 2018 the box where you pasted the link disappeared from keepvid.com and a page about copyright took its place. for twelve years the site had done one job: you gave it the address of a video on youtube or dailymotion and it handed back the file. nobody announced the change. a representati |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Yahoo Aviate 📖 2013 - 2018 aviate was an android launcher that rearranged your home screen based on context, mostly time of day and physical location. ex-googlers founded it in 2013. yahoo bought it for around $80 million on january 7, 2014, days before that year's ces keynote where marissa mayer announced the deal. the launc |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Project Tango 📖 2014 - 2018 project tango was google's first serious bet on depth-aware phones. it shipped on a peanut prototype, a yellowstone tablet, a lenovo phab 2 pro, and an asus zenfone ar. arcore arrived in 2017 with software-only tracking, and tango was over. |
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| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
PhantomJS 📖 2011 - 2018 phantomjs was a webkit browser with the window taken off, driven entirely from javascript, and for most of the 2010s it was how an automated test actually opened a web page. ariya hidayat released it in january 2011 and it became a default dependency underneath the test runners of the era. google an |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Swype 📖 2009 - 2018 swype was a touchscreen keyboard that let you type by dragging one finger across the letters of a word without lifting it. it shipped commercially in december 2009 on the samsung omnia II and became the default keyboard preloaded on millions of android phones. nuance bought it in 2011 and then stopp |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Twitter for Mac 📖 2009 - 2018 twitter for mac started as tweetie 2 for mac, written by loren brichter at atebits, the same developer who built the pull-to-refresh gesture on the original iphone tweetie. twitter acquired the tweetie codebase on april 9 2010 and rebranded the mac client as twitter for mac late that year. the last |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
SUSE Studio 📖 2009 - 2018 in july 2009 novell put a linux image builder on the open web, and for the first time you could assemble a distribution by ticking boxes in a browser and then boot the result in another tab to see whether it worked. the engine underneath was kiwi, the same tool that built suse linux enterprise 11. t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1991-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Equation Editor 📖 1991 - 2018 the equation editor shipped with word for twenty seven years and was never the most loved tool in office. you opened it to insert a square root or a summation sign and the dialog felt frozen in 1995. when researchers found a stack overflow in font parsing that anyone could exploit, microsoft did not |
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| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Parsix GNU/Linux 📖 2005 - 2018 iran got its own debian derivative on 1 february 2005, and alan baghumian kept it current for twelve years, which is longer than plenty of distributions manage with a company paying for them. parsix put the newest stable gnome on top of debian's testing branch and carried the persian support that no |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1987-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing 📖 1987 - 2018 mavis beacon teaches typing was a fictional typing tutor invented in 1987 by the software toolworks. a haitian model named renee l'esperance posed for the box for 500 dollars and never worked on the product. the brand passed through mindscape, riverdeep, encore and software mackiev hands, and the re |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Songsmith 📖 2009 - 2018 you sang into the microphone and songsmith built a backing track in a genre you picked. the january 2009 launch came with one of the most- mocked infomercials ever shipped by microsoft, and within two days people were feeding isolated vocals from bohemian rhapsody and sgt. pepper into it. the meme o |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
SecuROM 📖 1998 - 2018 securom was the sony dadc pc-game copy protection that shipped in 1998 and inherited the new-title business from safedisc and starforce in the mid 2000s. the publisher tier liked it because it enforced install-count limits and online activation, the players hated it for the same reasons. the spore l |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
StartCom / StartSSL 📖 1999 - 2018 startcom handed out ssl certificates for nothing from 1999, years before any serious authority thought that was a survivable business. it charged you to revoke one, which is how it earned. then a chinese authority bought it in secret, got caught backdating certificates it was no longer allowed to is |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Z Launcher 📖 2014 - 2018 nokia closed the sale of its handset division to microsoft in april 2014 and announced an android launcher in june. it was a real piece of software rather than a joke: six apps predicted from time of day and habit, and a search you drove by scribbling a single letter anywhere on the screen with a fi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
SurfPatrol 📖 2010 - 2018 eighty nine percent of the browsers that visited surfpatrol in 2011 came back with at least one known hole in them, and nearly half came back with more than three. positive technologies ran the page for free out of moscow from september 2010, using the vulnerability data behind its commercial scanne |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Bing Audio 📖 2011 - 2017 bing audio was the shazam-equivalent microsoft built into windows phone 7.5 and shipped from september 27 2011 onward. it was a microsoft-developed audio fingerprinting service that listened continuously rather than for a fixed window. on windows phone 8.1 it was folded into cortana's notebook. it n |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Sony Media Go 📖 2009 - 2017 sony's answer to itunes for anyone locked into the sony hardware world. it moved music and video onto the psp, the vita, the walkman, the xperia, all from one windows library. sony announced the end in december 2017 and told everyone to install music center for pc, which now only speaks to walkmans. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
CodePlex 📖 2006 - 2017 codeplex was microsoft's open-source project host. launched in beta may 2006, public june 27 2006. it ran on tfvc and mercurial first, added git later. peak usage came from asp.net plus the long tail of sharepoint and dotnet community projects. microsoft announced the sunset on march 31 2017. read-o |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Classic Shell 📖 2009 - 2017 classic shell was a free windows utility by ivo beltchev that put an old fashioned start menu back on a system that had taken one away. it launched on 29 november 2009 and became a mass download after windows 8 shipped without a start menu in 2012, reaching something near forty million downloads. be |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Filsh 📖 2007 - 2017 three million people a month pasted a video link into filsh.net and got a file back, which made a small company in the ruhr the market leader for video conversion in the german-language web. it went online on 17 july 2007 as a plain downloader and added conversion a few months later, eventually hand |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Firebug 📖 2006 - 2017 joe hewitt shipped firebug as a firefox extension in january 2006 and it changed what a web page was to work on. before it you read view-source and guessed. after it you clicked an element, saw the live document, and edited it in place while the page rearranged itself under your hands. every browser |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Word Viewer 📖 1995 - 2017 microsoft shipped a free program whose whole job was to open a word file on a machine that had not bought word. it could display a document and print it, and it could copy the text out into something else. the license said that was all you were permitted to use it for. the last version came out in 2 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Microsoft WebMatrix 📖 2011 - 2017 visual studio code came out of the same company that made this one, which is the whole story in a sentence. webmatrix shipped free on 13 january 2011 with a web server, a database engine and a one-click wordpress install folded into a single window, aimed at the person who wanted a website and did n |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Bower 📖 2012 - 2017 twitter's front-end package manager. it solved the problem of managing javascript libraries before npm decided to manage them too, then was deprecated in october 2017 when its own maintainers told everyone to use yarn or webpack instead. the github repo is still up. nobody is using it. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Theano 📖 2007 - 2017 theano came out of a university lab in montreal in 2007 and it was the first library that let you write mathematics in python and have it compiled down to the graphics card. keras started on top of it, and so did pymc. in september 2017 yoshua bengio sent a message saying major development would sto |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Java Applets 📖 1995 - 2017 applets were how the web tried to be a real application platform in the 90s. you visited a page, the gray loading rectangle appeared, sun's coffee logo spun, and a little java program ran inside your browser. the model worked technically but never worked as a security story. java 9 deprecated them i |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
YouTube Video Editor 📖 2010 - 2017 for seven years youtube kept a full editing timeline inside the website, and you did not need a program, a license or a machine that could handle video to use it. you cut your clips in a browser tab, dropped in a licensed track from youtube's own library, and published straight to the channel. it we |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
QQ Xuanfeng 📖 2009 - 2017 qq xuanfeng was tencent's download manager for windows, released in january 2009 out of an older product called super xuanfeng. it pulled files over http and ftp as well as bittorrent and the edonkey network, and its best trick was offline download, where tencent's own servers fetched a slow file fi |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Nylas Mail 📖 2015 - 2017 eighty-four dollars a year was the price of the pro tier on an open source mail client, and nylas raised that price on the last holdouts three weeks after it stopped paying anyone to build the thing. n1 launched on 5 october 2015 as an inbox you could extend the way you extend a text editor. it was |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
BillGuard 📖 2010 - 2017 sixty million dollars of charges that cardholders did not recognize, found by pooling what strangers complained about online and matching it against your own statement. billguard was a good idea with a bad business under it: nobody wants a second subscription to police the subscriptions they already |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Adobe SpeedGrade 📖 2012 - 2017 the lumetri color engine arrived at adobe with the iridas purchase in 2011, and it spent the next six years eating the application it came in with. speedgrade shipped with creative suite 6 on 7 may 2012 as the place you went to do real grading. premiere pro learned the same job in 2015, and on 22 au |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Stormpath 📖 2011 - 2017 on 6 march 2017 okta said it had acquired stormpath, and in the same announcement stormpath told its customers the api would stop answering on august 17. that is five and a half months to rip authentication out of a live application and put something else in, and okta's replacement sdks were not fin |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Word Flow Keyboard 📖 2016 - 2017 word flow was microsoft's windows phone swipe keyboard, ported to iphone in april 2016 as a microsoft garage experiment. it lived for fifteen months, never came to android, and was pulled the moment microsoft decided swiftkey was the keyboard story. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Visual SourceSafe 📖 1995 - 2017 one tree software wrote sourcesafe and microsoft bought the company in 1994, shipping visual sourcesafe 3.1 in february 1995 as the version control that came in the box with the developer tools. it worked by putting the repository on a windows file share and letting every client write into it direct |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
ProClarity 📖 1995 - 2017 boise, idaho is not where business intelligence software is supposed to come from. knosys started there in 1995, renamed itself proclarity in 2001 after the product everyone already knew it by, and sold to microsoft in april 2006. the tool was folded into performancepoint and then kept alive by a su |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Clef 📖 2013 - 2017 on 6 march 2017 clef gave itself three months to live, then quietly took one more. the login worked by holding your phone camera up to a pattern of bars animating on the screen in front of you, and it replaced the password on more than a million wordpress sites. nobody ever found the business model |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1986-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Harvard Graphics 📖 1986 - 2017 harvard graphics was the dos presentation tool that sat in every corporate slide deck before powerpoint arrived. software publishing corporation shipped the first version in 1986 as harvard presentation graphics. it held roughly seventy percent of the market by 1990. the windows port in 1991 lost th |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
ReBirth RB-338 📖 1997 - 2017 propellerhead software put two roland tb-303 bass lines and a tr-808 drum machine on screen in 1997, wired together and running on an ordinary desktop, at a moment when the real hardware was changing hands for more money than the computer. it is the first software emulation of a specific instrument |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Eureqa 📖 2009 - 2017 michael schmidt was a cornell graduate student when he pointed a genetic algorithm at motion capture data from a swinging double pendulum and it came back with the conservation law. the software behind that 2009 science paper went out as a free download in november of the same year and around eighty |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Kadira 📖 2014 - 2017 arunoda susiripala built kadira alone in colombo and it ended up watching more than five thousand meteor deployments. he announced the shutdown on 30 december 2016, then pushed the deadline twice while he handed the assets to meteor development group and put the source on github. the servers stopped |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Oculus Story Studio 📖 2014 - 2017 facebook's in-house vr animation studio. fifty people in a building making short narrative films you could only watch with a rift on your head. they shipped lost in 2015, henry in 2016 (emmy winner for outstanding original interactive program), dear angelica in early '17 (sundance premiere). jason r |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
RoboVM 📖 2013 - 2017 two acquisitions in six months is what killed it. niklas therning and henric müller built a compiler that turned java bytecode into native iphone code, xamarin bought it in october 2015, and microsoft bought xamarin four months after that. the wind-down letter went up on 15 april 2016 and paid licen |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Windows Vista 📖 2006 - 2017 windows vista released to manufacturing november 8, 2006 and shipped to consumers january 30, 2007 after five and a half years of development as longhorn. it introduced aero glass, the uac prompt, sidebar gadgets, bitlocker, and search indexing. it also demanded more ram than most pcs on store shelv |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Ubuntu Touch 📖 2013 - 2017 ubuntu touch was canonical's bet that the same operating system could run on a phone and a desktop with the same package manager underneath. mark shuttleworth announced it on january 2 2013. the ubuntu edge crowdfunding campaign raised $12.8m of a $32m goal in 2013, the biggest crowdfund to that poi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Autodesk 123D 📖 2011 - 2017 autodesk sells CAD by the seat to people whose employer signs the purchase order. 123d was the opposite of that, a free suite aimed at anyone with a 3d printer and a saturday, and for six years it was the easiest way into modeling that existed. it could turn a ring of phone photos into a mesh and sl |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Positron 📖 2016 - 2017 myk melez wanted what electron gave developers without shipping chromium to get it, so he started a runtime that would take an electron app and run it on gecko and spidermonkey instead. the electron quick start app ran on it within weeks. then tofino, the mozilla browser experiment positron existed |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
TextWrangler 📖 2003 - 2017 textwrangler was the free mac plain-text editor that people kept open in a second tab while bbedit sat in another. bare bones ran it for fourteen years on the promise that the paid product would never swallow it. when bbedit grew a free mode the promise was kept by ending textwrangler instead. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
AppGratis 📖 2009 - 2017 apple pulled appgratis off the app store on 7 april 2013, citing two review guidelines, and a french company that had just raised ten million euros lost its distribution overnight. the product was one line long: every day, one paid app, free. it limped on for four more years, switched its engineerin |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Photosynth 📖 2008 - 2017 photosynth launched on august 20 2008 from microsoft live labs as the consumer version of noah snavely's phd work on structure-from-motion at the university of washington. you uploaded 30 to 200 photos of a place, and the service handed back a navigable 3D point cloud after running bundle-adjustment |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Adobe Contribute 📖 2002 - 2017 macromedia contribute shipped on 3 december 2002 as a wysiwyg page editor built on the dreamweaver mx engine for non developers who needed to update a website without learning html. adobe inherited it in the 2005 macromedia acquisition and shipped six versions before announcing the end on 27 january |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Parse 📖 2011 - 2017 the backend you did not have to build. parse let a mobile developer skip the servers and ship the app, with data storage and push notifications handled by someone else's cloud. facebook bought it in 2013 for around 85 million dollars, then announced in 2016 it was shutting the hosted service down a |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1985-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Macromedia Director 📖 1985 - 2017 director was the authoring tool of the cd-rom decade. macromind shipped it as videoworks on the macintosh in 1985 and renamed it director two years later, with the lingo scripting language added in 1988. for the next ten years, almost every interactive cd-rom you slid into a tray was built in it. ma |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Windows Live Mail 📖 2007 - 2017 the email client microsoft shipped after they pulled outlook express from vista. lived inside the windows live essentials suite from 2007 to 2017. supported pop3 and imap mailboxes alongside the old usenet newsgroups in one window. died on january 10 2017 when microsoft ended support for the entire |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Windows Live Photo Gallery 📖 2007 - 2017 microsoft's free desktop photo organizer. bundled with vista, offered as a separate download for windows 7 and 8. the face tagging worked surprisingly well and the panorama stitcher was good for a free tool. shut down on january 10 2017 with the rest of the windows live essentials line. the tags it |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Windows Live Writer 📖 2007 - 2017 windows live writer was the desktop blog editor microsoft kept shipping for ten years. wysiwyg editor with image and table support, publishing to blogger or wordpress or live spaces or any platform with the metaweblog api. the final 2012 version stopped getting updates, scott hanselman shepherded an |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Windows Movie Maker 📖 2000 - 2017 windows movie maker shipped on millennium edition in 2000 and turned every kid with a webcam into an editor. the title-card font was a generation's first contact with typography. microsoft pulled the download in january 2017 and the video editor in the photos app inherited what was left. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Windows Essentials 📖 2009 - 2017 for about a decade the last step of setting up a windows machine was going back to microsoft to download the parts microsoft had taken out of windows. movie maker, photo gallery, live mail, writer, and the messenger that half of turkey was on. microsoft decided in 2012 that windows 8 and the store m |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Agnitum Outpost Firewall 📖 2002 - 2017 a personal firewall out of st. petersburg that spent a decade at the top of the only scoreboard that mattered, matousec's proactive security challenge, by being better than anybody else at noticing a program trying to get out of your machine through somebody else's process. yandex bought the company |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
DragThing 📖 1995 - 2018 dragthing was the dock for mac users who needed more than the dock. james thomson wrote it in 1995, kept it alive through every mac os transition, and finally stopped when apple removed 32-bit carbon support in macos catalina. version 5.9.17 in november 2016 was the last release. a rewrite would hav |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
CyanogenMod 📖 2009 - 2016 cyanogenmod was the android rom you flashed when you wanted your phone to be yours. it removed carrier bloat and ran on phones google had stopped updating. then someone tried to turn it into a company, and the company killed the project in two years. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
ClusterHQ 📖 2014 - 2016 the board met three days before christmas and voted to stop that afternoon. flocker was the piece that let a docker container keep its data when it moved to another machine, a problem every operations team agreed was real and almost none were ready to pay for. mark davis signed the notice himself an |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Remote TV 📖 2013 - 2016 the hdmi socket on this box did not carry any picture. it was there to send channel and playback commands to the blu-ray recorder sitting next to it, while the video itself came in over an analog cable and went back out to your phone at 854 by 480. kddi put it on sale on 23 february 2013 at 19,800 y |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Nitrous.io 📖 2012 - 2016 two weeks was all the notice anyone got. the announcement went up on 31 october 2016, the boxes were deleted on 14 november, and anything paid after the sixteenth came back as a refund. nitrous had raised $7.65 million to rent developers a linux machine with an editor bolted to the front of it, whic |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Fetchnotes 📖 2011 - 2016 two shutdown dates in nine months, which is more than most products get. a pair of michigan undergrads launched fetchnotes in 2011 as a notes app with no folders, only hashtags, raised eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars and sold the technology to driftt in april 2015. the new owner gave users |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Mythbuntu 📖 2007 - 2016 on 4 november 2016 thomas mashos wrote that mythbuntu was finished, and the reason was that a team of roughly ten people had become a team of two. for nine years it had been the official ubuntu flavor for turning a desktop computer into a television recorder, packaging mythtv so that ordinary people |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Mobipocket 📖 2000 - 2016 two people in paris built an ebook reader for palm pilots and psions in 2000, and invented a file format to feed it. amazon bought the company in 2005 and put that format under the kindle with a different lock on it, which is why an extension from a small french startup sat on millions of devices fo |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Visual Studio LightSwitch 📖 2011 - 2016 $299 bought a microsoft tool that promised to turn a database schema into a working business application without you writing much of anything. it was aimed at the person who had been keeping the department running on a spreadsheet, and the idea was sound enough that microsoft has rebuilt it twice si |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
PriceZombie 📖 2013 - 2016 two developers in tampa built a price tracker that did the thing camelcamelcamel deliberately would not: compare amazon's history against walmart's, newegg's and a hundred other stores in the same chart. amazon removed them from the associates program for it. the founder wrote that appeals to the as |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Vesper 📖 2013 - 2016 vesper was the notes app from q branch, the small studio john gruber set up in late 2012 with brent simmons and dave wiskus. it shipped on iphone in june 2013 to unusually warm apple-blog coverage and added a small subscription sync service in 2014. it never quite made enough money to support the te |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Sunrise Calendar 📖 2013 - 2016 sunrise calendar was the new york via paris startup that briefly turned the calendar app into something people actually liked opening. pierre valade and jeremy le van shipped it in february 2013. microsoft bought it for around one hundred million in february 2015 and turned the lights off on septemb |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Firefox OS 📖 2013 - 2016 mozilla's mobile operating system. the whole UI and apps were built in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. the pitch was: every web developer is now a mobile-app developer. launched july 2013 on the ZTE Open, a low-cost android-cheaper phone aimed at emerging markets. partners included telefónica, LG, geeksp |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
TV Guide Plus 📖 1995 - 2016 a full week of television listings, on screen, free, arriving through the blank lines at the top of a broadcast picture that were never meant to carry anything. gemstar built it into sets from sony and panasonic and half a dozen others, and paid for it with a banner ad on the guide screen. rovi turn |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Yahoo GeoPlanet 📖 2005 - 2016 yahoo geoplanet was the geographic-identifier api built around the woeid, a 32-bit number that named every country, region, town, and named place on earth. it came from a london gazetteer company gdc that yahoo acquired in 2005. flickr started using woeids for photo geotagging in august 2006. twitte |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Cobook 📖 2011 - 2016 riga built one of the better address books apple's platforms ever had, and denver bought it. cobook launched in 2011, replaced the stock contacts app for more than a million mac and iphone users, and was acquired by fullcontact in january 2014 with the whole six-person team relocating to colorado. f |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Windows Journal 📖 2002 - 2016 windows journal was the note-taking app that shipped with windows xp tablet pc edition in november 2002. it drew on the screen. it saved handwriting into a proprietary jnt file. it stayed in vista, seven, and eight. microsoft killed it in the windows 10 anniversary update because a memory-corruption |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
OpenCandy 📖 2009 - 2016 opencandy was the polite end of the bundling business. it did not hijack your browser or hide from add/remove programs, it just put one extra offer in front of you during setup and paid the developer when you took it. that was enough to get it filed as malware by most antivirus vendors, and one by o |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Blue Coat Systems 📖 1996 - 2016 it started in redmond in march 1996 as cacheflow, selling appliances that made pages load faster for internet providers. the dot-com crash took ninety seven percent of its value in five months, and it came back in august 2002 under a new name, selling boxes that watched employees instead of serving |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Google Swiffy 📖 2011 - 2016 swiffy took an adobe flash swf file and gave you back something a phone could render, which mattered because the iphone never ran flash and by 2011 that had stopped being apple's problem and become everybody else's. a google engineering intern named pieter senster started it in the summer of 2011. i |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Facebook Notify 📖 2015 - 2016 facebook released a separate ios app in november 2015 that did nothing but ping you when cnn or vogue or weather channel posted something. 70 publishers, ios-only, us-only, free. people did not want another notification source. it lasted seven months. the team folded the work into news feed and mess |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Firefox Tilt 📖 2012 - 2016 firefox 47 shipped on 7 june 2016 and the developer release notes carried one line about it: 3d view has been removed. tilt was the webgl thing that turned a page's dom into stacked glass layers you could spin with the mouse, written by victor porof as an add-on in 2011 and folded into the built-in |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
BitTorrent Sync 📖 2013 - 2016 btsync did the thing you would want it to do. two folders on two machines stayed in step over the internet, encrypted end to end, using the exact torrent-swarm plumbing that made half the file-sharing internet work. in 2016 bittorrent inc. handed the product to a spinout called resilio, took its nam |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
AppSurfer 📖 2012 - 2016 four school friends in pune spent four years trying to make android apps run without being installed first. they got funded on an indian television show by the founder of one97, rebuilt the product from scratch three times, and ran out of money once in between. at google i/o in may 2016 google annou |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
WebObjects 📖 1996 - 2016 webobjects was the apple piece of the late-nineties java web stack. next first shipped it in march 1996 for fifty thousand dollars a license, apple inherited it in the december 1996 next acquisition, and at one point the apple store and the itunes music store both ran on it. the final binary release |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Picasa 📖 2002 - 2016 the desktop photo organizer that managed every digital camera dump for a decade. you plugged in the camera and picasa sorted everything into date folders without you doing anything. google bought it in 2004, gave it away free, then added face recognition in 2008. in 2016 they killed it to push every |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
My Tracks 📖 2009 - 2016 my tracks was google's gps recorder for android, shipped in february 2009 when a phone that knew where it was still counted as news. you pressed record, and at the end of the walk it gave you a file you could keep. that second half is why engineers liked it and why it stood no chance in the fitness |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1986-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Softimage 📖 1986 - 2016 softimage was the high-end 3d animation package of the 1990s, the software behind the jurassic park dinosaurs, and then it spent twenty years being sold between companies that could not decide what it was for. daniel langlois built it in montreal in 1986 and microsoft bought it in 1994. avid took it |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
QuickTime for Windows 📖 1994 - 2016 quicktime for windows was the price you paid for installing itunes. apple shipped it in november 1994, mostly so its own.mov format would play on the windows machines that ran the rest of the world. for twenty years it was the default way to watch movie trailers from apple's site and to handle any.m |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Phorm 📖 2002 - 2016 ttnet carried phorm from 2012 under a brand called gezinti, which is how a company already driven out of british broadband ended up reporting twenty million daily users. it began in 2002 as 121media, a delaware adware firm behind a rootkit called apropos. kent ertugrul closed that revenue down and s |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Alien Blue 📖 2010 - 2016 alien blue was reddit's favorite ios client back when reddit did not have an official one. jase morrissey built it in objective-c out of melbourne. reddit bought him in 2014, kept the app running for about eighteen more months, then replaced it with an entirely new official client in april 2016. the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
OSVDB (Open Sourced Vulnerability Database) 📖 2004 - 2016 osvdb was an attempt to keep a vulnerability database outside anybody's commercial control. it was started at black hat in august 2002 and opened to the public in march 2004, and volunteers wrote the entries while commercial scanners consumed them, which is the arrangement that eventually broke it. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Dropbox Carousel 📖 2014 - 2016 carousel was dropbox's attempt to be the place your photos lived without the social-feed noise. it was nicely built, paired with an app called mailbox that dropbox also shut down on the same announcement, and ran for less than two years. the photos kept living in dropbox. the app that was supposed t |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Hypertable 📖 2008 - 2016 doug judd built hypertable at zvents as a c++ implementation of google's bigtable paper, and baidu signed on as a project sponsor in january 2009 and ran it in production. the company selling support for it took no outside funding at all, which was a deliberate choice and turned out to be the fatal |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Mailbox 📖 2013 - 2016 the iphone email app that taught a generation of people what "swipe to archive" meant. orchestra inc launched it on 7 february 2013 with a reservation queue you waited weeks to clear. dropbox bought the company a month later in a deal reported around $100 million. they ran mailbox for three years, n |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Fly Labs 📖 2012 - 2016 a former child actor who came back with a cornell math phd and taught himself ios on the side is not the standard founder story, but tim novikoff and laiyee ho built four of the best small video editors on the iphone out of new york, and apple put one of them on its best of 2014 list. three million |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Shumway 📖 2012 - 2016 flash outlived the project built to replace it. mozilla research announced shumway on 12 november 2012, written up by jet villegas: a flash virtual machine implemented in javascript, parsing swf files and drawing them onto html5 canvas, with interpreters for actionscript 1 through 3. it landed in fi |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Skitch 📖 2007 - 2016 skitch was a mac annotation tool. you took a screenshot, drew a fat red arrow on it, the public skitch.com url was already on your clipboard. plasq previewed it at macworld 2007 and shipped it properly in december 2010. evernote bought it on 18 august 2011 and killed every version except mac on 22 j |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Unity Web Player 📖 2005 - 2016 the plugin that ran 3d games inside your browser before that was a normal thing to expect. for about a decade, if a web page loaded a real unity game, you first installed the unity web player, a browser plugin that did the heavy lifting the browser itself could not. it died the way every browser plu |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Opera Mail 📖 2003 - 2016 opera mail was the email client built into the opera browser, known as M2, with one odd idea for its time. it did not want you to sort mail into folders, it wanted you to filter one big pile into views by label and sender. when opera moved to chromium in 2013 the old engine had nowhere to live, so i |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
McAfee SiteAdvisor 📖 2006 - 2016 a room of MIT engineers built robots that filled in nine hundred thousand signup forms with throwaway addresses, counted the spam that came back, and installed a hundred and forty thousand downloads inside a virtual machine to see what else came with them. the result was a colored icon beside every |
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| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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Pulse News 📖 2010 - 2015 pulse was a stanford class project that became one of the most-downloaded news apps of the early ipad era. steve jobs named it on stage at wwdc 2010 four weeks after launch. the rest was a fast acqui-hire arc. linkedin paid $90m for it in 2013 and shut down the standalone app at the end of 2015. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Word Lens 📖 2010 - 2015 word lens was the augmented reality demo that turned every iphone owner into a tourist in 2011. you pointed the camera at a spanish menu and the app replaced the spanish words with english words in place, with the same font and roughly the same layout. it ran offline. quest visual sold to google in |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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OpenFoundry 📖 2003 - 2015 the ministry of science and technology funded openfoundry on three-year cycles, and in january 2015 it decided to move the money somewhere else. that ended twelve years of taiwan's only official open source office, which had sat inside academia sinica since 2003 and answered licensing questions for |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Carrier IQ 📖 2005 - 2015 150 million handsets carried it and almost none of their owners knew the name until a connecticut android developer filmed it logging his keystrokes in november 2011. carrier iq sold operators a diagnostics agent baked into the firmware, sent the developer a cease and desist, withdrew it, survived a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Nodejitsu 📖 2010 - 2015 forever and node-http-proxy came out of this company and are still sitting in node projects today. nodejitsu was the first platform as a service for node.js, founded in new york in april 2010, back when deploying a node app meant renting a vps and learning to keep the process alive yourself. godaddy |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Topsy 📖 2007 - 2015 topsy labs spent eight years indexing every public tweet on the planet. it sold itself to apple for around two hundred and twenty-five million dollars in december 2013 and disappeared from the web on december 15, 2015 with no successor product. the firehose access was its rare asset, and apple has n |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Metaio 📖 2003 - 2015 metaio was the munich augmented-reality spinoff from the technical university of munich, founded in 2003. the company licensed an ar software development kit to brands and museums and ran a consumer ar browser called junaio. apple acquired metaio on may 28 2015 and pulled the sdk and the junaio chan |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Opera Link 📖 2008 - 2015 opera link made its desktop debut with opera 9.5 on 12 june 2008 and kept your bookmarks and speed dial identical across every copy of opera you were signed into, phone included. there was a web page at link.opera.com where you could read the same bookmarks out of somebody else's browser, which was |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Zite 📖 2010 - 2015 zite was the personalized news reader that learned what you read and adjusted what it showed you. it shipped on the ipad in march 2011, cnn bought it for around $20m five months later, flipboard bought it from cnn in march 2014 for a reported $60m, and the app went dark on december 7 2015. the team |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Adobe Edge Animate 📖 2011 - 2015 edge animate was adobe's official answer to "what do you use now that flash is going away." it shipped a preview on august 1 2011 and hit 1.0 in september 2012, with its last real build, version 2.0.3, landing in june 2014. by november 2015 adobe announced it was no longer being actively developed. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
EverythingMe 📖 2010 - 2015 thirty-five million dollars bought an android home screen that rearranged itself by the time of day and where you were standing, and never bought a way to charge anyone for it. the tel aviv company started in 2010 as doat media, spent a few years on mobile search, and landed on a launcher that guess |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1985-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Carmen Sandiego 📖 1985 - 2015 carmen sandiego started in april 1985 as broderbund's first internally developed title and ran for thirty years as a geography-and-history detective franchise across CD-ROMs and two PBS game shows, with a small string of console reissues running through the 2000s. it survived broderbund being sold t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Screenr 📖 2009 - 2015 screenr was a free browser-based screencast tool that ran on a java applet. articulate, the e-learning software company, gave it away as a lead product for its paid storyline suite. when chrome and every other browser removed java support, the applet stopped loading and the whole product had nowhere |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Crocodoc 📖 2010 - 2015 crocodoc turned a word file or a pdf into html and svg so it opened in a browser tab with no plugin and no download, which in 2010 was a thing almost nothing did properly. it came out of the wreckage of a failed annotation startup called webnotes, over one weekend. linkedin and yammer both rendered |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Windows Anytime Upgrade 📖 2006 - 2015 on windows 7 the home premium disc and the ultimate disc held the same files. the difference between the editions was a product key, and windows anytime upgrade was the shop microsoft built inside the operating system to sell you one. you paid, the machine switched on what it already had and restart |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
XULRunner 📖 2006 - 2015 mozilla stopped backing xulrunner in july 2015 and shipped the last build, 41.0.2, on 15 october. it was the mozilla platform packaged on its own, so a developer could write a desktop application in xul and javascript and run it on gecko without shipping a browser around it. songbird ran on it, and |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Amazon Music Importer 📖 2012 - 2015 amazon music importer was a small adobe air desktop application that scanned your local itunes or windows media library and pushed the mp3 and aac files up to amazon cloud player storage. it launched in 2012 as the desktop companion to the amazon cloud player web app, matching the same job google pl |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Mitro 📖 2012 - 2015 vijay pandurangan, evan jones and adam hilss built a password manager, sold themselves to twitter in july 2014, published the entire codebase on the way out and promised to keep the servers running anyway. they kept that promise for fourteen months on their own time and their own money. the shutdown |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Yahoo Pipes 📖 2007 - 2015 yahoo's 2007 visual programming tool for wiring web feeds and apis together. you opened the editor in your browser, dragged modules onto a canvas, connected outputs to inputs with virtual pipes, and got back a new feed that was the result of the pipeline. it was named after unix pipes. power users l |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Evernote Food 📖 2011 - 2015 chris o'neill took over as evernote's ceo in july 2015 and started cutting almost immediately. food was one of the first out, announced on 26 august and no longer syncing after 30 september. it had shipped at leweb in paris in december 2011, a separate iphone app for photographing what you ate and k |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Timeful 📖 2014 - 2015 nearly seven million dollars went into an iphone app that read your calendar and worked out when you were actually going to do the things on your list. a behavioral economist and an ai professor built it with a stanford phd student, and shipped it on 31 july 2014. google bought the company nine mont |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Mozilla Appmaker 📖 2013 - 2015 the tool was made of bricks and the bricks were html tags. mozilla's appmaker let somebody who could not write code assemble a working phone app in a browser and put it on a handset. it reached public beta in july 2014 and was switched off on 30 september 2015, seven weeks after the announcement, so |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Looksery 📖 2014 - 2015 looksery was a face-tracking app out of odesa that could find and reshape your face in a live camera feed, back in 2014 when phones were barely fast enough for it. it launched in october 2014 and was bought by snapchat a year later for a reported 150 million dollars, the biggest acquisition of a ukr |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
SublimeVideo 📖 2010 - 2015 on 26 january 2010 a small swiss company posted a link to a video player demo and the web spent a week arguing about it. jilion turned that demo into a hosted service that kept every customer's player updated for them, sold the company to dailymotion in december 2013, and switched the service off on |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
reQall 📖 2007 - 2015 reqall started as a phd project about human memory and turned into a voice-note service you could phone. you spoke a task, it came back transcribed and timed. later it tried to surface the right reminder at the right moment, years before your phone did that on its own without being asked. the brand |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Adobe Edge Reflow 📖 2013 - 2015 adobe edge reflow was a visual layout tool for responsive web design that let you draw media-query breakpoints on a canvas and watch the layout reflow between them. it shipped as a public preview in april 2013 inside the edge creative cloud family, never made it out of preview, and was retired in au |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Tag 📖 2009 - 2015 microsoft tag was a higher-density colored-triangle barcode that microsoft research thought could out-compete the qr code. it lost on two fronts: qr codes were already free and already worked, and tag required a microsoft-hosted resolver to decode anything. by 2013 microsoft announced a two-year win |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Google Moderator 📖 2008 - 2015 google moderator was a box you dropped a question into and a list everyone else voted on, so the best question rose instead of the loudest asker. the obama transition team ran one in december 2008 and took 4.7 million votes on 76,000 questions in a little over a week. google then left the thing alon |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Windows Media Center 📖 2002 - 2015 windows media center was microsoft's bet that the family TV needed a beige tower with a remote control, an IR blaster, and a tv tuner card from a third party. the bet did not pay off, but for thirteen years the product was inside windows on millions of laptops where nobody touched it. windows 10 rem |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1990-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Sound Recorder 📖 1990 - 2015 the small grey window with a tape-deck slider and a single red record button. it lived in every copy of windows from 3.0 through windows 7, ate sixty seconds of mic into a wav file, and existed mainly so the operating system could say it supported audio. windows 10 replaced it with voice recorder, w |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Windows Photo Viewer 📖 2001 - 2015 the double-click default for a decade and a half on every windows machine. shipped inside windows xp in 2001 as windows picture and fax viewer, renamed to windows photo viewer in windows 7, then quietly demoted in windows 10 when microsoft made the new photos uwp app the default and hid the old file |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1990-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
WinHelp 📖 1990 - 2015 before every program's manual lived on somebody's web server, it lived in a .hlp file sitting next to the executable. winhelp arrived with windows 3.0 in 1990, gave the f1 key something to do, and for fifteen years it was how software explained itself. the format let a help file load and call a dll, |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Windows Easy Transfer 📖 2007 - 2015 there was a special usb cable for this. microsoft shipped a wizard in vista that packed your documents and your account settings into an archive and unpacked them on the new machine, and it could never move a single installed program, which was the part people actually wanted. windows 8.1 cut it dow |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Adobe FormsCentral 📖 2011 - 2015 adobe formscentral was adobe's answer to jotform and wufoo, released in 2011 and shut in 2015. it lived inside acrobat xi pro as a companion form-builder and outside of it as a standalone SaaS. neither surface produced the demand adobe needed, and the service ended with a six-month notice. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
AhnLab SiteGuard (사이트가드) 📖 2008 - 2015 ahnlab gave this away free to koreans for seven years, scanning every page you opened with the same v3 engine that ran its antivirus, and charging only institutions for the pro version. the farewell page claims it had been protecting over ten million browsers in real time. then the features went int |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Tempo Smart Calendar 📖 2013 - 2015 iOS-only smart calendar from tempo AI, an sri international spinoff in the same darpa-funded calo lineage that produced siri. launched 13 february 2013, raised $12.5M, salesforce announced the acquihire on 29 may 2015 and shut the app down 30 june 2015. the team went into salesforce IQ, the app neve |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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Circa News 📖 2012 - 2015 circa was a mobile-first news app launched in october 2012 by matt galligan and ben huh, with arsenio santos as cto. it broke news stories into atomic pieces called points, then let you follow a story to get push updates as new points were added. the design got real love from press and the team won |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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Niconico Movie Maker 📖 2008 - 2015 at about two in the afternoon on 18 june 2015, niconico stopped accepting swf uploads, and the only program in the world that could make them for the site stopped having a reason to exist. niconico movie maker was free, built by an outside company better known for music software, and for seven years |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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Instacast 📖 2011 - 2015 instacast was a podcast app for iphone and later the mac, made by the small german studio vemedio. it arrived in 2011, back when apple's own podcast app did not exist yet, and for a few years it was one of the apps serious listeners swore by. it kept adding polish right up to the end, an apple watch |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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Adobe Photoshop Touch 📖 2011 - 2015 adobe tried to put photoshop on a tablet four years before the ipad pro existed. the result was a ten-dollar app with seven layers, jagged selection tools, and a workflow that nobody could quite finish a job in. adobe gave up in 2015, broke the product into six smaller apps with cc in the name, and |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Mandriva Linux 📖 1998 - 2015 the linux you put on your computer in the early 2000s if you wanted to leave windows without leaving the desktop. mandrake started in july 1998 out of france, took the top consumer-linux spot for about five years, renamed itself to mandriva in 2005 after losing a trademark fight, then spent a decade |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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Foresight Linux 📖 2005 - 2015 ten years of chasing gnome upstream ended with one email from michael k. johnson, sent for the foresight linux council late on 11 may 2015 eastern time, saying there had been insufficient volunteer activity to sustain meaningful new development. the repositories and the mailing lists were given unti |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Yandex.Kit 📖 2014 - 2015 19 february 2014 is world whale day, and yandex picked it to release an android with no google inside it. кит means whale in russian and kit means a complete set in english, so the name worked twice and art lebedev's studio drew the logo as a whale made of colored arcs shaped like a signal-strength |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1989-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
IBM OfficeVision 📖 1989 - 2015 lotus notes killed officevision, and ibm bought lotus in 1995 partly so that it could. underneath the brand was profs, the mainframe office system ibm shipped in 1981, which handed a generation of office employees their first mailbox on a 3270 terminal. the os/2 client was pulled in 1992 after the m |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1988-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Timbuktu 📖 1988 - 2015 the email went out on 28 april 2015 and gave customers ninety days to buy a last copy. timbuktu had been letting one macintosh drive another since the late 1980s and had changed hands three times on the way. a remote control program written for appletalk finished its run at arris, a company whose bu |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Aperture 📖 2005 - 2015 aperture launched in november 2005 as apple's pro answer to adobe lightroom before lightroom existed. the price dropped from $499 to $80 over three versions and the product built a small loyal base of working photographers. apple ended development at wwdc on june 27, 2014, alongside iphoto. the phot |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
iPhoto 📖 2002 - 2015 iphoto launched in january 2002 as the photo half of the digital hub strategy that itunes had started for music. for thirteen years it was the default photo software on every mac. apple announced its end at wwdc 2014 and shipped the photos app in april 2015 with os x yosemite 10.10.3. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Nebula, Inc. 📖 2011 - 2015 the market was not there yet and the company said so on its way out the door. nebula was founded in march 2011 by chris kemp, former cto of nasa ames and one of the people who wrote the code that became openstack, and it sold a single appliance that turned a rack of standard servers into a private c |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Baidu Yi 📖 2011 - 2015 an internal business restructuring took it out, which is the flattest sentence an operating system has ever died of. baidu announced its own android on a stage in beijing in september 2011, pulled google's search and maps out of it, got dell to build the first phone for it, then renamed the thing tw |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Smush.it 📖 2008 - 2015 two engineers demoed it in boston on 30 september 2008 and yahoo ran it for the next six and a half years: you handed smush.it an image, it ran the good open-source optimizers over it and handed back a smaller file that looked identical. a wordpress plugin wired it into three hundred thousand sites. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
CrunchBang Linux 📖 2008 - 2015 a british developer called philip newborough took debian, removed the desktop environment, put openbox in its place and shipped it with a black background and a conky panel down the right side listing the keyboard shortcuts. it ran on machines that had aged out of everything else, and for a few year |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Acompli 📖 2014 - 2015 acompli was an iOS email app from april 2014. microsoft paid more than two hundred million dollars for it in december 2014. six weeks later the brand was renamed Outlook Mobile, the code became microsoft's mobile mail strategy, and the startup half of the story was done. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Railo 📖 2004 - 2015 a fork killed it, and the fork came from the same hands. on 29 january 2015 railo's original developer announced lucee, built from the railo 4.2 codebase, and said plainly that there would be no more work on railo. the other developers went across too. the swiss engine that had spent six years as th |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Windows Media Encoder 📖 1999 - 2015 microsoft renamed the netshow encoder to windows media encoder in october 1999 and then gave it away for fifteen years. the version everybody actually ran, 9 series, shipped on 15 november 2002 and never needed replacing, which is why the last stable build is dated january 2003. it captured live vid |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Adobe Buzzword 📖 2006 - 2015 buzzword was the flex-based online word processor adobe bought from virtual ubiquity in september 2007. it ran inside flash player and looked like a real wysiwyg page. the demo was striking for 2007. it could not survive once google docs got serious and flash player started its public decline. adobe |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Nokia Ovi Store 📖 2009 - 2015 the ovi store was nokia's centralized app store for symbian s60 and series 40 devices, launched in may 2009 as the lineup's answer to the apple app store that had opened the previous summer. it was rebranded to nokia store in 2012 during a wider brand consolidation. microsoft bought the nokia device |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
UberSocial 📖 2009 - 2015 ubersocial started life as ubertwitter, the most popular way to use twitter on a blackberry. in 2011 twitter caught it bending the rules, editing tweets and mishandling private messages for money, and suspended it. the truce came with a condition: drop the word twitter from the name. so ubertwitter |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
NetObjects Fusion 📖 1996 - 2015 netobjects fusion let you drag boxes around a page and it wrote the html underneath, which in 1996 was worth a hundred million dollars of ibm's money. fifteen million licenses went out through bundles and cover discs, the company floated in 1999, and the paper value touched about a billion and a hal |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Facebook Home 📖 2013 - 2014 zuckerberg got on stage in april 2013 and pitched a phone that put facebook in front of every other app on the home screen. people hated it within hours. the htc first went from $99 to $0.99 on at&t inside a month. cover feed and chat heads got absorbed back into the main facebook app, and the launc |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Microsoft MapPoint 📖 2000 - 2014 mappoint was the consumer-grade gis on a desk. it shipped in nine versions between 2000 and 2013, mostly aimed at business users who needed to plot excel sheets onto a us or europe road map. it had vba scripting, route optimization, demographic overlays, and a price tag that sat below an arcgis lice |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Reader Rabbit 📖 1984 - 2014 reader rabbit was the flagship reading-instruction software the learning company started shipping in 1984 for the apple ii. ann mccormick and her co-founders had set up tlc in 1980 explicitly to build educational software grounded in actual pedagogy. the first reader rabbit game taught early phonics |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1988-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Microsoft AutoRoute 📖 1988 - 2014 microsoft autoroute was the european version of streets and trips, a boxed route-planner that ran on windows and covered thirty-seven countries from the uk through european russia, with turkey on the same disc. it began at the british company nextbase in 1988, was acquired by microsoft in 1994, ship |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Java ME 📖 2001 - 2014 java me, originally java 2 platform micro edition, was sun's mobile java subset for resource-constrained devices, built around the kvm runtime and the midp profile. between 2001 and 2013 it ran on roughly three billion handsets, the pre-iphone way to distribute a mobile app. nokia's symbian and seri |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Oracle Beehive 📖 2008 - 2014 oracle beehive was an enterprise collaboration server combining email, calendar, instant messaging, team workspaces, conferencing under one administrative roof. the product was announced at oracle openworld in september 2008 to replace the older oracle collaboration suite. by 2014 oracle had pivoted |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Qualcomm BREW 📖 2001 - 2014 brew (binary runtime environment for wireless) was qualcomm's app platform for cdma feature phones. it shipped on ktfreetel in korea in november 2001 and on verizon nationwide in june 2002 under the get it now brand. for about a decade it ran the ringtones and over-the-air game downloads on hundreds |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Trapster 📖 2007 - 2014 trapster started in november 2007 as one man's version of a gesture drivers had been making at each other for decades, which is the headlight flash that warns you there is a police car ahead. it grew to something like twenty-two million accounts by crowdsourcing speed traps and road hazards before w |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Slide Bureau 📖 2014 - 2014 a six-person design studio in seattle, run by two people who had left microsoft, decided the problem with slide decks was not the software but the design, and shipped an ipad app full of templates drawn for specific jobs. ten months later the goodbye letter gave customers until 24 december 2014 to e |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
[email protected] 📖 1998 - 2014 in 1998 a portal called list.ru wanted a software section, and an independent developer named stanislav zharkov had already started building one. that catalog outlived list.ru, took the mail.ru name, and spent sixteen years being where russian-speaking windows users went for a download link somebody |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
ZipList 📖 2008 - 2014 fourteen million dollars bought condé nast a recipe box in april 2012, and thirty-two months later condé nast switched it off. ziplist began as a shared grocery list you could edit by text message and became white-label plumbing for food publishers, running the save-recipe button on martha stewart a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Otegaru Ichi Kensaku (お手軽位置検索) 📖 2011 - 2014 「いまどこですか？」, where are you now, is the message kddi printed inside its own press diagram for this app. you sent it from one au handset to another, and the app that answered it was free and android only. it held five registered numbers at most, and it asked the other person's permission every single t |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1988-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Streets & Trips 📖 1988 - 2014 streets & trips was the desktop trip-planning cd-rom you bought at staples and installed once. you used it for the next four road trips before forgetting it existed. it shipped from 1988 to 2014, sometimes with a usb gps puck in the box. then google maps and the iphone arrived and the whole category |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1991-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Office Clip Art 📖 1991 - 2014 clip art was the drawer of pictures that came with the software. a cartoon man in a suit, a globe with a ring around it, indexed by keyword and dropped into a document by anyone who could not draw and had no camera. microsoft shipped it from publisher 1.0 in 1991 and closed the online library on 1 d |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Zeus Web Server 📖 1995 - 2014 two cambridge undergraduates wrote a web server in 1995 that beat apache on almost every benchmark anyone ran, and then tried to sell licenses for it. for about a year in 2003 that worked well enough to make zeus the third most used server on the web. free software took the rest. riverbed bought the |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1980-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Novell 📖 1980 - 2014 founded 1980 in utah. novell's netware became the default way to share files and printers across small office networks. peak market share around sixty-three percent in 1993. then windows nt arrived with built-in file and print services for free, and netware's market share collapsed to single digits |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Dalvik 📖 2008 - 2014 every android application on earth ran inside this thing between 2008 and 2014, and almost nobody who used one could have named it. dan bornstein built a register-based virtual machine for a phone with very little memory and called it after the icelandic village his family came from. google replaced |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Samaritans Radar 📖 2014 - 2015 a british suicide-prevention charity built a free twitter app that watched the timelines of everyone you followed and emailed you when a post matched its list of distress phrases. the people being watched were never asked and were never told. nine days after launch it was suspended, after complaints |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Adobe Edge Code 📖 2012 - 2014 adobe edge code was a creative cloud code editor for html, css, and javascript that sat on top of the open source brackets project adobe had started in 2011. it shipped as a public preview in september 2012, hit a 1.0 build in september 2013, and was retired in november 2014 when adobe announced tha |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Forte Agent 📖 1994 - 2014 forte agent was the canonical windows usenet newsreader from 1994 until usenet itself stopped being a place. charles dazler knuff's company forté inc shipped two skus: the freeware free agent, capped at v3.3, and the paid forte agent that survived through commercial usenet's decline. the last releas |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Lotus Symphony (IBM) 📖 2007 - 2014 ibm took openoffice and put it inside an eclipse rich client shell. they called it a free corporate office suite and shipped it to enterprise customers. it was slower than openoffice and weirder than microsoft office. ibm killed it in 2014 along with the rest of the lotus brand. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Venkman 📖 2001 - 2014 in april 2001 robert ginda started writing a javascript debugger for mozilla, in javascript, and it shipped inside the browser that october. venkman was the only real way to step through web code for most of a decade. then firebug arrived and did the same job without asking anyone to think of debugg |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Lotus 1-2-3 📖 1983 - 2014 lotus 1-2-3 was the original killer app for the ibm pc. mitch kapor and jonathan sachs shipped it in january 1983, and for a decade nothing else mattered in the spreadsheet category. then windows happened and excel won. ibm bought the corpse in 1995 and finally turned the lights off in 2014. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Lotus SmartSuite 📖 1992 - 2014 lotus smartsuite was the bundle that stapled lotus 1-2-3 to wordpro and a handful of smaller productivity apps in one box. ibm bought lotus in 1995 for $3.2 billion to acquire notes, with smartsuite coming along as a secondary asset. the last consumer version was smartsuite millennium edition 9.8 in |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1991-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Lotus Approach 📖 1991 - 2014 lotus approach was the end-user relational database in lotus smartsuite, originally a 1991 product from approach software inc in redwood city under jaleh bisharat that won comdex best of show its first year. lotus acquired approach in late 1993, then ibm acquired lotus in 1995. the database itself r |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1986-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Lotus Freelance Graphics 📖 1986 - 2014 fifty kilobytes was a normal size for a freelance graphics presentation, which meant twenty of them fit on a single floppy disk and you could carry your entire working year in a shirt pocket. lotus got it by buying graphic communications inc in 1986 and spent the next decade fighting harvard graphic |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
YUI Library 📖 2006 - 2014 yahoo's open-source javascript framework. it shipped css resets and ajax widgets back when "frontend" still meant copy-pasting prototype.js into your html. it was discontinued august 29 2014 after eight and a half years, with yahoo citing the rise of npm and webpack as the cause. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Download Accelerator Plus 📖 1999 - 2014 on a 56k modem a four megabyte mp3 took ten minutes and one dropped connection meant starting the whole thing again. dap opened several connections to the same file at once and could pick up from wherever the last attempt died. speedbit shipped it out of israel from 1999 and claimed a hundred and ei |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Xobni 📖 2006 - 2014 xobni was inbox spelled backwards. an outlook sidebar that turned your mail archive into a people index before anybody else was doing that. yahoo paid over sixty million for it in 2013 and killed it exactly one year later in a batch of "underperforming" products. the tech got welded into yahoo mail. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Readmill 📖 2011 - 2014 henrik berggren and david kjelkerud shipped readmill from berlin in december 2011 as an ios app for reading ebooks and sharing highlights with the people you followed. it grew into a small but loved reading community over two years. dropbox acquihired the team for about $8 million in march 2014 and |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Little Eye Labs 📖 2012 - 2014 facebook's first indian acquisition was four engineers in bangalore who had built the tool android developers actually needed: a profiler that measured battery drain and memory per app rather than per device. the deal closed in january 2014 and the product was switched off at the end of june, which |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Gurunavi Touch (ぐるなびタッチ) 📖 2007 - 2014 the hardware was a box the restaurant plugged into a wall socket, and that was the whole installation. you held your felica phone against it, your handset opened a web page, and you had a stamp. gurunavi ran it from september 2007 to one minute before midnight on 30 june 2014, across about nine thou |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Quickoffice 📖 1997 - 2014 quickoffice was the mobile office viewer and editor that ran on every smartphone platform that existed before the iphone simplified the category. clients shipped for symbian and palm os in the early years, then for ios and android in the late 2000s. google bought it in june 2012. on june 29 2014 goo |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Springpad 📖 2008 - 2014 springpad was the pre-pinterest pinboard nobody remembers. you clipped something off the web and the app guessed whether it was a recipe or a product, then structured the page accordingly. it had 4.5 million users by shutdown in june 2014, with one of the cofounders acqui-hired to google a few weeks |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Digital Post Australia 📖 2012 - 2014 a private letterbox for your bills, built in australia by computershare and fuji xerox before the national postal service had one of its own. australia post took it to court over the name and lost, including on appeal, and that lawsuit is the only fight this company ever won. by early 2014 it had si |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Freshmeat / Freecode 📖 1997 - 2014 freshmeat was the release ticker for open-source software from about 1998 to the mid-2000s. patrick lenz launched it in 1997 as the first web-based aggregator of software releases. every open-source project of the era posted its point releases there, every screenshot of a curated desktop distributio |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1986-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Symantec pcAnywhere 📖 1986 - 2014 the remote desktop standard before remote desktop was a windows feature. pcanywhere 1.0 shipped in 1986 from dynamic microprocessor associates for dos. symantec bought DMA in 1991 and rebranded it norton pcanywhere, with the windows version arriving march 1993. for two decades it was how a sysadmin |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
TrueCrypt 📖 2004 - 2014 the free disk encryption tool that ran on windows and macos and linux for ten years and was the default answer for full-disk and container encryption when you did not trust the os-bundled options. its anonymous developers killed it on may 28, 2014 with a single warning page that recommended bitlocke |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Docking@Home 📖 2006 - 2014 a volunteer computing project on the boinc platform, hosted by the university of delaware under michela taufer and paid for by the nsf and the nih. it handed your idle machine a protein and a small molecule and asked how the two fit together, which is the first step in finding something that jams hi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
StackMob 📖 2010 - 2014 five months. that is how long stackmob lasted inside paypal, which bought it in december 2013 and announced the shutdown on 12 february 2014. the pitch had been that nobody writing a phone app should have to run a server, and $7.5 million of venture money went into making that true for push notifica |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Facebook Camera 📖 2012 - 2014 facebook camera was a standalone iphone app from facebook that let you shoot, filter, batch upload, and browse a feed of friend photos. it launched on may 24 of 2012. by the time it was pulled on may 9 of 2014 it had not been updated since august 2013 and the main facebook app had absorbed most of t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Cooliris 📖 2006 - 2014 the 3D wall plugin that made image search look like a movie scene for two years. installed fifty million times across the major browsers, won a crunchies award in 2008, then got quietly replaced by the company's mobile pivot. by 2014 the download links were gone and only the ipad app was left. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Twitter Music 📖 2013 - 2014 twitter music launched at coachella in april 2013 and shut down april 18, 2014, one year to the day. it was built on the we are hunted acquisition, played songs through whatever streaming account you had, and was a punchline by the fall. the vp who pushed the acquisition through left the company a w |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Windows XP 📖 2001 - 2014 windows xp shipped in october 2001 and refused to leave for thirteen years. it sat under bliss, the napa hill that became the most-seen photograph on earth. when microsoft finally cut extended support on april 8 2014, roughly 95 percent of the world's atms were still booting into it and around half |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1981-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Data Becker 📖 1981 - 2014 39 million marks a year by 1984, three years after two brothers opened a computer accessories shop in düsseldorf. the books were the thing: blue-spined paperbacks that documented the commodore 64 better than commodore ever did, and a lot of german teenagers learned 6502 assembly out of one. revenue |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
DreamBook 📖 1997 - 2014 half a million personal websites once ended with a link that said sign my guestbook, and a very large share of those books lived on one server run by the company that would later become dreamhost. dreambook started in 1997, outlasted the entire era it belonged to, and was switched off on 31 march 20 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Widgetbox 📖 2006 - 2014 widgetbox was the shop where people who could not write code got something moving onto their page. you picked a widget, copied a block of html, and pasted it into a blog template or a profile that allowed it. sequoia funded it in 2007 and it took eight million more in 2008. by early 2011 the company |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Popcorn Time 📖 2014 - 2014 the app that made piracy look like netflix. it wrapped the whole torrent grind inside one clean grid of movie posters you could press play on. its own creators killed it three weeks after launch, spooked by what they had made and who might come for them. the code was open, so other people kept rebui |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Intel AppUp 📖 2010 - 2014 for four years intel ran an app store. it opened in january 2010 for netbooks, back when a netbook was a product category rather than a punchline, widened to ultrabooks and windows 8 laptops, and closed on 11 march 2014 once microsoft had shipped a store of its own inside the operating system. the h |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
MetroTwit 📖 2010 - 2014 long zheng posted a screenshot of a metro-styled twitter client for windows in march 2010 and had a closed beta running inside the month. with david golden and winston pang he turned it into metrotwit, and over four years it reached more than 400,000 users on a stack of .net and windows presentation |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
BIGLOBE Okudake Ninsho 📖 2006 - 2014 nec's internet provider spent eight years offering its members a way to log in without a password: rest an osaifu-keitai handset or a felica credit card on a usb reader and the page opened. underneath there was no certificate and no applet. it read the edy electronic money number on the chip and tre |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
BackWeb Technologies 📖 1995 - 2014 push was the idea that the web should come to you instead of you going to it, and for about eighteen months in the late nineties three companies were going to own the whole internet with it. pointcast is the one people remember. backweb was the israeli one, it reached nasdaq in june 1999 with sixty |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Google Chrome Frame 📖 2009 - 2014 google's answer to internet explorer 6 was not to ask people to switch browsers, but to smuggle chrome inside the browser they were stuck with. a page added one meta tag and the plugin took over rendering with webkit and v8 while the window around it stayed internet explorer. microsoft said it doubl |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Banshee 📖 2005 - 2014 banshee was the linux music player that got everything right except the runtime it was built on. for a while it was ambitious and good, the closest the gnome desktop had to an itunes that did not embarrass anyone. it was written in c-sharp on mono, which made it fast to build and slow to run, and wh |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Willow Garage 📖 2006 - 2014 willow garage was a private robotics research lab in menlo park, funded personally by scott hassan from 2006 through early 2014. it built the pr2 humanoid research platform, released ros to the public in january 2010, took over maintenance of opencv, and seeded the point cloud library. the lab wound |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
myOpenID 📖 2006 - 2014 janrain ran the best known free openid provider on the web, then announced in september 2013 that the standard had lost. the login button people actually clicked said facebook or google, and an identity you controlled yourself turned out to be a thing almost nobody wanted to manage. the service was |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Splashup 📖 2007 - 2014 two people in y combinator's summer 2007 batch built a photoshop clone that ran inside a flash plugin, with real layers and a canvas close enough to the original that you could work in it. it launched as fauxto, took the name splashup that november, and was free the whole way. faux labs closed on 1 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Bump 📖 2009 - 2014 bump launched in march 2009 with a gimmick that turned out to be a real product. tap two phones together and the app would exchange contact cards or photos between them. by february 2013 it had 125 million downloads and a place in the top ten free iphone apps of all time. google acquired it in septe |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Microsoft InfoPath 📖 2003 - 2014 infopath was microsoft's xml-based electronic-forms designer. it shipped as part of office 2003 on 21 october 2003 and was killed on 31 january 2014 when microsoft announced no further versions would ship. the infopath 2013 client got an extended-support runway through july 2026 to give large enterp |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
CrossLoop 📖 2006 - 2014 crossloop was a freemium screen-sharing tool from a monterey california startup that ran 2006 to 2014. tom rolander and mrinal desai started it after rolander's father got an alzheimer's diagnosis and remote troubleshooting his pc became a recurring problem with no clean answer. peer-to-peer encrypt |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Legacy Locker 📖 2009 - 2014 three hundred dollars bought you a lifetime, and the lifetime lasted until november 2013, when passwordbox bought the company and gave everyone sixty days. legacy locker existed to make sure your accounts outlived you. it was acquired, wound down and had its servers wiped inside five years, which is |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Conduit toolbar 📖 2005 - 2014 conduit let anybody build a browser toolbar for free and then made its money on the search box inside it. by 2010 more than a hundred million of those toolbars were being used at least once a month, which put an israeli company almost nobody could name at number 29 on google's list of the thousand b |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Mozilla Labs 📖 2006 - 2014 december 2013 is the last post on the mozilla labs blog, and nobody ever wrote a final one. the incubator opened in august 2006 and had quietly stopped existing by sometime in 2014, with no announcement from mozilla at any point. the blog is still online in 2026, tagline intact. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Sybase 📖 1984 - 2014 four people started it in berkeley in 1984 and built the database that ran wall street trading floors through the nineties. in 1988 they licensed the engine to a small company in redmond, which is how microsoft sql server exists at all. sap paid 5.8 billion dollars for the whole thing in 2010 and ra |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Bitzi 📖 2001 - 2013 before you downloaded a file off a stranger there was no way to know what was in it. bitzi hashed files and let volunteers write down what each fingerprint actually contained, so you could check before spending an hour of modem time on a lie. it never got large and it never made money. two things it |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Wibiya 📖 2008 - 2013 wibiya made the bar that floated along the bottom edge of a blog, the one with the share buttons on one side and a search box on the other. it was free, it installed with a single line of javascript, and by 2013 it was sitting on around 150,000 sites. conduit paid $45 million for it in 2011 and then |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Vidalia 📖 2006 - 2013 for almost eight years the way you knew tor was running was a small onion sitting in your system tray. vidalia was the control panel behind it, written by two students who entered a tor interface competition, and it did the unglamorous work of starting the daemon and drawing a bandwidth graph. the t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
ClaimID 📖 2006 - 2013 two phd students at chapel hill built it in 2006 to answer a question that now sounds quaint: what does the web say about you, and which of it did you write. you made one page, you listed every account you had, you marked each link as yours or merely about you, and the page doubled as your openid. s |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Wikimapy.cz 📖 2006 - 2013 seznam.cz opened a mediawiki in june 2006 and asked czech walkers to write the descriptions of the castles and the ponds themselves, then shipped what they wrote into mapy.cz every business day. it ran seven and a half years on the gfdl and on volunteer photographs. on 30 november 2013 seznam switch |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Joli OS 📖 2008 - 2013 joli os was a cloud-centric linux distribution built for the asus eee pc era of netbooks. tariq krim, of netvibes, founded jolicloud alongside romain huet in 2008 with a 4.2 million dollar seed round from atomico ventures and mangrove capital. v1.0 shipped on july 8 2010, running on top of an ubuntu |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Google Currents 📖 2011 - 2013 google currents was the news reader google tried before it tried google play newsstand, which it tried before it tried google news app, which it tried before it tried google podcasts. the 2011 app pulled long-form magazine articles into a smooth tablet-shaped grid. then it was folded into play newss |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Bread 📖 2011 - 2013 yahoo announced it had bought bread on 11 october 2013 and the links were given thirty days. the product was a url shortener with a tollbooth in it: click a bre.ad link and you got a five second ad plus a personal note from whoever shared it, called a toast, before you reached the place you were goi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Wapedia 📖 2004 - 2013 florian amrhein put wikipedia on a wap phone in august 2004, years before the wikimedia foundation got around to it, at an address that ended in .mobi back when .mobi was a serious proposal for how the mobile web would be sorted out. it reformatted articles for whatever handset asked and paid for it |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
iGoogle 📖 2005 - 2013 igoogle was google's customizable home page. you opened a tab and a grid of widgets you had picked yourself was sitting there. weather next to your gmail preview, RSS feeds underneath, a small notepad off to the side. it launched as 'google personalized homepage' in may 2005, got renamed igoogle in |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Smolt 📖 2007 - 2013 fedora's hardware census. it shipped with fedora 7 in may 2007 and asked, politely and once, whether you wanted to send an anonymous list of what was inside your machine to a central server, so the distribution could see what it was actually running on. other projects picked it up, openSUSE and myth |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
live earth 📖 2005 - 2013 more than eighteen million yen went from japanese phone bills to disaster relief through a standby-screen app, which is not a sentence anybody expected to write about a world clock. live earth put a spinning globe on an au handset in the summer of 2005, with the day and night line moving in real tim |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
CryptoSeal 📖 2011 - 2014 the court documents in the lavabit case became public in october 2013, and ryan lackey read them and closed his own product two weeks later. cryptoseal privacy was a consumer vpn whose design could not log what a pen register order would demand, which meant any such order would force the company to |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Windows SideShow 📖 2007 - 2013 january 2007, and microsoft ships an api for a class of hardware that did not exist yet and largely never came to exist. sideshow pushed mail and rss to a small display on the outside of your laptop so you could read it with the machine asleep. asus put one on a $2,200 notebook and dell put one on a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
FileMaker Bento 📖 2008 - 2013 bento was the consumer face of filemaker. forty-nine dollars for a single license, ninety-nine for a five-pack, mac only at launch with an iphone and ipad client from version 4. it shipped in january 2008 after a november 2007 public preview, leaned on templates that linked to ical and address book |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Avid DS 📖 1998 - 2013 ten thousand dollars of software, and the only way to conform an avid project at 2k or 4k. built in montreal by softimage while microsoft still owned the company, shipped in january 1998 on intergraph hardware. avid told its customers it was over in a conference call in august 2013 that was meant to |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Apple Cards 📖 2011 - 2013 apple shipped the cards app on october 12, 2011 alongside the iphone 4s and ios 5. it let you build a physical greeting card from any photo on your phone, type a short message, hand the order to apple, and apple printed the card on letterpress paper at a us facility and mailed it on your behalf. car |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Mediaroom 📖 2007 - 2013 mediaroom was the layer of microsoft you only met if your phone company sold you tv. att u-verse, telus optik, bell fibe, deutsche telekom entertain. powered 22 million set-top boxes at peak. microsoft sold it to ericsson in april 2013 because xbox was the only tv story they wanted to tell. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Microsoft TechNet Subscription 📖 1998 - 2013 it started as a stack of discs in the post carrying the whole microsoft knowledge base, and became the cheapest legal way for an it professional to get hold of the software they were paid to run. two hundred dollars for the standard tier and three hundred and fifty for the one with the enterprise pr |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
club DAM MEMBERSアプリ 📖 2004 - 2013 the gesture was tapping your handset against the karaoke machine in the room itself, a damステーション rather than anything at the front desk. the app held your club dam membership and your edy balance on the phone's felica chip, and in october 2012 daiichikosho relaunched dam★とも so that an id and a passw |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Catch Notes 📖 2008 - 2013 catch notes was the android note-taking app that briefly looked like it could pressure evernote. four million users at peak, $9.3 million in funding from excel venture management. the team announced in july 2013 that they were taking the company in a different direction, and the apps went dark on au |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Orbit Downloader 📖 2006 - 2013 eset published the finding on 21 august 2013: one of the most downloaded free download managers for windows had been fetching a target list from its own website and flooding the addresses on it. orbit downloader had won its place since 2006 by saving flash video from youtube when browsers could not, |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Astrid 📖 2008 - 2013 astrid was an open-source todo app started in 2008. it built a cult on android with a green octopus mascot and a clean priority model. yahoo acquired the team in may 2013 and gave users 90 days to export their data. the service went dark on 5 august. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Xtranormal 📖 2008 - 2013 xtranormal handed anyone a movie studio with a two-line learning curve. you typed dialogue and picked two characters at a desk, and it read the words back in a flat computer voice while the little models blinked and gestured. from 2008 that cheapness was the whole joke, and the internet ran with it, |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Soocial 📖 2007 - 2013 viadeo bought the amsterdam startup soocial in november 2011 for its contact syncing and turned the syncing off on 31 july 2013. roughly 120,000 people had been using it to keep a single address book straight across a phone and a webmail account, back when those two things did not talk to each other |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Personal Ancestral File 📖 1984 - 2013 paf was written by the church of jesus christ of latter-day saints because the church wanted families entered into a database and the people doing the entering had no software to do it with. it shipped in april 1984 for dos and the apple ii. it cost thirty five dollars until 1999 and nothing after t |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
OmniGraphSketcher 📖 2009 - 2013 robin stewart started it at williams college in 2003, turned it into an mit master's thesis, and sold both the app and himself to the omni group in 2008. the idea it carried is still unusual: every other charting program makes you supply data before it will draw anything, and this one let you draw t |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
FoxyTunes 📖 2004 - 2013 foxytunes was a tiny strip on the firefox toolbar that controlled whatever music player you had open behind it. play, pause, next, song title. it worked with thirty-plus players including winamp and itunes. yahoo bought it for over thirty million dollars in 2008 and killed it five years later in a g |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
SightSpeed 📖 2001 - 2013 sightspeed made video calls that looked better than everyone else's when video calls still stuttered and froze, which in the early 2000s was most of the time. logitech bought it in 2008 for thirty million dollars, rebadged it as logitech vid, and then watched skype take the category. a webcam compan |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Songbird 📖 2006 - 2013 songbird was the open-source music player that wanted to be firefox for music. mozilla xulrunner underneath with an extension marketplace on top. it shipped from 2006 to 2013. when poti ran out of money the project went dark. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Yahoo Axis 📖 2012 - 2013 axis was yahoo's browser experiment, launched may 23 2012 as an extension for chrome, firefox, internet explorer and safari with companion ios apps for iphone and ipad. the pitch was that the standard list of blue links should be replaced by thumbnail previews of the actual pages, browsable inside a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Falcon Pro 📖 2012 - 2013 falcon pro was an android twitter client written by joaquim verges, released to the play store in december 2012 and finished six and a half months later. twitter's api rules capped a third-party client at a hundred thousand user tokens, falcon pro hit that ceiling on 23 february 2013, and verges res |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Google Building Maker 📖 2009 - 2013 google building maker let anyone pick a building in one of at least 127 cities and push simple boxes around against aerial photographs until the geometry matched. accepted models went into google earth's 3d buildings layer, which for several years was largely the work of unpaid volunteers. google an |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Adobe Visual Communicator 📖 2003 - 2013 american middle schools ran morning news bulletins, and for about ten years a lot of them ran on this. serious magic replaced the video timeline with a scrolling teleprompter you read off your own monitor while a webcam filmed you, which turned editing into performing. adobe bought the company in oc |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
BBC Digital Media Initiative 📖 2008 - 2013 the bbc used it to make one television show. the digital media initiative was supposed to take videotape out of the entire corporation, started in february 2008 on a siemens contract that collapsed inside two years, came back in house under the name fabric, and was canceled on 24 may 2013 with ninet |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
HijackThis 📖 2002 - 2013 a dutch student wrote a scanner with no opinion about anything. it read the parts of windows that a hijacker had to touch and printed them as a flat list, without marking which of the lines was the bad one. the other half of the product was a person on a forum who could read that list for you, which |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Adobe Fireworks 📖 1998 - 2013 fireworks was the macromedia tool web designers reached for when photoshop felt like a tank and illustrator overshot. it shipped from 1998 through 2012 and survived adobe's 2005 macromedia acquisition. the cut came in may 2013 with the canned line about overlap with photoshop and illustrator. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Unsanity 📖 2000 - 2013 haxie was a word this company invented, out of hack mac os x, for the small system modifications apple had permitted in mac os 9 and left no room for afterwards. unsanity shipped about a dozen of them on top of its own application enhancer framework, which injected code into places apple never inten |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Norton Ghost 📖 1995 - 2013 the disk imaging tool. murray haszard built ghost at binary research in auckland new zealand in 1995. symantec acquired the company in 1998 and folded it into the norton consumer brand. for most of the late 1990s and the entire 2000s, ghost was how you cloned a windows install across a lab of machin |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Fuduntu 📖 2010 - 2013 andrew wyatt ended his own distribution on 28 april 2013 and put the arithmetic in the announcement: fewer than 2,500 people were still running it, and the number was dropping weekly. it had started as a fedora remix for netbooks and then held on to gnome 2 and gtk 2 while fedora moved to gnome 3 an |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Rambler Maps 📖 2000 - 2013 on 10 october 2000 rambler put a map of russia on the web, the first one a russian portal had. over the next twelve years it learned to build routes across the country and to show where the traffic was standing. in february 2013 the merged afisha-rambler company said maps no longer fit the plan, and |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1979-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Simtel 📖 1979 - 2013 simtel was the shareware archive, started by keith petersen in 1979 for cp/m software and hosted for a decade on an army weapons range in new mexico. it survived losing that machine in 1993, moved to walnut creek cdrom, and was pushing 873 gb a day by 1999. digital river bought it in october 1999 an |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Adobe BrowserLab 📖 2009 - 2013 browserlab was a screenshot farm adobe ran so you did not have to keep six browsers and two operating systems on your desk. you handed it a url, picked the combinations you cared about, and it photographed your page on machines in adobe's building. it opened as a free public preview on 4 june 2009 w |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
BackTrack 📖 2006 - 2013 two security live cds merged in 2006 and became the thing everyone booted from a disc instead of installing. it carried the whole toolkit already configured, which is why it turned up in university labs and on machines that were not yours. offensive security rebuilt it on debian and released the res |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Fraps 📖 1999 - 2013 dormant fraps was the windows utility that drew a small yellow frame counter in the corner of your screen and let you record whatever was happening behind it. beepa, an australian outfit with one product, shipped it in august 1999 and sold the full version for around thirty dollars. for about a decade it wa |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Bada 📖 2010 - 2013 bada was samsung's quiet attempt to own its own smartphone stack instead of renting android from google. it launched on the samsung wave in may 2010, sold mostly in europe and southeast asia, climbed to about 3% of global smartphone shipments by q3 2012, and was killed in february 2013 when samsung |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Bluefin Labs 📖 2008 - 2013 deb roy and michael fleischman spun bluefin labs out of mit in 2008 to do social-tv analytics. their product, bluefin signals, read public twitter and facebook chatter, matched it to the specific tv show or commercial running at the same time, and sold the resulting heat-map to networks and advertis |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Microsoft XNA 📖 2006 - 2013 the notice was an email to unpaid volunteers and it was never meant to be read outside that mailing list. it told the mvp award holders that directx was no longer evolving as a technology and that xna game studio was not in active development, with both retired from the program on 1 april 2014. the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Office Picture Manager 📖 2003 - 2013 office picture manager was the small image editor that nobody chose and everybody used. it shipped in the office bundle from 2003 through 2010. it opened jpegs faster than photoshop's splash screen and had a crop tool plus a red-eye button. office 2013 dropped it without a successor and microsoft po |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Xandros 📖 2001 - 2013 xandros was the linux distribution that shipped on the first generation of the asus eee pc, the 2007 netbook that put linux on a million store shelves. the company was founded in 2001 in new york, bought corel linux from corel that same year, then ran a desktop linux distro through the mid-2000s wit |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Handango 📖 1999 - 2013 the pre-iphone mobile app store. founded 1999 in irving texas to sell software for palm pdas and symbian phones. acquired by pocketgear in 2010 and shuttered in 2013. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
PocketGear 📖 2001 - 2013 pocketgear was a 2001 cross-platform mobile software catalog. by february 2010 it had bought handango for an undisclosed sum, becoming the largest pre-app-store mobile catalog in the world at around 140,000 titles. in 2011 it rebranded as appia and pivoted to a white-label oem store engine. the cons |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Miro 📖 2006 - 2013 miro wanted to be television for the open web, a free player that pulled in video podcasts and bittorrent feeds and treated them like channels you subscribed to. it came from a nonprofit with a real mission, which is usually a sign of software people admired more than they used. streaming moved into |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
WikiScanner 📖 2007 - 2013 wikiscanner launched on 13 august 2007 and did exactly one thing. it took every anonymous wikipedia edit made between february 2002 and august 2007, about thirty-four million of them, and matched the ip addresses against a database of which organization owned which block. inside two weeks it had pro |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
FlashGet 📖 1999 - 2013 before broadband made downloading boring, a file that failed at ninety four percent was simply gone and you began again from zero. flashget opened several connections to the same server at once and stitched the slices back together, and more importantly it wrote them to disk as they arrived, so a de |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Vlingo 📖 2006 - 2012 vlingo was the june 2006 cambridge massachusetts voice assistant by mike phillips and john nguyen. the app shipped on most pre-iphone smartphone platforms, including symbian and blackberry. vlingo powered an early version of siri before apple bought siri, then powered samsung's s voice on the galaxy |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Webroot Spy Sweeper 📖 2002 - 2012 steven thomas and kristen talley started webroot in boulder in july 1997 with a tool that erased browser traces, and five years later they fell into the biggest consumer security market of the decade. spy sweeper arrived in 2002, when spyware had a name and no default cure, and by 2005 a group of ca |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Installous 📖 2009 - 2012 goodnight, sweet prince was the opening line of the notice. installous was the piracy half of the jailbreak, a cydia package that browsed an index of cracked ipa files and put them on the phone in a few taps. it ran alongside appsync, which patched ios so the phone would accept an application whose |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Expression Web 📖 2006 - 2012 microsoft tried to do html the grown-up way after frontpage's reputation collapsed. expression web shipped clean markup, no proprietary tags, no shared-borders nonsense, but it landed in the same year as the new dreamweaver and got crushed in the design crowd it was built for. by the end microsoft j |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Expression Design 📖 2007 - 2012 two researchers in hong kong invented skeletal strokes, a way to bend an entire drawing along a curve as if it were a brush loaded with a picture, and built a vector editor around it. microsoft bought the product in september 2003, hired one of them, then spent four years rewriting it in wpf as the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Expression Encoder 📖 2007 - 2012 the free edition is the one that mattered. microsoft shipped expression encoder in september 2007 as the transcoder that fed silverlight, sold a pro version with the licensed codecs inside it, and gave away an express build that could not do live streaming but could record your screen. service pack |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
OpenFeint 📖 2009 - 2012 openfeint was the achievements and leaderboards layer that mobile games bolted on before apple and google shipped their own. you did not choose it. you opened fruit ninja and it asked you to make an account. gree bought it in april 2011 for 104 million dollars and killed it on 14 december 2012, givi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
WSO2 Mashup Server 📖 2008 - 2012 january 2008, and a sri lankan open source company shipped the first mashup server anybody could download and read the source of. you wrote javascript in a text editor, dropped it on the server, and the server turned it into a published web service that other mashups could call. the last release was |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Adobe Flash Builder 📖 2005 - 2012 flash builder was the eclipse-based ide adobe sold to flex developers between 2005 and 2012. it started as macromedia flex builder 1.0 in june 2005, was renamed flash builder with version 4 in march 2010, and shipped its final release as flash builder 4.7 on 7 december 2012. core support ended in 20 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Twistory 📖 2008 - 2012 twitter's api rewrite in 2012 took a long list of small tools down with it and this was one of them. tijs vrolix built twistory in a belgian town in 2008 to show off what he could do: subscribe to any twitter account from ical or google calendar and the tweets land on the day and hour they were writ |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1989-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Lotus Notes 📖 1989 - 2012 lotus notes was the desktop client for the lotus domino server, the dominant corporate email and groupware stack of the 1990s. ibm bought lotus in 1995 for $3.2 billion to acquire the product. the lotus brand was dropped in 2012 when the product became ibm notes. ibm later sold the whole stack to hc |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Cover Flow 📖 2006 - 2012 the rotating 3d album-art carousel that made every steve jobs keynote from 2007 to 2012 feel like the future. invented by andrew coulter enright, implemented by jonathan del strother, bought by apple in 2006 and shipped in itunes 7 that september. it spread to the original iphone in 2007 and mac os |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1985-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Navteq 📖 1985 - 2012 navteq spent twenty-seven years building the part you never saw, which is the underlying road data that in-car navigation ran on. it started in 1985 in a sunnyvale office as karlin & collins, driving roads and writing down what was on them, and philips put close to $600 million into it before it was |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Adobe Flash Lite 📖 2003 - 2012 flash lite was the mobile subset of macromedia and then adobe flash, built for handsets without enough cpu to run the desktop player. ntt docomo shipped it first on its imode handsets in may 2003. nokia loaded it onto s40 and symbian phones from 2005, sony ericsson and samsung from 2007. version 4 i |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Koders 📖 2005 - 2012 before stack overflow existed and before any code host had a search box worth using, finding out how somebody else had solved your problem meant searching source code itself. koders got there first, opening in may 2005 out of santa monica with a hundred and ninety million lines indexed and a filter |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
VirusBuster 📖 1992 - 2012 a budapest antivirus house that started in the late eighties under the name virsec, took the virusbuster name in 1992 and spent most of its life on hungarian government machines. it never became a consumer brand outside its own country, so the money came from licensing the scanning engine to other v |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Intel Array Building Blocks 📖 2010 - 2012 five years of research and one acquisition went into this. arbb came out of intel's ct project and the rapidmind team intel bought in 2009, and it offered data-parallel c++ in which programs could not create data races or deadlocks by construction. it never got past beta 6. in october 2012 intel dis |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
KOffice 📖 2000 - 2012 koffice was the office suite kde wrote for itself, first released with kde 2.0 in october 2000 and cited by microsoft in the antitrust trial as evidence that somebody else was competing. it never reached the users staroffice had, but it was the thing on the disc when you installed linux and it worke |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Reader 📖 2000 - 2012 microsoft reader was the company's bet on the consumer e-reading market in 2000. it ran on Pocket PC PDAs and on Windows desktops. ebooks shipped as.lit files with Microsoft DRM. for a while the product had publisher partnerships with Barnes and Noble plus other major chains. then the Kindle launche |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Yellow Dog Linux 📖 1999 - 2012 the linux distribution for powerpc macs. terra soft solutions in loveland colorado shipped the first release in march 1999 for the imac and power mac generation. yellow dog ran as the only third-party os apple officially licensed for preinstall on its own hardware. it followed the mac to ps3 and ibm |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
The SCO Group 📖 2002 - 2012 darl mcbride took over a linux company in june 2002 and by march 2003 it was suing ibm for a billion dollars, sending demand letters to fifteen hundred corporations and offering linux users a license to code it could not show anyone. a judge ruled in august 2007 that novell had owned the unix copyri |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Google Notebook 📖 2006 - 2012 google notebook was the clip-and-save tool that lived between google search and gmail. development stopped on 14 january 2009. the service kept running unmaintained until july 2012, when google finally killed it and exported every notebook to google docs. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Xgrid 📖 2004 - 2012 apple spent much of the 2000s selling the idea that a room full of macs could behave as one computer, and xgrid was the part that made it literally true. a controller cut a job into pieces and handed them to agents, which were ordinary machines doing nothing in particular at the time. it shipped ins |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Sparrow 📖 2011 - 2012 french indie team builds the prettiest gmail client on the mac, becomes the top paid app on the mac app store its first day, ships an iphone version a year later. google buys the team in july 2012 and stops development the same week. one final bug-fix release ships in october, then nothing. the foun |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Yahoo! Widgets (Konfabulator) 📖 2003 - 2012 konfabulator was a desktop widget runtime that arlo rose shipped for mac os x in february 2003, two years before apple's dashboard. yahoo bought pixoria in july 2005 and made the engine free the same day. the desktop product ended july 2012. the connected-tv branch crawled along until 2018, then yah |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Microsoft ActiveSync 📖 1996 - 2012 before a phone could reach a server on its own, it reached a desktop over a cable, and on windows that cable was owned by activesync. it shipped in september 1996 as h/pc explorer, was renamed twice, and spent a decade as the only supported way to get a contact list off a pocket pc. version 4.5 on 1 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Windows Sidebar / Desktop Gadgets 📖 2007 - 2012 windows sidebar shipped with windows vista in january 2007 and brought back desktop widgets in a hosted javascript runtime. eleven preinstalled gadgets came in the box, with thousands more available on windows live gallery. windows 7 dropped the docked panel but kept the gadgets as floating desktop |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Windows Home Server 📖 2007 - 2012 windows home server was a computer you put in a cupboard and stopped looking at. it backed up every pc in the house overnight, keeping one copy of the files they had in common. it also pooled whatever disks you fed it into a single lump of storage that grew when you added another one. that pooling w |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Face.com 📖 2009 - 2012 face.com was a tel aviv facial-recognition startup founded in 2009. by february 2011 its api had scanned 18 billion faces across third-party photo apps and its own two facebook add-ons. facebook bought the company on 18 june 2012 for a reported 55 to 60 million dollars and shut the public api down w |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Needlebase 📖 2010 - 2012 google paid seven hundred million dollars for a flight search company and a scraping tool came along in the box. needlebase let you point at a web page, tag the fields you wanted and get a clean queryable database out the other end without writing a line of code. the acquisition closed on 12 april 2 |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Hohm 📖 2009 - 2012 most home energy products of 2009 opened by asking what hardware you owned. this one opened by asking how old your water heater was. microsoft licensed a simulation model out of lawrence berkeley national laboratory and wrapped it in a web form running on azure, so a household with a dumb meter coul |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Sega Mobile Friends (セガ モバイルフレンズ) 📖 2001 - 2012 in a japanese sega arcade between 2001 and 2012 there was a terminal called mobanavi. you showed it the barcode off your sega moba membership page, and it asked which sort of game you had just played and for the four digit pin you had set. twenty points for that, once a day across every branch, and |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Yahoo Livestand 📖 2011 - 2012 livestand was a yahoo ipad app that turned your reading history into a personalized magazine. it shipped in november 2011 as a flipboard competitor and sat for six months at four stars in the app store. yahoo's new ceo ross levinsohn shut it down on may 25, 2012, less than two weeks into his job. th |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Perian 📖 2006 - 2012 four volunteer developers put a farewell letter on the front page on 14 may 2012 and promised one last release. it never shipped. the download link still points at version 1.2.3, built in july 2011, and it still works today. for six years perian was the one component that made quicktime open the vid |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Openwave 📖 1994 - 2012 before the iphone there was a browser inside almost every phone that could reach the internet at all, and for most of a decade that browser came from one company in the bay area under three different names. alain rossmann founded it in december 1994, it invented the markup that became WAP, and it en |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Adobe Flash Catalyst 📖 2010 - 2012 adobe took an illustrator artboard and turned it into a flex prototype the developer could use. that was the pitch. it shipped in cs5 in april 2010 as the descendant of an old macromedia codename called thermo. by april 2012 adobe was pulling out of flash on the consumer web, and flash catalyst was |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Adobe Device Central 📖 2007 - 2012 device central was the window in creative suite where you found out how your work looked on a phone. it carried profiles for hundreds of handsets, their screen sizes and their memory limits, and adobe refreshed the list every quarter because the list changed every quarter. you could dim the backligh |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Adobe OnLocation 📖 2007 - 2012 tapeless cameras killed this one, and adobe wrote the cause of death into its own end-of-life notice: the industry had moved to native, card-based workflows and no longer needed a computer cabled to the camera. onlocation started life as serious magic's dv rack, came to adobe with the october 2006 a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Picnik 📖 2007 - 2012 the in-browser flash photo editor that opened any jpeg in fifteen seconds and let you crop, color-correct, add a faux-polaroid frame, and save it back. flickr embedded it in 2007. google bought picnik in march 2010 and folded the engineering into picasa web albums. when google+ took over and flash i |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Shareware.com 📖 1995 - 2012 a civil engineering professor at the university of ljubljana built an index of every shareware archive he could reach, and it got popular enough to overload his own machine. cnet took the master copy in june 1995 and shipped it as shareware.com that november. it searched other people's collections i |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
SimpleGeo 📖 2009 - 2012 ten million dollars in, three and a half million dollars out, and the product gone within five months of the signature. simplegeo sold developers a hosted place to put location, so that answering "what is near this point" stopped meaning you ran your own postgis cluster. urban airship wanted the tea |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Urchin 📖 1998 - 2012 two people running a small san diego hosting company in the late nineties needed to bill customers by bandwidth, so one of them wrote a program to add up the server logs. that program grew into urchin, the analytics package half the hosting industry resold. google bought the company in april 2005, g |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Niconico DVD 📖 2010 - 2012 you put a disc in the drive and a free windows application laid a comment track over the top of it, so that the people watching the same film were shouting at the same frames you were. there was no disc identification in it at all. two copies of the same release run for the same length of time, and |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Opera Unite 📖 2009 - 2012 opera unite was your browser as a webserver. you opened opera and flipped a switch, then other people could connect to your laptop to download a file or read a note you left on a virtual fridge. opera shipped it inside the browser in late 2009 and killed it in march 2012, two and a half years later, |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
CoTweet 📖 2008 - 2012 in 2008 "running the company twitter account" was a job that had just been invented and had no tooling behind it. cotweet built the tooling: one dashboard for a whole team, with incoming replies you could assign to whoever was on shift. coca-cola and jetblue signed up, exacttarget bought the company |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Pageflakes 📖 2005 - 2012 pageflakes opened in late 2005 as an ajax personal start page where each widget was called a flake. it sat in the same category as netvibes and igoogle. balderton capital invested in may 2006. in march 2008 comscore measured 50000 us unique visitors against netvibes 1.4 million, a gap that never clo |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Amaya 📖 1996 - 2012 the w3c built its own browser and made it an editor too, because the first browser tim berners-lee wrote had been one and the web had quietly lost that. amaya let you open a page and change it where it stood. it rendered mathml and svg years before anything popular did. the last release came out on |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Stanza 📖 2008 - 2012 stanza was on the app store before amazon's own reader was, it read every format that mattered including the ones amazon did not sell, and it pulled books straight off free catalogs without asking anyone for a credit card. four million downloads. amazon bought lexcycle in april 2009 and promised not |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
sones GraphDB 📖 2010 - 2012 a tranche from the second funding round never arrived, and that was the whole story. the managing directors filed at the leipzig district court for impending illiquidity, the provisional administrator kept the business running while talks with old and new investors went nowhere, and on 1 january 201 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Producer for PowerPoint 📖 2002 - 2011 microsoft producer was a free add-in for powerpoint that let you capture webcam video alongside microphone narration synced to slide timings, then publish the bundle as a web page you could play back in internet explorer. the final official release was producer for powerpoint 2003, shipped on 21 oct |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Tablet PC 📖 2002 - 2011 bill gates demoed the tablet pc concept at fall comdex in november 2001 as a stylus-driven windows laptop. windows xp tablet pc edition shipped on november 7 2002, and the convertible-with-pen design got refreshed through vista and windows 7. windows 8 in 2012 rebooted the whole thing as a touch-fir |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Kerio Personal Firewall 📖 2002 - 2011 kerio personal firewall was the small czech program that sat in the windows tray and asked whether the executable it had just caught was allowed to reach the internet. tiny software handed it over on 1 february 2002. version 2.1.5 in may 2003 was the last free build and the one most people kept runn |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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280 Slides 📖 2008 - 2011 motorola paid twenty million dollars in august 2010 for three people who had rebuilt apple's cocoa framework in javascript, and the presentation app was only ever the thing they built to prove it ran. sixteen months later the app was switched off with a save-your-work notice. the framework it was ad |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Google Sidewiki 📖 2009 - 2011 google sidewiki launched on 23 september 2009 as a browser-toolbar feature that opened a sidebar next to any web page and let visitors leave comments on that page. the comments were ranked by a quality algorithm and shown to other sidewiki users on the same url. on 2 september 2011 google announced |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Snaptu 📖 2007 - 2011 snaptu was a free app platform for feature phones, the cheap handsets that could not run real apps of their own. the trick was that the apps did not run on the phone at all. they ran on snaptu's servers, which rendered a light screen and shipped it down the line, so a facebook or a twitter app worke |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
PocoMail 📖 1999 - 2011 shareware was a business model before it became a memory, and this was one of the last ones that worked. pocomail shipped in 1999 out of poco systems as a small fast windows mail client with a scripting language of its own, took pc magazine's shareware program of the year in 2000, and then spent a d |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Apache Harmony 📖 2005 - 2011 an apache project that rebuilt java from scratch under a license anybody could use, and then could not get hold of the test suite that would have let it call itself java. sun offered a certification license with a field-of-use clause attached and apache refused to sign it, and the standoff outlived |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Adobe Flex SDK 📖 2004 - 2011 flex was macromedia's rich internet application framework, an xml dialect called mxml that compiled into a flash swf with actionscript behind it. adobe inherited it in the 2005 macromedia deal and shipped it as the enterprise side of the flash platform. in november 2011 adobe gave the source to the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Apple iDVD 📖 2001 - 2011 idvd was the consumer half of apple's optical-drive era. you imported imovie footage and picked one of the painfully designed motion-menu themes to spit out a playable disc your relatives could put in a dvd player. it shipped on every mac for a decade, and then in 2011 the macbook air dropped the op |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Autonomy Corporation 📖 1996 - 2011 cambridge, june 1996: two people and a piece of bayesian inference wrapped into a product that could read documents nobody had bothered to structure. by 2011 it was in the ftse 100 and hp paid 11.7 billion dollars for it. thirteen months later hp wrote off 8.8 billion of that and said the accounts h |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Windows Live Gallery 📖 2006 - 2011 for five years microsoft ran a free shelf of small things you could bolt onto windows and onto messenger. desktop gadgets for the vista sidebar, toolbar buttons, writer plugins, and the emoticon packs and winks that were the only way to make a chat window look like yours. it closed on 1 october 2011 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
MeeGo 📖 2010 - 2012 meego was a linux mobile operating system that nokia and intel announced together at mobile world congress on february 15 2010 by merging maemo and moblin into one project. it shipped on exactly one finished consumer phone, the nokia n9 of june 2011, before nokia ceo stephen elop redirected the whol |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
DigiNotar 📖 1998 - 2011 a dutch notary's office spent thirteen years selling the promise that a website was who it said it was, and ended up holding the certificates behind the login system of its own government. somebody got inside in june 2011 and issued at least 531 certificates nobody had asked for, and the company sai |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Google PowerMeter 📖 2009 - 2011 powermeter drew a line graph of the electricity leaving your fuse box, updated close to real time, on the theory that people shown their own consumption would use less of it. google.org built it and never tried to charge for it. the catch was in the plumbing: it needed either a utility willing to ha |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Google Desktop 📖 2004 - 2011 google desktop was google's attempt to index the inside of your computer the way it had already indexed the outside. it shipped in october 2004 as a free download for windows, added a sidebar of gadgets in 2006, and was killed on september 14 2011 in the same blog post that killed google pack and go |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Google Pack 📖 2006 - 2011 google's curated installer for windows. one download with a single updater managing a dozen free apps that the average new-pc owner needed. announced at ces 2006, killed five years later in the same "more focus" sweep that took google desktop with it. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
webOS 📖 2009 - 2011 webos was palm's last attempt to compete with iphone and android. it launched in january 2009 with a card-based multitasking model and a gesture area below the screen that quietly influenced every mobile UI that came after. hp bought palm for $1.2 billion in april 2010 to put webos on phones and tab |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Pushbutton 📖 2002 - 2011 paula byrne and sheila creak left bskyb in 2002 to build the things that happened when somebody pressed a button on a television remote, and for nine years pushbutton made them for clients like disney and the national lottery without its own name ever appearing on a screen. amazon bought the company |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Apple Front Row 📖 2005 - 2011 for six years macs had a hidden party trick. press menu on the bundled apple remote and the screen would dim, the whoom animation would play, and a clean 10-foot menu would let you browse itunes, iphoto, dvds. apple removed it in os x lion in july 2011 and shipped fewer macs with ir receivers after. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Apple iSync 📖 2003 - 2011 isync was the mac's answer to a problem that died with the iphone. you plugged in a nokia or a palm or a sony ericsson over bluetooth, hit sync, and your address book moved both ways. when icloud landed apple stopped pretending other phones existed, and isync went out of mac os x in lion without a p |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Google Labs 📖 2002 - 2011 for nine years google kept a public page of things that were not products yet. autocomplete started there in december 2004 as an experiment nobody was obliged to use. on 20 july 2011 bill coughran posted a note titled "more wood behind fewer arrows" and the page was scheduled for removal, three mont |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
GifBuilder 📖 1996 - 2011 yves piguet gave it away, which in 1996 was how the good mac utilities tended to arrive. gifbuilder took a stack of images and wrote them out as one animated gif, with the delay settable frame by frame, and for about a decade it was the tool behind a serious share of the moving pictures on the web. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Microsoft Office XP 📖 2001 - 2011 31 may 2001, and the thing microsoft chose to advertise was a paperclip being switched off. office xp was the first version of office that phoned home to activate itself, and the first microsoft tried to rent rather than sell. sixty million licenses went out in the first year. security patches kept |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
BackType 📖 2008 - 2011 backtype indexed the conversation that happened away from the article, the blog comments and the tweets that linked to a url, and made it searchable by person. it came out of y combinator in 2008 on fifteen thousand dollars of seed money. twitter bought the company on 5 july 2011 and switched the pr |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Final Cut Server 📖 2008 - 2011 final cut server was apple's media asset management server for post-production shops, descended from the artbox tool apple picked up in the 2006 proximity group acquisition. version 1.0 shipped in april 2008 at $999 for ten clients. version 1.5 in july 2009 dropped the per-client cap. apple killed t |
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| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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VMware Server 📖 2006 - 2011 in july 2006 vmware took a server product that had cost money since 2001, renamed it and gave it away, because xen was arriving in linux and microsoft had just made virtual server free. four years later vmware shipped a free bare-metal hypervisor that did not need a host operating system, which is w |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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QuteCom (WengoPhone) 📖 2005 - 2011 a french voip operator paid for an open source softphone and then gave it away. wengophone shipped on 25 june 2005 under the gpl and spoke plain sip, so you could point it at any provider you liked. it picked up msn and icq chat through libpurple along the way. wengo handed the project to mbdsys in |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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DVD Studio Pro 📖 2001 - 2011 apple shipped dvd studio pro in 2001 after buying astarte's dvdirector code in 2000. it was the high-end disc authoring tool for hollywood. apple sold it standalone until 2006 and then bundled it exclusively into final cut studio. version 4 added hd dvd authoring in 2005 right before hd dvd lost the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Final Cut Studio 📖 1999 - 2011 for twelve years final cut was the editing suite hollywood used when it was not using avid. final cut pro 7 shipped in 2009 inside the fcs3 bundle at 999 dollars with motion, color, soundtrack pro, dvd studio pro, plus compressor and shake. in june 2011 apple replaced it with final cut pro x, a comp |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Final Cut Express 📖 2003 - 2011 $299 bought you most of final cut pro with the professional formats taken back out. for eight years that was the honest middle of apple's video lineup, sitting above imovie and under a suite almost nobody bought casually. then final cut pro x arrived cheap enough that the middle had nothing left to |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
SageTV 📖 2002 - 2011 sagetv was the enthusiast end of the home-theater pc world in the early-2000s, a paid windows and linux app that ran your tuner card, scheduled recordings off a built-in guide, and pushed video out to hd200 set-top extenders over the network. jeffrey kardatzke's small team in goleta sold it through |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
eComStation 📖 2001 - 2011 ecomstation was the kind of operating system its users kept alive in defiance of every signal from the market. serenity systems licensed os/2 warp from ibm in 2001 and sold updated builds for a decade. the last general release was 2.1 in may 2011. ownership transferred away in 2012, development stop |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Dabble DB 📖 2006 - 2011 avi bryant and andrew catton ran a smalltalk consulting shop in vancouver and spent a year building a database that anyone could make by pasting in a spreadsheet. dabble db launched in june 2006 with ventures west money behind it. twitter bought the four-person team on 10 june 2010 for its analytics |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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PhoneValet Message Center 📖 2003 - 2011 a small box on the phone line with a mac behind it. parliant shipped phonevalet in july 2003 as a call log that announced callers out loud, then in 2004 swapped the hardware for one that could take the line off-hook, which turned the computer into the answering machine. version 4.0 arrived in march |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Adobe Soundbooth 📖 2007 - 2011 soundbooth was adobe's consumer-tier audio editor for the four years between adobe acquiring cool edit pro and the audition rebrand catching up. it shipped from CS3 in '07 through CS5 in '10. premiere and flash users got a 'send to soundbooth' button that opened a stripped-down editor with task-base |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1985-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Sun StarOffice 📖 1985 - 2011 staroffice was a hamburg-built office suite from 1985 that sun bought in 1999 because licensing microsoft office for 42,000 employees would have cost more than the company itself. sun open-sourced it in 2000 as openoffice. oracle bought sun in january 2010 and killed the commercial product in april |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Windows Live OneCare Safety Scanner 📖 2005 - 2011 a virus scan that ran inside a web page, from the years when that sounded like progress. microsoft opened windows live safety center in beta on 1 november 2005 and later renamed it after windows live onecare, the paid suite it sat beside. onecare was killed off in 2008 and the free scanner kept runn |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Gizmo5 📖 2005 - 2011 a sip softphone built on open standards by michael robertson, the guy from mp3.com and linspire. cross-platform desktop and a couple of mobile clients. it ran from 2005 to 2011 as the open answer to skype. google bought it for around 30 million dollars in november 2009 and shut the service off on ap |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Windows Live Toolbar 📖 2005 - 2011 windows live toolbar was microsoft's replacement for the msn search toolbar, shipping in the windows live wave series inside internet explorer 6 through 8. the final release was version 14.0.8064.0206 on 12 february 2009. wave 4 of windows live essentials in september 2010 dropped the toolbar for th |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Cmode 📖 2002 - 2011 in april 2002 coca-cola japan put a computer inside a drinks machine and wired it to a phone network. you registered on a site called club cmode over i-mode, charged a prepaid balance by feeding coins into the machine itself, then bought a drink by holding a qr code on your phone screen up to a sens |
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| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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au one My Page 📖 2006 - 2011 kddi said out loud which year the decline started, which almost nobody does. usage of its customizable handset portal peaked in 2008, and the company named that when it announced the closure on 1 november 2010. seven services went out together on 31 march 2011: the page itself, the file storage, the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Twitoaster 📖 2009 - 2011 twitter in 2009 had no threads. replies landed as loose messages with an @ stuck on the front, and reassembling a conversation was manual work, so arnaud meunier built something that did the reassembling and gave every user an archive page at twitoaster.com slash their name. it ran two years, got a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Google Gears 📖 2007 - 2011 google gears was a browser plugin from 2007 that added the features web apps did not yet have: a local sqlite database, background worker threads, a local caching server, geolocation. gmail offline, google reader offline, wordpress offline all shipped through gears. once html5 standardized most of t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Cedega 📖 2001 - 2011 transgaming forked wine while it was still under a permissive license and closed the source, then sold the result as a five dollar a month subscription for running windows games on linux. it worked well enough that people paid, and it annoyed the wine project enough that they relicensed in 2002 to s |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1986-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Sonic Solutions 📖 1986 - 2011 three people walked out of lucasfilm's audio division in 1986 and built the machine that took the hiss off old recordings. nonoise shipped in mid 1987 and the cd reissue business ran on it for years. the same company then built dvd creator in 1996 and by 2003 something like eighty percent of commerc |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Microsoft CardSpace 📖 2006 - 2011 cardspace was microsoft's attempt to put a system-level identity wallet inside windows. it shipped with .net 3.0 in november 2006 under the codename infocard, got the official name windows cardspace in 2007, and lived as a bundled component of vista and windows 7. almost no relying websites integrat |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Windows CardSpace 📖 2006 - 2011 kim cameron wrote seven laws of identity for microsoft and cardspace was the product built to obey them. you would keep your logins as cards in a wallet on your own machine and hand one over instead of typing a password. it shipped inside windows vista and windows 7, which means it reached hundreds |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Virtual PC 📖 1997 - 2011 virtual pc was the desktop virtualization product connectix released in june 1997 for mac and ported to windows by 1999. microsoft acquired it in february 2003. the windows version became the company's official client-side virtualization tool until windows 8 shipped hyper-v as a built-in component a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
TradElect 📖 2007 - 2011 accenture built it on windows server 2003 and sql server 2000, the london stock exchange paid around forty million pounds, and in june 2007 it replaced a system that needed 140 milliseconds to complete a trade. tradelect got that down to ten. on 8 september 2008 it went down for most of a trading da |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Mozilla Prism 📖 2007 - 2011 benjamin smedberg built the prototype as a conference demo in 2006 and mark finkle turned it into a mozilla labs project called prism, which put one web app in a bare window with no tabs and no address bar. it was a fix for a problem gmail had only just created. mozilla labs stopped maintaining it o |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
fflick 📖 2010 - 2011 fflick read movie tweets and sorted them into positive and negative buckets. it launched in august 2010 and google bought it five months later for ten million dollars. the team went into youtube. the site itself never came back. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
GetRight 📖 1997 - 2011 getright did one thing that mattered enormously on a dial-up modem, it let you resume a download that had died halfway. before it, a dropped connection at ninety percent meant starting the whole file again from zero. it was arguably the first real download manager, from a time when there was not eve |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
WinAce 📖 1999 - 2011 ace beat rar on compression by a few percent for about two years, and a few percent was never going to be enough against a format that was already on everyone's machine. winace spent the middle of its life shipping with an adware bundle, which is how a lot of people met it and why a lot of people re |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Sxipper 📖 2007 - 2011 sxipper was a firefox extension that filled login forms and managed openid personas, built by sxip identity in vancouver under dick hardt. it launched publicly in 2007 as a spinoff of hardt's identity 2.0 pitch and rode the last real wave of openid optimism through 2008. the parent company folded in |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
字幕.in 📖 2007 - 2011 a jobless 25-year-old built it in january 2007, because niconico douga had shown him that comments belonged on top of the video and not under it. 字幕.in let you type subtitles onto somebody else's youtube clip straight in the browser. when niconico went offline for a week that february the traffic ca |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Office Communicator 📖 2005 - 2010 office communicator was the in-office im client that microsoft shipped with live communications server, then office communications server. it gave corporate desktops presence dots wired into outlook so you could see whether the person you were emailing was at lunch. it also routed voice calls throug |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
EVEREST 📖 2004 - 2010 hardware diagnostics for people who built their own machines. lavalys shipped everest home and pro on may 3 2004, written by tamás miklós, who had stopped work on aida32 six weeks earlier. the free home edition ended on december 1 2005 and the whole line ended on november 19 2010, when the author's |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Entourage 📖 2000 - 2010 entourage shipped in october 2000 as part of office 2001 for mac, a personal information manager combining email with calendar and address book and tasks and notes into one program for classic mac os and later os x. it replaced outlook express on the mac side and was built by microsoft's macintosh b |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Vine 📖 2009 - 2010 microsoft vine was the post-katrina social network microsoft tried to build for emergencies. you would log in during a disaster and find the people in your life on a dashboard, with alerts pulled from twenty thousand news sources. it never left private beta in seattle. microsoft killed it after eigh |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Live Labs Pivot 📖 2010 - 2011 microsoft live labs pivot was a data-visualization client built on the seadragon deep-zoom engine, released as a free download in february 2010 and demoed by gary flake at ted that same month. microsoft disbanded live labs on 8 october 2010, moved the remaining team into bing, and flake resigned fro |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Adobe Media Player 📖 2007 - 2010 adobe built a television application for the desktop out of its own air runtime, showed it in april 2007 and shipped 1.0 a year later, with cbs and pbs among the networks signed up to supply programming. the pitch to publishers was that a downloaded player let them keep the branding and the advertis |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Haystack 📖 2009 - 2010 in march 2010 the us treasury licensed a piece of software for export to iran, which had not happened before, and the software was haystack. the press had already decided it worked: the guardian named austin heap innovator of the year and newsweek said he had found the perfect disguise for dissident |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
VersionTracker 📖 1995 - 2010 versiontracker was a software-update directory created in 1995 by kurt christensen in sacramento. it started as a mac-only catalog of shareware versions and grew into the place you checked to see if your copy of bbedit or graphicconverter had a newer build. cnet acquired it in august 2007, merged it |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Go-oo 📖 2007 - 2010 michael meeks had been patching openoffice.org since 2003, and in october 2007 novell let the patch set out under a name of its own. go-oo read microsoft works files and ran excel macros that upstream openoffice would choke on. then the document foundation announced libreoffice in september 2010 and |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Response Point 📖 2007 - 2010 in 2007 microsoft sold a phone system to companies with under fifty employees, and its selling point was a blue button on the handset that you held down and spoke a name into. four years before siri, on an office desk, working off the company directory. it never sold. microsoft moved the product to |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Microsoft FolderShare 📖 2001 - 2010 foldershare was a peer-to-peer file sync tool created by bytetaxi in 2001 and acquired by microsoft on november 3 2005. it sat in the windows live stack as the only direct pc-to-pc sync product microsoft ever shipped, with no required cloud middle. microsoft rebranded it windows live sync in the 200 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
DiggBar 📖 2009 - 2010 on 2 april 2009 digg shipped a toolbar that turned any address into digg.com plus a few characters. the page you asked for loaded underneath it inside a frame, so the browser said digg no matter whose work you were reading. publishers had frame-busting code out within the week and digg walked the th |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
OpenSolaris 📖 2005 - 2010 opensolaris was sun microsystems opening its own unix, starting with dtrace in january 2005 and the bulk of the solaris source that june. it had a written charter and a governing board the community actually elected, and it shipped three public distributions. oracle finished buying sun in january 20 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
4TVInteractive 📖 2002 - 2010 every night between three and four in the morning a data stream went out over british digital terrestrial television, and the receivers built for it woke up and wrote fourteen days of listings into memory. that was 4tvinteractive, on channel 300, and it had a full guide two years before freeview its |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Photo Story 3 📖 2003 - 2010 microsoft photo story started as a research project for adding narrated motion to still photos. the first version shipped in 2003 inside the paid plus! digital media edition add-on. photo story 3 arrived in 2004 as a free download for licensed windows xp users and stayed the most loved version for y |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Hotbar 📖 1999 - 2010 two founders put a plugin into internet explorer in 1999 that gave you emoticons for your email and skins for the browser window, and paid for it by watching where you went afterward. three million people had it running by 2002, most of them because it arrived attached to something else they had act |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Real Alternative 📖 2003 - 2010 realplayer was the toll you paid to watch a .rm file, and a lot of people decided the toll was too high. real alternative unbundled it: the realmedia codecs and a directshow splitter, packed with a copy of media player classic, in about five megabytes with nothing left running afterward. its maintai |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Windows 2000 📖 1999 - 2010 december 1999 is when microsoft handed it to manufacturing, and three days before the february retail launch a leaked internal memo counted over 63,000 potential known defects in a product being advertised as a standard in reliability. it shipped anyway and it held up. active directory came with it |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
PGP Corporation 📖 2002 - 2010 network associates gave up on pgp in october 2001, suspended development, and put the assets out for sale. jon callas and phil dunkelberger founded a company in june 2002 for the specific purpose of buying them, and closed on it that august. for eight years pgp corporation was the reason the most fa |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| ....|
|_____|
|
MapQuest 📖 1996 - present (effectively dead by 2010) dormant the way you got driving directions before google maps. you typed in two addresses, got back a list of turn-by-turn instructions, and printed it out on a4 paper before you left the house. the site is still online but nobody has used it for anything in fifteen years. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Green Dam Youth Escort (绿坝·花季护航) 📖 2008 - 2010 the ministry of industry and information technology paid 41.7 million yuan for one year of it in may 2008 and never paid again. in may 2009 it ordered every pc sold in china from 1 july to ship with the filter, and on 30 june it backed down. researchers at michigan had needed under twelve hours to f |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
BumpTop 📖 2009 - 2010 bumptop turned your desktop icons into stacks of paper on a 3d table with physics. you could fling them at the wall or pile them in a corner with a lasso. the app shipped in april '09 as a free download with a paid pro tier, and google bought the team thirteen months later. it was discontinued almos |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
S60 📖 2001 - 2010 nokia built s60 on top of symbian and then handed it most of the smartphone market for the better part of a decade. the menu key and the ability to install an app after you had already bought the phone were s60, not symbian, and almost nobody outside the industry knew there was a difference. the 5th |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
tr.im 📖 2008 - 2010 august 2009 is when the web found out what a short link actually is. nambu network announced tr.im was over, then reversed itself within days and promised to hand the service to the public instead. nothing came of that. the shortener quit for real in april 2010, worn down by spammers rather than by |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Mozilla Sunbird 📖 2003 - 2010 mozilla sunbird was a standalone calendar program from the mozilla foundation, the same people who made firefox. announced in july 2003 and first released in 2005, it was an attempt to do for the calendar what firefox did for the browser: a free, open-source app anyone could run on any system. it ne |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
G.ho.st 📖 2006 - 2010 g.ho.st stood for global hosted operating system and it lived on the country code of sao tome and principe, which remains the best thing about it. what loaded was a free desktop inside a browser tab with your files and your mail in it, running on amazon's servers and aimed at anybody whose only comp |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Wayfinder 📖 1995 - 2010 wayfinder sold turn-by-turn navigation as a monthly subscription on symbian and java handsets, back when the alternative was a garmin suckered to the windshield. it listed in stockholm in 2005 at six hundred million kronor and vodafone bought the whole company in december 2008 for 239 million. ten m |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Win4Lin 📖 2000 - 2010 version 5.5, february 18 2009, was the last release anybody shipped. win4lin ran windows applications inside a window on a linux desktop, first the windows 9x family on a patched kernel, later windows xp on a tuned build of qemu. it was a licensed commercial product sitting on top of a category that |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
On2 Technologies 📖 1992 - 2010 a company almost nobody could name wrote the code that played video on your computer for eighteen years. it started as the duck corporation in 1992 doing cutscenes for cd-rom games, gave vp3 away to xiph in 2002 where it became theora, then put vp6 inside flash in 2004, which is how it came to decod |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Marratech 📖 1998 - 2010 a swedish company out of luleå university of technology, founded in 1998, selling desktop software for e-meetings: voice and video with a shared whiteboard and group chat alongside them, years before a browser could carry any of it. google bought the software in april 2007 to run its own scattered o |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Maemo 📖 2005 - 2010 maemo was the linux distribution nokia built for its internet tablet line starting in november 2005 with the nokia 770. four hardware generations shipped over five years from the 770 to the n900. the platform's reputation among european linux users was outsized for its actual sales numbers. it merge |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Windows Mobile 📖 2000 - 2010 windows mobile was the pocket-pc-era microsoft mobile os, launched april 19 2000 as pocket pc 2000 on a windows ce 3.0 kernel. it peaked at 42 percent market share in 2007 and powered around 50 million devices, 80 percent of them built by htc. windows phone 7 (a clean-slate rewrite that shared the b |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Project Darkstar 📖 2007 - 2010 oracle closed the 7.4 billion dollar sun acquisition on 27 january 2010, and within a week a sun engineer posted on the project darkstar forum that the project was finished. darkstar was java middleware that let you write game server logic as though it were single threaded while the stack ran it in |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1982-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Sun Microsystems 📖 1982 - 2010 the silicon valley brand that built java and a long list of other infrastructure you have used without thinking about who wrote it. founded february 1982 at stanford. oracle bought sun in january 2010 for $7.4 billion and turned the brand off in pieces over the next few years. the software is mostly |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Yahoo! Go 📖 2006 - 2010 yahoo go was the version of yahoo you got on a phone in 2006. mail, flickr, onesearch, weather, finance, all behind one j2me jar or one windows mobile installer. it never left beta. when the iphone arrived it stopped making sense, and yahoo killed it in january 2010. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
RichCopy 📖 2001 - 2010 ken tamaru first built this at microsoft in 2001, and it reached the rest of us in the spring of 2009, when technet magazine ran it as that month's free utility. it copied across many threads at once instead of one file at a time, and it did it from a window rather than a command line. microsoft nev |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Encarta 📖 1993 - 2009 the multimedia encyclopedia that came on cd-rom and later dvd. microsoft bought funk & wagnalls in 1989, dressed it up with video clips and panoramic images, and shipped encarta in 1993. for a generation of kids it was THE encyclopedia. you put the disc in, double-clicked the entry on the ottoman em |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
FireTune 📖 2005 - 2009 mozilla's trademark policy killed this one, and totalidea said so on the page where the download used to be. firetune was a free windows utility that asked how fast your computer was and how fast your connection was, then wrote the matching settings into firefox for you. it shipped in march 2005, wh |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
PowerQuest PartitionMagic 📖 1994 - 2009 partitionmagic was the boot floppy you reached for when you wanted to make room for a second os without wiping the disk. powerquest invented the category in 1994. symantec bought it in 2003, declined to ship a new version, and let it die in december 2009 with no vista support. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Zembly 📖 2008 - 2009 sun microsystems spent 2008 arguing that the next generation of software would be small social apps written by people who were not professional developers, and zembly was the tool it built to prove it: a full development environment in a browser tab, aimed at facebook apps and at whatever opensocial |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
モバプリパ 📖 2007 - 2009 you bought the file on your phone and then pointed the phone's infrared port at an epson colorio, and the printer started. seiko epson and sammy networks ran this from july 2007, au only at first and then across all three japanese carriers, and the server kept a log of every infrared handoff so nobo |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Office Accounting 📖 2006 - 2009 microsoft office accounting was a small-business bookkeeping program shipped as part of the office 2007 lineup. it started in 2006 as microsoft small business accounting and was renamed office accounting in 2007. the express edition was bundled free with several office 2007 skus, the professional ed |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Xoopit 📖 2006 - 2009 xoopit was a firefox plugin that added a strip across the top of gmail showing every attachment you had ever received as thumbnails. photos, videos, pdfs, indexed and searchable. yahoo bought it in july 2009 for around twenty million, turned off the gmail plugin on 13 november the same year, and fol |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
S! Onajimi Sousa (S!おなじみ操作) 📖 2006 - 2009 japan opened mobile number portability on 24 october 2006, and softbank lost that first week by 23,900 subscribers while au gained over a hundred thousand. a month later softbank shipped a handset that could wear a rival carrier's menu: you downloaded a settings file and your new sharp phone laid it |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Windows Ultimate Extras 📖 2007 - 2009 microsoft sold windows vista ultimate at $399 retail and justified the gap over home premium with a program called ultimate extras: premium add-ons that would arrive regularly through windows update for the customers who wanted it all. over almost three years nine things arrived, among them a poker |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1987-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Works 📖 1987 - 2009 microsoft works was the office suite you got when you bought a compaq or an emachines at a discount. it had its own word processor that almost saved to.doc and a spreadsheet that almost ran excel formulas. there was also a database, which nobody i ever met admitted to using. for 22 years it sat on t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Ulead PhotoImpact 📖 1996 - 2009 most image editors made you choose between pushing pixels and drawing shapes. photoimpact refused to, and kept a vector object layer sitting on top of the bitmap where you could still go back and edit the text three days later. taipei shipped it from 1996 to 2008 across thirteen versions, aimed squa |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Popfly 📖 2007 - 2009 popfly was a microsoft web tool for stitching mashups out of building blocks in the browser, launched as a public beta on may 18 2007 by the developer division. it ran on silverlight and gave each user 100mb of cloud storage. you could assemble a small game or web widget without writing any js by ha |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Google Mashup Editor 📖 2007 - 2009 may 2007 was peak mashup and google shipped a browser ide for it. you wrote a page in a tag set google invented, pointed it at an rss feed, and google hosted the result under a googlemashups.com address. it never came off the invitation list. on 14 january 2009 vic gundotra put it in a shutdown post |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Apple Shake 📖 1997 - 2009 shake was the compositing program peter jackson's wellington vfx houses used to put gollum on screen. it started life at nothing real in 1997, was bought by apple in february 2002, and got priced down from its irix high-end origins to under five thousand dollars on the mac. apple stopped developing |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Borland 📖 1983 - 2009 borland was the company that taught you what an ide could feel like, two decades before that became normal to expect. turbo pascal undercut microsoft pascal by an order of magnitude in 1983 and ran on every dos machine that mattered. delphi held the windows-app market in eastern europe and turkey fo |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1991-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Money 📖 1991 - 2009 microsoft money was the household budgeting app that came in a shrinkwrap box. it lost the fight to quicken in the US and never built a home in turkey. mint launched in 2007. money got the sunset notice in 2009. a free read-only edition called money plus sunset shipped the next year so existing cust |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Windows Live OneCare 📖 2006 - 2009 microsoft's first paid consumer antivirus suite. it launched may 31 2006 as a $50 per year subscription that bundled the antivirus engine with a firewall, plus a pc backup utility. it ran on windows xp and vista. detection rates placed it last among 17 antivirus products in 2007 av-comparatives test |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
AvantGo 📖 1997 - 2009 avantgo let you read the web on a handheld before a handheld could reach the web. you subscribed to channels on a desktop computer, and every time you dropped the device in its cradle the client wrote fresh pages onto it for you to read somewhere with no signal. it listed in september 2000 at the ve |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1989-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
WinCIM 📖 1989 - 2009 compuserve was a text service you reached by typing go and a word. in 1989 it moved to a private binary protocol called hmi and shipped its own software so the same forums could be read through windows and buttons instead of message numbers. the windows build, wincim, is the one people remember, and |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Predictor@home 📖 2004 - 2009 the first boinc project that did not come out of berkeley. michela taufer's group at the scripps research institute launched it on 9 june 2004 to enter the sixth casp, the contest where teams are handed protein sequences and asked what shape the finished molecule takes. 6,786 volunteers gave it more |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Macromedia HomeSite 📖 1996 - 2009 homesite shipped september 1996 from a single developer in north carolina named nick bradbury, written as a delphi side project. it was the html editor for people who wanted to see the markup. allaire bought it in 1997 and embedded the same engine inside coldfusion studio. macromedia inherited it th |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
trueSpace 📖 1994 - 2009 roman ormandy started building 3d software on the amiga in the mid eighties and shipped truespace 1.0 for windows in 1994. it put modeling and animation into one window for a few hundred dollars while the packages it competed against cost as much as a car. microsoft bought caligari in early 2008, ga |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
XFree86 📖 1992 - 2009 for twelve years this was the thing that put pixels on the screen of almost every linux and bsd machine on earth, and almost nobody who used it could name it. the xfree86 project ran x development by default through the 1990s because the official consortium had stopped. then it added an attribution |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Zango 📖 1999 - 2009 two brothers in bellevue built a business on a bargain nobody was meant to read: you take the free game, we take the right to put advertisements on your screen from then on. by the time the ftc finished counting, the software had gone onto american machines seventy million times and shown almost sev |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Agent 📖 1997 - 2009 microsoft agent was the ActiveX-based animated-character runtime that shipped in september 1997 alongside internet explorer 4. four free characters lived on the start menu (merlin the wizard, peedy the parrot, genie, robby the robot) and any application or web page could call them up to walk around |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
SafeDisc 📖 1998 - 2009 safedisc was the macrovision pc-game copy-protection system that shipped on hundreds of cd and dvd titles from 1998 onward. final build 4.90.010 went out 2 may 2008. macrovision divested the games protection business to trymedia in 2008 and 31 march 2009 is the date the safedisc service for new titl |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Vindigo 📖 1999 - 2009 two traders quit d. e. shaw in 1999 and built a city guide that lived on a palm pilot. vindigo held restaurant reviews and walking directions for american cities and loaded them onto the device at sync time. it worked with the radio off, because there was no radio. it sold over six million subscript |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
CAPICOM 📖 2001 - 2009 signing something with the real windows crypto library meant c++ and a lot of it. capicom meant three lines of visual basic, which is why script authors and asp pages and internet explorer itself all ended up calling it. being an activex control reachable from a web page is also what finished it. ms |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
StarForce 📖 2000 - 2009 starforce was the russian copy-protection company that built the aggressive kernel-level drm system used on western pc-game releases from the early 2000s through the mid-2000s. it kept splinter cell chaos theory uncracked for 422 days. it also installed a driver that did not uninstall with the game, |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
gOS 📖 2007 - 2009 gos was a google-themed ubuntu derivative built around the google web apps suite. it shipped on the everex gpc tc2502 at walmart for 199 dollars on november 1 2007, founded by david liu of good os llc in los angeles. the first version put gmail and youtube into the main launcher, with picasa web and |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Nokia Lifeblog 📖 2004 - 2009 the earliest mainstream idea of lifelogging shipped as an s60 app plus a windows companion. every photo and MMS your phone captured would sync to a timeline on your PC, timestamped and geotagged from cell tower data. nokia sold it as the moblog answer for the nseries. by the time the ovi rebrand swe |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Palm OS 📖 1996 - 2009 the operating system that lived in your palm before the phone did. it taught a generation to write in a stripped-down alphabet so a machine could read them, and it kept your calendar and your contacts in a slab you tapped with a plastic stick. for a decade it was what a handheld computer meant. then |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Flektor 📖 2007 - 2009 flektor let you pull photos and video into a browser page and cut them together with about a hundred effects. the finished piece was called a flek and it embedded into a myspace profile, which in 2007 was the only distribution that mattered. jason rubin and andy gavin built it after running naughty |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
GNU arch 📖 2001 - 2009 a distributed version control system written as a pile of shell scripts in 2001, years before the industry agreed that the central server was the problem. changesets instead of file revisions, and branching that happened across machines rather than through one server. all of it correct, all of it wr |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Norton SystemWorks 📖 1998 - 2009 norton systemworks was symantec's answer to the question every windows owner was asking in 1998, which was why the computer had gotten slow. it put norton utilities and norton antivirus in one box behind a single button that promised to check everything at once. a dozen releases later the suite had |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
UIQ 📖 2002 - 2009 symbian shipped three provisional user interfaces and let the phone makers pick. nokia picked the one it controlled, called it series 60 and put it on everything. sony ericsson picked the pen-driven one, quartz, which became uiq and lived in ronneby sweden as its own company. for six years that was |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
U3 📖 2004 - 2009 in october 2005 a usb stick started arriving with a second personality: a small read-only cd drive welded to the front of it, put there so windows would autorun a menu. sandisk and m-systems called the platform u3 and sold it as your software following you between machines. most people met it as the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Norton AntiBot 📖 2007 - 2009 avg finished buying sana security on 16 january 2009, and symantec stopped selling norton antibot not long after, because the behavior engine inside the product had been rented from sana all along. the thing was eighteen months old. it had been sold as a second layer to sit next to your antivirus du |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
SuperDOT 📖 1984 - 2009 what killed it was a database migration, announced in a memo to member firms and carried out stock by stock through 2009. for twenty-five years superdot was how an order got from a brokerage in another state onto the floor of the new york stock exchange, and by the end it was the reason a human spec |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Tickle.com (eMode) 📖 1999 - 2008 emode.com launched in 1999 as a san francisco quiz site that ran on a single viral email to four hundred friends. it grew into millions of monthly visitors taking "what career are you" and "what dog breed are you" tests, then renamed itself tickle around 2002. monster.com bought the company in may 2 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Google Ride Finder 📖 2005 - 2008 between 2005 and 2008 google labs ran an experiment that showed you where the taxis actually were. ride finder pulled gps positions off participating taxi and limousine fleets in ten american metros and drew them on google maps, refreshed every five minutes. you still had to call the dispatcher your |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Filterset.G 📖 2004 - 2008 before there was easylist there was one person's text file, updated weekly and downloaded by enough people to break the hosting bill under it. graham pierce ran filterset.g on donations from july 2004, stripped the homepage down to plain text to save bandwidth, and on 18 december 2008 commented the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Stikkit 📖 2006 - 2008 a sticky note that read plain english and turned a date into a reminder on its own, built by rael dornfest at values of n. twitter bought the company in november 2008 to hire dornfest, not to keep the app. two weeks later, on the eighth of december 2008, stikkit was switched off. it was doing lightw |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Entellium 📖 2000 - 2008 entellium sold customer relationship management software out of seattle and told its investors it was selling roughly four times as much of it as it was. paul johnston and his finance chief parrish jones kept a second set of books for four years and raised more than fifty million dollars against the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
WinFixer 📖 2005 - 2008 winfixer ran a scan nobody asked for and reported infections that were not there, then charged forty dollars to remove them. it arrived through ad networks rather than downloads, which meant an ordinary website with a bad banner on it was enough to get you. more than a million people paid. the ftc g |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Antics3D 📖 2005 - 2008 development costs that outran revenue closed antics technologies in 2008 and the software went with it. antics3d let a director drop characters into a set and tell them where to walk, which was previsualization without an animator on the payroll. the bbc used it to train film students. on 28 novembe |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Adobe Ultra 📖 2007 - 2008 adobe bought serious magic in october 2006, shipped its keyer once as adobe ultra inside creative suite 3, and then left it out of creative suite 4 when that went on sale on 15 october 2008. there was no announcement, because there rarely is for something that only ever existed inside a bundle. ultr |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
MusicMatch Jukebox 📖 1997 - 2008 musicmatch was the windows app that ripped a cd into mp3 and tagged it cleanly in one window. yahoo bought it for $160m in 2004 and rebranded it as yahoo music jukebox. by 2008 yahoo had sold its music assets to rhapsody and the servers went off. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
MuPAD 📖 1992 - 2008 paderborn, 1989: a research group starts building a computer algebra system meant to run on parallel hardware, which is where the name comes from. multi processing algebra data tool. it went commercial in 1997 and gave itself away free to universities until 2005. mathworks bought the company in sept |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Adobe FlashPaper 📖 2003 - 2008 flashpaper started life at a company called blue pacific software, got picked up by macromedia, and first shipped to the public bundled inside contribute 2 in october 2003 as a virtual printer that produced flash swf documents. the pitch was that flash player was already installed on more browsers t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Sha-Mail Card (写メールカード) 📖 2003 - 2008 one hundred and ninety yen bought a postcard with your own photograph on it, printed and posted by somebody else, ordered by mailing the picture from your handset to an address at sha-mail.com. vodafone started it in november 2003, a month after it had finished painting its name over j-phone. softba |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Linspire 📖 2001 - 2008 the desktop linux that walmart sold on $299 microtel pcs starting in 2002 with a wine compatibility layer that promised to run microsoft office. michael robertson, the founder of mp3.com, incorporated lindows inc. in july 2001 in san diego and shipped lindowsos in january 2002. microsoft sued for th |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
I Am Rich 📖 2008 - 2008 armin heinrich put a glowing red gem on the app store for nine hundred ninety nine dollars and ninety nine cents, which was the highest price apple allowed, and it did nothing except display a short mantra with a spelling mistake left in it. eight people bought it before apple took it down inside tw |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Sony SonicStage 📖 2001 - 2008 sonicstage was sony's attempt to be itunes. it managed atrac music files, tied them to your machine through openmg drm, and pushed them onto a walkman through a one-way usb cable. the international version stopped getting updates in august 2007. the japanese version limped on under a renamed brand u |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
YouOS 📖 2006 - 2008 youos was a webshaka product, four y combinator founders in palo alto, and in 2006 it put a windowed desktop inside a browser tab at a time when that was close to impossible. it had a javascript api and an in-browser editor, and users wrote over seven hundred applications against it. pc world ranked |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
CoolWebSearch 📖 2003 - 2008 coolwebsearch changed your homepage to coolwebsearch.com and then made itself extremely hard to take back off. webroot's audits in early 2005 found it on close to half the windows machines it examined, which its threat research lead put at roughly 127 million worldwide, and he called it the ebola of |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1990-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
NetManage 📖 1990 - 2008 zvi alon, an engineer out of the technion, started netmanage in cupertino in 1990 and sold a tcp/ip stack for a version of windows that had no idea the internet existed. chameleon did well, and the sockets interface underneath it went into the public domain, where it fed the design of winsock. micro |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Google Browser Sync 📖 2006 - 2008 a firefox extension out of google labs, free from 8 june 2006, that pushed your bookmarks, cookies, saved passwords and open tabs to google's servers so a second machine could pull the whole session down and continue it. this was two years before chrome existed and three before firefox shipped sync |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Xgl 📖 2006 - 2008 february 2006, a novell demo showed a linux desktop rotating on the faces of a cube with windows you could see through, and for about eighteen months that clip was the most persuasive argument the linux desktop had. xgl was the thing underneath it, written by david reveman to put every drawing opera |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Gobuntu 📖 2007 - 2008 mark shuttleworth wanted an ubuntu with nothing in it the free software foundation would refuse, and in october 2007 he got one. eight months later jono bacon wrote to the development list that gobuntu's changes would be folded back into mainline ubuntu, because mainline had grown an installer optio |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1986-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Gemstar-TV Guide International 📖 1986 - 2008 seven point nine billion dollars bought a magazine, and the magazine was never the point. gemstar owned the patents on putting a television schedule onto a television screen, and it collected from everyone who tried, from the set makers to the companies building the first dvrs. henry yuen ran it as |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Adobe GoLive 📖 1996 - 2008 golive was Adobe's web authoring app from 1999 to 2008. it started life as a small mac-only HTML editor called GoLive CyberStudio. Adobe bought the company, renamed the product, and shipped it alongside Photoshop in the Creative Suite box. then Adobe bought Macromedia, which already had Dreamweaver. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Gator / Claria 📖 1998 - 2008 gator started as a 1998 password autofill utility from a stanford-mba founder and an ex-symantec co-founder. by 2003 it was bundled into every free download anyone wanted and serving so many pop-up ads on top of major news sites that the new york times had to sue. the company renamed itself claria, |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Visual Basic 6 📖 1998 - 2008 visual basic 6 launched in mid 1998 and became the most popular programming language in the world by tiobe count for several years. microsoft ended mainstream support on march 31 2005 and extended support on april 8 2008. binaries written in it are still running in corporate environments around the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1977-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
ASCII Corporation 📖 1977 - 2008 ascii started in 1977 as a computer magazine and became microsoft's first office outside america a year later. by 1980 its licensing of microsoft basic in japan accounted for forty percent of everything microsoft sold anywhere. it co-designed the msx home computer standard and it published famitsu, |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Automatix 📖 2006 - 2008 ubuntu's own cto said in november 2006 that he could not recommend it and that machines which had used it could not be given a clean upgrade path. people installed it anyway, because a fresh ubuntu could not play an mp3 or a dvd and this fixed that from a menu. the announcement came at 18:50 on 24 m |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
WhenU SaveNow 📖 2000 - 2008 whenu save arrived bundled with free software you actually wanted and then served you pop-ups matched to whatever site you were looking at. the company said it sat on 25 to 30 million desktops. it spent its whole life insisting in american courtrooms that this was contextual advertising rather than |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Go!Zilla 📖 1995 - 2008 go!zilla was the loud one. it broke a file into pieces, pulled the pieces at the same time, and picked the download back up when the phone line dropped, which on a modem was the whole ballgame. it paid for itself by carrying aureate's ad software, and when aureate renamed itself radiate and bought g |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
PrivatePhone 📖 2006 - 2008 netzero switched off its voice business on 15 december 2007 and the free voicemail number went with it. for twenty months privatephone had given anyone who asked a real us number in almost any state, with every call going straight to a mailbox you read on the web. the closing date was announced for |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Yahoo! Design 📖 2007 - 2008 yahoo ran a design innovation team, called yHaus inside the building, and gave it a public site at design.yahoo.com to show nine data-visualization prototypes built on its own properties, from flickr to yahoo answers. in february 2008 the whole team went in a thousand-person layoff and the work was |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
WebSideStory 📖 1996 - 2008 websidestory was an early enterprise web analytics company, founded in san diego on 10 september 1996 by blaise barrelet. its two main products were hitbox, a free consumer-tier visitor counter that ran on hundreds of thousands of sites, and hbx analytics, the paid enterprise-tier tool that competed |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1990-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
PC-cillin 📖 1990 - 2008 los angeles in 1988, and a copy protection dongle whose profits paid for the pivot into antivirus. trend micro's first real product was named like a prescription and it behaved like one: pc-cillin shipped in 1990 into a market that had only just worked out it needed a scanner at all, and it sold acr |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Namesys 📖 2000 - 2008 reiserfs was the fast one, the journaling filesystem that beat ext3 on small files and shipped as the default on suse. the company behind it was effectively one man, and in october 2006 that man was arrested for the murder of his wife, nina reiser. namesys stopped trading in january 2008, three mont |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
System Commander 📖 1993 - 2008 v communications of san jose sold a boxed utility whose entire job was the three seconds before an operating system loads. system commander arrived in 1993, kept a menu of everything installed on the machine, and could hide partitions from each of them so that windows would never touch the linux dis |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Java Virtual Machine 📖 1996 - 2007 the msjvm came with internet explorer 3 in 1996 and was the fastest way to run java on windows for about two years, which is not in dispute. what is in dispute is what microsoft added to it: hooks that let a java program call windows directly, and pieces of the standard that were never finished. sun |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Picture It! 📖 1996 - 2007 picture it! launched in september 1996 as microsoft's answer to the photoshop-is-for-professionals problem. it ran on pentium-class hardware with 8 megabytes of ram and shipped with a wizard-driven interface that walked users through cropping and red-eye removal. it pioneered consumer sprite editing |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
AOL OpenRide 📖 2006 - 2007 fourteen months is a short life for software with a launch campaign behind it. openride arrived on 4 october 2006 as aol's answer to the question of what a company built on dial-up does once the dial-up is gone, and the answer was a single window split into four panes that you dragged around with a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Sherlock 📖 1998 - 2007 apple's built-in mac search and internet-services tool, shipped with mac os 8.5 in 1998. sherlock 3 in 2002 added web channels for stocks and weather that looked exactly like a small mac app called watson. watson's developer never recovered. the verb "sherlocked" entered the developer vocabulary tha |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Direct Revenue 📖 2002 - 2007 direct revenue was an adware company with venture funding, a manhattan office and clients like american express and ford. its software arrived attached to free screensavers and games, watched what you browsed, served popups, and was engineered so that removing it was as difficult as the law would to |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
BlackICE Defender 📖 1998 - 2007 twelve thousand machines was the entire vulnerable population, and the witty worm reached all of it in about forty-five minutes on the night of 19 march 2004, deleting pieces of every hard disk it touched. the hole was in debug code left inside the icq parser of a product whose whole job was watchin |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Movieland 📖 2005 - 2007 movieland sold movie downloads to people who had never asked for them, by installing software that filled the screen with a pop-up demanding $29.95 and would not let the window be closed or muted. the message claimed you had taken a three day free trial and let it lapse. most of the people who compl |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Tegic Communications 📖 1996 - 2007 one press per letter. that was the entire product, and for about a decade it was the difference between a phone you could write on and a phone you could not. the idea came out of accessibility research in 1987, turned into a seattle company in 1996, got bought by aol in 1999 and sold to nuance for t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1991-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
AppleWorks 📖 1991 - 2007 it started as clarisworks in 1991, an all-in-one suite where word processing, spreadsheet, drawing, painting, database, and a terminal lived under one icon. claris was apple's software spinoff. when apple dissolved the spinoff in 1998 it took the suite back, renamed it appleworks, and let it run on |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1987-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Adobe Authorware 📖 1987 - 2007 authorware was the icon-and-flowchart e-learning authoring tool of choice from the late eighties through the early two-thousands. michael allen launched it in 1987 after building plato-style instruction at control data. macromind paracomp merged with authorware in 1992 to form macromedia. adobe boug |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
CoralQQ 📖 2001 - 2007 shenzhen police arrested chen shoufu in beijing in august 2007 and took the servers. he had spent six years giving away a patched build of tencent qq that removed the ads and showed you where the other person was connecting from, plus a dozen things tencent had never shipped. china's biggest messeng |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1988-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Derive 📖 1988 - 2007 in 1977 a professor at the university of hawaii heard that a man in honolulu had lisp running on an intel 8080, and went to find him. david stoutemyer and albert rich formed soft warehouse two years later, sold mumath, then built derive on top of their own lisp. it did real symbolic algebra in a foo |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Linux Screen Reader 📖 2006 - 2007 ibm changed its mind about gnome accessibility on 31 may 2007, and the following afternoon peter parente wrote to five mailing lists at once to explain what that meant. one of the things it meant was that the linux screen reader, a python program that read the gnome desktop out loud and had existed |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1988-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Adobe FreeHand 📖 1988 - 2007 freehand started at altsys in 1988 and passed through aldus and macromedia before adobe inherited it in the 2005 macromedia acquisition. by then adobe already owned illustrator. on may 15, 2007 adobe announced it would stop developing freehand and steered its 400,000 users toward illustrator. a desi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
grid.org 📖 2001 - 2007 a screensaver that did chemistry. you installed it, left the machine on, and while nobody was typing it tested drug-like molecules against protein targets and mailed the results back to austin. united devices ran it from april 2001 with oxford chemists and a cancer research foundation, and at its he |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Adobe ImageReady 📖 1998 - 2007 imageready was the half of photoshop that handled the web. animated gifs, sliced table-layout images, rollover hover states. for nine years it shipped as a separate app that you toggled into from photoshop's toolbar. at the creative suite 3 release in april 2007, adobe folded the popular features ba |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Visual FoxPro 📖 1984 - 2007 visual foxpro was the database-and-language combo that ran small accountancy and clinic software through the 90s and 2000s. fox software built it, microsoft bought it in 1992, then announced no version 10 in march 2007. extended support ended january 2015. the apps it built are still out there. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
AppForge 📖 1999 - 2007 visual basic programmers who wanted their software to run on a palm pilot bought crossfire, and crossfire phoned a license server every time anything was built or installed. the company behind it ceased operations on 13 march 2007 and handed its assets to a creditor trustee owing 1.8 million dollars |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Plus! 📖 1995 - 2007 microsoft plus! was a paid windows add-on disc from 1995 to 2007. it gave you desktop themes and screen savers the base os shipped without, plus a handful of bonus utilities like 3d pinball space cadet and the internet jumpstart kit that bundled internet explorer 1.0 with a dial-up setup wizard. the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
NetMeeting 📖 1996 - 2007 netmeeting was the icon nobody clicked. microsoft shipped it bundled with internet explorer 3 in may 1996, and for a decade it sat in the start menu of every windows machine on earth as conf.exe. it offered voice and video calling on top of desktop sharing, all over h.323. almost nobody used it. win |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Outlook Express 📖 1996 - 2007 outlook express was the email program preinstalled on every windows machine for ten years. nobody bought it because nobody had to, and nobody loved it because there was nothing to love. windows vista renamed it to windows mail in 2007 and the brand quietly dissolved. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Active Desktop 📖 1997 - 2007 active desktop arrived inside internet explorer 4 in september 1997 and replaced the windows wallpaper layer with a browser. alongside it came the channel bar, a strip of buttons for publishers whose pages were supposed to download themselves overnight so you could read them offline. the whole desig |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1990-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Program Manager 📖 1990 - 2007 program manager is what windows booted into between 1990 and 1995. one large window holding smaller windows, each of them full of icons you had sorted into groups yourself, with no start menu and no taskbar anywhere. windows 95 took the job off it and handed it to explorer, but the executable kept s |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
HyperTerminal 📖 1995 - 2007 microsoft did not write hyperterminal. it licensed a cut-down version of a michigan company's terminal program in 1995 and dropped it into accessories, where it sat through every windows release until vista arrived without it. by then almost nobody was dialing a bulletin board, but a generation of n |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
EAX (Environmental Audio Extensions) 📖 1998 - 2007 windows vista reached consumers on 30 january 2007 with the audio stack rewritten and the hardware path taken out, and every effect creative had spent nine years building went quiet on the same day. eax arrived with the sound blaster live! on 11 august 1998 as a set of reverb presets running on a ch |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
NTBackup 📖 1993 - 2007 the bkf file outlived the program that wrote it, and that is the whole story. ntbackup shipped with windows nt on 27 july 1993, written originally by arcada and conner rather than by microsoft, and it stayed in the box through six releases of windows without ever being loved. vista replaced it on 30 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
ClipBook Viewer 📖 1992 - 2007 windows for workgroups 3.1 arrived in october 1992 with a program that let you name the thing you had just copied and then publish it to the office network under an access control list. clipbook viewer rode every release of windows nt through xp, hidden behind clipbrd.exe and opened by almost no one |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Windows Address Book 📖 1996 - 2007 every windows machine between 1996 and vista kept its contacts in one file ending in .wab, and outlook express read it, and so did anything else that asked. that was the design goal. it was also the reason that when iloveyou went around in may 2000, it could mail itself to everyone you knew without |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Windows File Protection 📖 2000 - 2007 dll hell was the name for what happened when an installer dropped an old system file on top of a newer one and took the machine down with it. microsoft's answer in windows 2000 was a service that watched the protected files and put the original back from a hidden cache the second anything touched th |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Direct Cable Connection 📖 1995 - 2007 a laplink parallel cable and two windows machines got you a network before an ethernet card was a given, and the wizard that set it up sat in accessories under communications from windows 95 onward. windows vista dropped it. microsoft's own kb article 930086 confirmed as much on 12 january 2007 in t |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
3721 (Yahoo Assistant) 📖 1998 - 2007 3721 was the plug-in that taught china to hate plug-ins. zhou hongyi built it in 1998 so people could type a chinese word into internet explorer instead of a url, a real idea for a web that assumed you could read english. the trouble was how it got onto your machine and how hard it fought to stay. i |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Visual J# 📖 2002 - 2007 sun microsystems sued microsoft over a java virtual machine that failed the compliance tests, and visual j# is what microsoft shipped once the settlement took it out of the java business. java syntax, microsoft's runtime, no bytecode anywhere: it was built for companies holding visual j++ code that |
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| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2006|
|_____|
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Microsoft FrontPage 📖 1995 - 2006 frontpage was the WYSIWYG editor that taught a generation of people how to build a webpage by dragging things on a canvas. vermeer technologies shipped version 1.0 in november 1995, microsoft bought the company two months later and folded the product into office. for the next decade frontpage was ho |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1987-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
OS/2 📖 1987 - 2006 os/2 was ibm's pc operating system, the one supposed to replace dos. ibm and microsoft started it together in 1985. they shipped 1.0 in december 1987 and split in 1990 when microsoft left to keep pushing windows. ibm carried it alone through warp 3 in 1994 and warp 4 in 1996, and for a brief window |
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| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2006|
|_____|
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iRows 📖 2006 - 2006 january to december of one year is the entire life of it. two israeli developers built a spreadsheet that ran inside a browser tab in 2006, got written up as the thing that was almost ready, and then wrote on their own blog that the advertising was not paying for the disk the files sat on. google hi |
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| RIP |
|1989-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Ulead Systems 📖 1989 - 2006 ulead systems was founded in taipei on 5 august 1989 and spent seventeen years making the software everybody used and nobody discussed. gif animator built the banners and the forum signatures, and photoimpact was the image editor you reached for when photoshop was out of the question. intervideo bou |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
InterVideo 📖 1998 - 2006 windvd came in the box. that was the whole business model and for about six years it was an excellent one, because windows could not play a dvd on its own and every pc maker had to license a player from somebody. intervideo was founded in fremont in 1998 and bought ulead systems in 2005. corel close |
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| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2006|
|_____|
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Project Looking Glass 📖 2003 - 2006 project looking glass was sun microsystems' attempt at a three dimensional desktop, written in java on top of the java 3d api and shown off by jonathan schwartz at linuxworld in august 2003. windows tilted back into perspective instead of stacking flat, and a rotated window had a back side that sun |
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| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2006|
|_____|
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Active Channel 📖 1997 - 2006 active channel was the push-technology bet microsoft shipped inside internet explorer 4 in september '97. the format underneath was called cdf, channel definition format, an xml dialect that let a publisher describe a feed for the browser to pre-download in the background. disney and warner bros. ra |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Nvu 📖 2004 - 2006 nvu was a free wysiwyg web page editor built on top of mozilla composer, paid for by linspire because desktop linux had nothing to put in front of somebody who had always used frontpage. daniel glazman shipped thirteen releases in seventeen months and reached 1.0 in june 2005, then announced on 15 s |
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| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
SPEWS 📖 2000 - 2006 spews was a list of address ranges that a mail server could check before accepting a message. nobody knew who ran it and there was no way to appeal a listing. it named the neighborhood around a spammer rather than the spammer alone, so the provider would feel it and act. it survived lawsuits and den |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1977-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Interactive Systems Corporation 📖 1977 - 2006 before 1977 there was exactly one place to get unix, and it was the company that wrote it. peter weiner changed that from an office in santa monica and built the first commercial unix business outside at&t. he sold the whole thing to kodak in 1988. kodak took it apart within five years. the operatin |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Windows ME 📖 2000 - 2006 windows me shipped september 14 2000 as the consumer follow-up to windows 98. microsoft cut real-mode dos out of it to speed boot times and broke a long list of legacy software in the process. system restore was the headline new feature and had bugs of its own. windows xp arrived thirteen months lat |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Windows 98 📖 1998 - 2006 june 1998 is when the home pc stopped being a machine you loaded programs onto and became a machine you connected. windows 98 made usb work without a fight and pulled internet explorer into the shell itself, which won microsoft the desktop and cost it an antitrust trial. it was meant to be the last |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1990-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Symantec WinFax PRO 📖 1990 - 2006 winfax was the windows fax stack that office pcs ran for fifteen years. delrina built it, symantec bought delrina, then quietly let the product rot once email made the dedicated fax dialer pointless. discontinued in june 2006. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Emagic 📖 1992 - 2006 rellingen, a small town outside hamburg, is where logic came from. gerhard lengeling and chris adam founded emagic there in september 1992 and spent a decade building the sequencer that a large share of european studios ran. apple bought the company on july 1 2002 and cut the windows version of logi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Libranet 📖 1999 - 2006 a father and son in vancouver sold a debian desktop for ninety dollars a copy and enough people bought it to keep the lights on for six years. jon danzig was diagnosed with cancer in october 2003, shipped version 3.0 in april 2005, and died that june at fifty-seven. his son tal ran it alone for six |
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| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2006|
|_____|
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Blue Frog 📖 2005 - 2006 "blue found the right solution to stop spam, and i can't let this continue." a spammer calling himself pharmamaster typed that into an icq window in may 2006, and then he proved it. blue security had signed up around 450,000 people to a do not intrude registry and shipped them a small windows client |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2006|
|_____|
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Google Deskbar 📖 2003 - 2006 the windows taskbar was contested ground in 2003, and google took a piece of it. no browser, no page load, just control alt g and a small window that closed itself when you looked away. a plugin scene grew on top of it within a year. google desktop absorbed the whole idea instead, and by 8 may 2006 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1988-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Eudora 📖 1988 - 2006 eudora was the email client steve dorner wrote at the university of illinois in 1988, named after the southern writer eudora welty. qualcomm bought it in 1991 and quit in 2006 when there was no money left in selling a desktop email client. the source went open in 2018. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1987-|
| 2006|
|_____|
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SoftICE 📖 1987 - 2006 a kernel debugger written in 386 assembly by two people at numega in 1987, sold for $386 as a joke about the processor it needed. it halted the entire operating system and gave you the machine at the level below windows, which made it the tool for writing drivers and the tool for taking software apa |
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| RIP |
|1984-|
| 2006|
|_____|
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Mathsoft 📖 1984 - 2006 a page of engineering arithmetic looks like a page of engineering arithmetic, which sounds trivial until you remember that in 1986 every other calculation tool made you write it as code. allen razdow and josh bernoff shipped mathcad for ms-dos that year out of a cambridge company razdow had founded |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2006|
|_____|
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yellowTAB 📖 2001 - 2006 mannheim, 2001: a small german company got hold of the last unreleased build of beos and started selling it in a box as zeta, on shopping television, to people who wanted their operating system back. the company motto was assume the power. access, which owned the source code by then, said no license |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2006|
|_____|
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WebCT 📖 1996 - 2006 the first widely deployed web-based course management system for higher education. murray goldberg started it at the university of british columbia and presented the prototype at the fifth world wide web conference in paris in spring 1996. by the mid-2000s more than ten million students in eighty co |
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| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2006|
|_____|
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Sleepycat Software 📖 1996 - 2006 carlisle, massachusetts, 1996: margo seltzer and keith bostic start a company because netscape wants a better version of the database library they wrote at berkeley. sleepycat gave berkeley db away to anyone who opened their own source and charged everyone who would not, and it was profitable every |
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| RIP |
|1993-|
| 2006|
|_____|
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Siebel Systems 📖 1993 - 2006 forty five percent of the crm market in 2002, and no longer a company four years later. thomas siebel left an executive job at oracle in 1993 to build the software that kept track of every customer a large business had, and larry ellison bought the result back for $5.85 billion on 31 january 2006. w |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2006|
|_____|
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Alias|Wavefront 📖 1995 - 2006 silicon graphics owned two rival 3d houses and merged them on 7 february 1995, because microsoft had just bought softimage and sgi wanted one answer to that instead of two. alias|wavefront shipped maya in 1998 and collected a scientific and technical academy award for it in march 2003. four months l |
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| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2006|
|_____|
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Infopop (UBB.classic) 📖 1996 - 2006 ubb.classic was a perl bulletin board engine that ted o'neil released on 7 may 1996. it ran on flat files and a cgi-bin install and at one point sat under a large share of the web's hobby forums. the company behind it went through several names, infopop being the one most users saw on the copyright |
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| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2005|
|_____|
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IBM ViaVoice 📖 1997 - 2005 ibm viavoice arrived in august 1997 at 199 dollars and asked you to sit and read prepared sentences aloud for an hour before it would transcribe anything. it came out of a decade of ibm speech research and it was one of the first two continuous dictation products consumers could buy, the other being |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2005|
|_____|
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AOL Media Player 📖 2005 - 2005 aol released the media player beta on 13 april 2005 after three years of development inside the aol client group. the playback engine was codenamed unagi and shared core code with winamp, which aol also owned through nullsoft at the time. seven months later the standalone client was killed on 20 dec |
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| RIP |
|1992-|
| 2005|
|_____|
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Macromedia 📖 1992 - 2005 one hundred million people had installed shockwave and flash by the end of 1999, which is how a company that started out selling cd-rom authoring software ended up owning the format the web animated in. adobe spent 3.4 billion dollars to stop competing with it and closed the deal on 3 december 2005. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
Sygate Personal Firewall 📖 2000 - 2005 sygate personal firewall was the free outbound firewall people installed instead of trusting windows, grown out of a program for sharing one modem across a house. symantec bought the company on 11 october 2005 for its enterprise access control and discontinued the consumer product seven weeks later. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
Sony BMG XCP 📖 2005 - 2005 xcp was the first 4 internet copy-protection software that sony bmg shipped on around 2 million audio cds across 52 titles in 2005. on october 31 mark russinovich posted to the sysinternals blog showing the software installed rootkit-class hooks that hid files from the operating system. within two w |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2005|
|_____|
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CWShredder 📖 2003 - 2005 merijn bellekom wrote cwshredder as a dutch student, because coolwebsearch had gotten past everything else, and for about a year it was the only thing that reliably took the hijacker off a windows machine. he gave up at version 1.59 in june 2004 and said so plainly: the newer variants were too aggre |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
VisualBoyAdvance 📖 1999 - 2005 a game boy emulator written by one person under the handle forgotten, which is the entire biography anybody ever got. it ran the game boy and everything after it up to the advance on a windows pc that had no business managing it, and it came with save states plus a link cable that existed only in so |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1985-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
Metrowerks 📖 1985 - 2005 freescale took the metrowerks name off the door in october 2005, six years after motorola had bought the company for 95 million dollars. it began in 1985 in hudson, quebec as metropolis computer networks and ended up as the compiler vendor apple's whole developer base leaned on through the powerpc y |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
PalmSource 📖 2002 - 2005 palmsource was the half of palm that built the operating system, after the hardware half was renamed palmone and walked off to make devices. the split was supposed to free palm os to license to anybody. instead it sat on a shrinking platform while windows mobile took the corporate pdas and the iphon |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2005|
|_____|
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UserLinux 📖 2003 - 2005 bruce perens spent late 2003 describing a debian for businesses that would come with certifications and paid support and cost nothing to install, and two years later lwn ran a piece called "userlinux: autopsy" on 14 september 2005. the project never shipped a distribution. it waited for debian sarge |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
Humongous Entertainment 📖 1992 - 2005 humongous entertainment was a kids' point-and-click studio in bothell, washington that built putt-putt, pajama sam, freddi fish, spy fox and the backyard sports line over thirteen years. the scumm engine veterans ron gilbert and shelley day founded it in march 1992. gt interactive bought it in 1996, |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2005|
|_____|
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DVD Shrink 📖 2003 - 2005 dvd shrink was a one megabyte windows executable that took a dual layer retail dvd and threw away enough bitrate to make it fit on a 4.7 gb blank. the region code and the copy protection came off on the way through. it had no burner of its own and handed the finished image to nero or to dvd decrypte |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
CodeWarrior 📖 1993 - 2005 codewarrior was an integrated development environment from metrowerks, a montreal-based startup, first shipped december 23 1993. it was the ide that compiled apple's own classic mac os during the powerpc transition years, and it was the one tool every serious mac developer used through the mid-90s a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2005|
|_____|
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MetaTV 📖 1999 - 2005 comcast and cox led a $21 million round into metatv in april 2002, and three years later they bought the company outright and retired the name. tv works, their joint software venture, announced the purchase of the business and assets on 13 july 2005 and kept the staff. the part metatv had already gi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2005|
|_____|
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Keyhole EarthViewer 📖 2001 - 2005 earthviewer was google earth four years before google owned it. from 2001 you paid a yearly fee for a program that streamed satellite imagery off a distant server and let you fall from orbit to a single roof in one unbroken move. cnn used it live on air to fly viewers into iraq in 2003, and the cia' |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2005|
|_____|
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DVD Decrypter 📖 2001 - 2005 dvd decrypter was one man's freeware and the default way a windows machine turned a disc into a file. it read a retail dvd and wrote out an image with the copy protection missing. on 6 june 2005 its author said he had received a cease and desist from macrovision and had decided to comply. macrovisio |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1989-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
Adobe Streamline 📖 1989 - 2005 adobe streamline was a single-purpose mac utility that turned a scanned bitmap into vector artwork using bezier traces. it shipped at macworld san francisco in january 1989 and went through four major versions, the last in july 2001 at $199. when illustrator cs2 arrived in april 2005 with a built-in |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
Liberate Technologies 📖 1996 - 2005 oracle spun a division out in april 1996 to build software for the network computer, the cheap terminal larry ellison was certain would replace the pc. it did not, so the company renamed itself liberate technologies and sold the same idea to cable operators: a browser and an application platform liv |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
CherryOS 📖 2004 - 2005 on 12 october 2004 a company in lahaina, hawaii opened pre-orders for a windows program that would run mac os x at eighty percent of the host machine's speed. ten days later wired had an expert saying the binary carried watermarks from pearpc, the open source emulator it claimed to have beaten. vers |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
CU-SeeMe 📖 1993 - 2005 cu-seeme was the first video call most people ever saw. tim dorcey wrote it at cornell and it went out free in april 1993, a small gray picture that ran on any machine with a network connection, which no other videoconferencing system of the period could claim. the multipoint part ran on public serv |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1989-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
Adobe Type Manager 📖 1989 - 2005 adobe shipped atm in 1989 because apple and microsoft had just gone public with truetype and adobe needed an answer that worked on the screen instead of in the printer. it did one job. it took a postscript type 1 outline and drew it smooth at any size, which is why it ended up on every machine in th |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1986-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
Telegard 📖 1986 - 2005 telegard came out of a copy of wayne bell's wwiv source that nobody had cleared with anybody, and then passed through four more sets of hands, a lawsuit and a public resignation before tim strike took it over in september 1993. it was free when free was rare, which is most of why the boards that for |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1985-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
Adobe PageMaker 📖 1985 - 2004 pagemaker is the reason desktop publishing exists as a phrase. it walked into 1985 next to the laserwriter and turned the mac into the layout machine for every small newsroom and zine in north america. adobe bought aldus in 1994, kept it on life support until indesign showed up in 1999, then quietly |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
Adobe Atmosphere 📖 1999 - 2004 adobe atmosphere was a browser plug-in for navigating 3d worlds in internet explorer. the technology came from attitude software's 3d anarchy, acquired by adobe in november 1999. the public beta ran nearly three years before the 1.0 release in december 2003. adobe pulled the plug in december 2004 af |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1988-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
SoundEdit 16 📖 1988 - 2004 soundedit 16 was the macromedia mac audio editor for the shockwave-and-director generation. its lineage started with steve capps coding the original soundedit on a sabbatical in 1986. farallon bundled it with macrecorder in 1988, macromind-paracomp bought it in 1991, and macromedia turned it into th |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
Karelia Watson 📖 2001 - 2004 watson was the $30 mac os x utility dan wood at karelia software shipped on november 27 2001. the pitch was internet content through a familiar mac-style interface, with plugins anyone could write in cocoa for weather, stocks, movie times, package tracking. the launch was warm, the press was favorab |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
Nullsoft 📖 1997 - 2004 in march 2000 justin frankel published gnutella on his employer's website with a note reading see, aol can bring you good things. aol had it pulled the same day, and then spent four years taking the rest of nullsoft apart. the san francisco office closed on 9 december 2003, frankel resigned in janua |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
Audion 📖 1999 - 2004 audion was the panic mp3 player on mac os 9 and os x. apple sat down with panic to talk acquisition and the meeting fell through over a scheduling conflict. apple bought soundjam instead and that became itunes. audion held on as freeware for two more years before panic retired it on 11 november 2004 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
Bloomba 📖 2003 - 2004 bloomba was a windows email client whose entire argument was that finding an old message should be instant. stata labs shipped it in october 2003, and pc magazine measured it at up to eight times faster than outlook at that one job. the company was founded by raymie stata, who had come out of the te |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1990-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
Jasc Paint Shop Pro 📖 1990 - 2004 jasc paint shop pro was the windows shareware photoshop alternative. robert voit started it as a gif2pcx file converter in august 1990 in minneapolis. jasc inc grew it from a single-purpose utility through the shareware-cd 90s into a full graphics editor by version 5 in april 1998. corel bought jasc |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1991-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
Jasc Software 📖 1991 - 2004 on 14 october 2004 corel bought a 120-person company in eden prairie, minnesota that was doing more than thirty million dollars a year selling software by download. jasc was robert voit's, a former dc-9 pilot who had gone back for a computer science degree, and the name began as a placeholder joke: |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
Netscape Composer 📖 1997 - 2004 netscape composer was a web page editor that arrived as a side effect of installing a browser. it came with communicator 4.0 in june 1997, out of the editor netscape had been selling inside navigator gold. it put a publish button next to the save button, so a page went from your screen to your provi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
Marimba (Castanet) 📖 1996 - 2004 the silicon valley startup founded by kim polese and three java engineers from sun who left in february '96 to build push tech. castanet pushed software updates and content channels to client machines on a schedule. for two years it sat on the wired and time covers as the future of the web. then it |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
Brightmail 📖 1998 - 2004 two million email addresses existed for no purpose except to be spammed. brightmail ran them as a probe network, watched what landed in them, and pushed filtering rules out to internet providers the way an antivirus company pushes signatures. by 2004 that was covering around three hundred million ma |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
NGSCB (Palladium) 📖 2002 - 2004 microsoft unveiled palladium in june 2002 through a magazine article, then renamed it next-generation secure computing base in january 2003. the plan was a small second kernel called the nexus running beside windows, holding memory no other software could read and keys that a remote machine could ve |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
Red Hat Linux 📖 1995 - 2004 for most of a decade red hat linux was what people meant when they said linux. it came in a cardboard box with printed manuals and a support number, and it gave the world rpm and anaconda, two pieces of plumbing that are still running today. version 9 shipped on 31 march 2003 and turned out to be th |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1987-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
HyperCard 📖 1987 - 2004 hypercard was apple's pre-web hypermedia stack. you laid out cards full of buttons and pictures, and you wrote little hypertalk scripts to link them together. it shipped free with every mac for a decade. by the time apple killed it in 2004 the web had been doing the same job for ten years, only with |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
VDMSound 📖 2000 - 2004 vlad romascanu started it in montreal in 1998 because he wanted to capture the midi music out of dos games as a file, and it grew into the thing that gave an entire shelf of old games their sound back on windows nt, 2000 and xp. it emulated the sound card and nothing else, which made it faster than |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
BonziBuddy 📖 1999 - 2004 bonzi was a purple cartoon gorilla that lived on your windows desktop, told you the time, sang dumb little songs, and quietly collected information from your computer in the background. it ran from 1999 to 2004, shipped as a free download bundled with everything, and got hit with FTC fines in early |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
Easy CD Creator 📖 1996 - 2004 adaptec bought corel's cd creator in june 1996 and merged it with easy-cd pro, the software it had picked up from incat systems the year before, and the combined product was called easy cd creator. for the next eight years that name was what came in the box with your burner. adaptec spun the divisio |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1991-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
Speak Freely 📖 1991 - 2004 speak freely was free software for talking over the internet, written by john walker, the autodesk co-founder, and posted to usenet in 1991. it carried encrypted voice between two machines with no company sitting in the middle, years before anyone worked out how to sell that. walker discontinued it |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
RealOne Player 📖 2001 - 2004 realone player was the brand realnetworks used between december 2001 and january 2004 for its merged player-jukebox application. it carried the goldpass subscription service that became realone superpass. when realplayer 10 shipped on 7 january 2004 the realone name retired and the product reverted |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
Comet Cursor 📖 1997 - 2004 comet cursor was a free download from the late 90s that let a website change your mouse pointer into its own little branded shape. for a few years it was everywhere, on tens of thousands of sites, and most people had it installed without ever choosing to. underneath the cute cursor it was quietly ta |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1981-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
TapCIS 📖 1981 - 2004 tapcis existed because compuserve charged by the hour. you wrote your mail and your forum replies offline in a dos program and pressed one key. it dialed in, traded everything outgoing for everything new, and hung up before the meter had much to say about it. howard benner wrote it in turbo pascal a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
Visual J++ 📖 1996 - 2004 microsoft announced in december 1995 that it was licensing java from sun and shipped its own compiler ten months later. then it added windows-only extensions that made java code faster on windows and useless anywhere else, which is the thing the license had been written to prevent. sun sued in octob |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
Immunix 📖 1998 - 2004 portland, oregon, 1998: a research group spins out of a graduate project to sell a linux you cannot easily break into. immunix was red hat with the compiler and the kernel both changed underneath it, and it never sold in the numbers a distribution needs. the company dropped the operating system in e |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Microsoft 3D Movie Maker 📖 1995 - 2003 3d movie maker was a kids' animation studio microsoft shipped on a CD-ROM in 1995. it ran on windows 95, used the BRender 3d engine, let an eight-year-old place 3d characters and props into pre-rendered sets and record a little movie. it shipped a doraemon expansion in japan and a nickelodeon one in |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1985-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia 📖 1985 - 2003 grolier shipped the first cd-rom encyclopedia in 1985 under the new grolier electronic encyclopedia name, then rebranded the multimedia version in 1995. it shuffled through hachette ownership and then scholastic ownership, and lost the consumer market to encarta. the last cd-rom edition went out in |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Berkeley Softworks 📖 1983 - 2003 brian dougherty walked out of the imagic collapse with roughly a hundred thousand dollars to his name and started again two blocks from his old campus. what he built there ran a windowing desktop on a commodore 64 in 1986, shipped in enough volume to sit third behind ms-dos and mac os, and got steve |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Wink Communications 📖 1994 - 2003 directv declined to renew, the carriage agreement ran out on 22 december 2003, and opentv deactivated about 10.4 million wink-enabled set-top boxes at once. brian dougherty had founded wink in alameda in october 1994 to put a response channel inside a television commercial, and for a while it worked |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Adobe LiveMotion 📖 2000 - 2003 adobe shipped livemotion in 2000 as the alternative to macromedia flash. it had an after-effects-style timeline and a vector engine that could export to swf. it never caught on. version 2 came in january 2002 and did not change the trajectory. on november 15 2003 adobe ended development. fifteen mon |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Photo Editor 📖 1996 - 2003 photo editor was the small image program that opened when you double-clicked a picture embedded in a word or powerpoint file. it shipped with office 97 in late 1996 and stayed in the box through office xp. office 2003 replaced it with picture manager, which had fewer features but a cleaner viewer. m |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
RealPC 📖 1997 - 2003 a new chief executive at fwb software opened the books in august 2003 and found that the mac os x version of realpc, promised for that summer with 3d acceleration, had not one line of code behind it. the emulator itself had been real enough: a pentium with mmx rendered in software on a power macinto |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
HotDog 📖 1994 - 2003 hotdog was an html editor first released june 1994 by a 22-year-old australian developer named steve outtrim. he founded sausage software in melbourne in 1995 around the product, which became one of the first shareware html editors people on dialup actually paid for. the company hit 250,000 site hit |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
SpeechWorks 📖 1994 - 2003 boston, 1994, two founders and a company called applied language technologies. it renamed itself speechworks and spent nine years selling the thing that made an automated phone line bearable: recognition good enough that you could interrupt the menu and just say what you wanted. fedex and amtrak ran |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1988-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Connectix 📖 1988 - 2003 a gray plastic sphere the size of a golf ball, plugged into the back of a mac, shipping in august 1994 for under a hundred dollars. that was the quickcam and it was the first webcam anybody could afford, and four years later logitech owned it for 25 million dollars. connectix did that with almost ev |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Roger Wilco 📖 1999 - 2003 roger wilco was the freeware voice-chat client that put voice on a 56k modem in 1999 before any pc shooter shipped voice chat of its own. resounding technology released it in may 1999. by 2000 over two million gamers were running it. gamespy bought the property in december 2000 and folded the client |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Casady & Greene 📖 1984 - 2003 nineteen years of boxed macintosh software ended on 3 july 2003. the publisher that put crystal quest in front of every mac ii buyer and sold soundjam mp to apple could not make the jump from the classic mac os to os x, and the staff spent the final year working for nothing. the goodbye page listed |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1986-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
StarSight Telecast 📖 1986 - 2003 somewhere in your city a pbs station was broadcasting the week's television schedule in the invisible lines above the picture, and if you owned the right zenith or the right magnavox box, your set pulled it down and drew a grid. starsight charged about four dollars a month for that and sold the deco |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1989-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
ACTV, Inc. 📖 1989 - 2003 in july 1989 a delaware corporation was formed in new york to sell a thing television could not yet do, and it kept selling it for fourteen years without ever finding the market. individualized television let a viewer choose a camera angle or a commentary track, which read better in a press release |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Cool Edit Pro 📖 1995 - 2003 the shareware-then-commercial windows audio editor syntrillium shipped from 1995, with cool edit pro arriving for multitrack work and the brand peaking at version 2.1 in early 2003. adobe bought syntrillium for $16.5 million on may 19 2003 and shipped the same engine as adobe audition 1.0 three mont |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Linux Router Project 📖 1997 - 2003 one point four four megabytes was the entire budget, and dave cinege got a working router into it in 1997. the linux router project turned a dead 486 with two network cards into real network equipment, booted off a floppy with no hard drive involved, and it is where busybox was maintained during the |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Mac OS Runtime for Java 📖 1997 - 2003 january 1997, and the macintosh had its own java virtual machine, written by apple rather than licensed from sun. it implemented jdk 1.0.2, shipped inside mac os 8, and then stopped moving: java 1.1.8 was as far as it ever went while the rest of the industry left for java 2. the last release, 2.2.6 |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1990-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Entertainment Pack 📖 1990 - 2003 the box where freecell and jezzball came from before they were free with windows. microsoft sold four entertainment packs from 1990 to 1992, then the best of compilation in 1994. half a million copies by '92, then quietly retired in 2003 once the games it contained had been absorbed into windows its |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Xupiter 📖 2002 - 2003 xupiter was the toolbar that taught a generation of windows users what a browser hijacker was. it arrived through an activex install on a page you did not mean to visit, then took the home page and the search box with it. there was no uninstaller. worse, it phoned its own server for code and ran wha |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1982-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
XyWrite 📖 1982 - 2003 dave erickson and john hild left atex and founded xyquest in june 1982, shipping xywrite that september as a personal computer version of the mainframe typesetting system they had walked away from. it was written in assembly and drew no formatting on screen, taking its instructions from a command li |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1988-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Lotus Word Pro (Ami Pro) 📖 1988 - 2002 ami pro was the first fully functional word processor for windows, shipped by samna corporation in 1988, a year before microsoft word for windows even existed. lotus bought samna in 1990 and folded ami pro into smartsuite. ibm bought lotus in 1995, rebranded the product as lotus word pro, kept it in |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
MapBlast 📖 1996 - 2002 mapblast was the other map site, the one you went to when mapquest was slow or wrong. vicinity corporation ran it from 1996 and syndicated the same maps out to portals like yahoo and excite and onto palm handhelds, which is why one company's cartography kept turning up on sites that had nothing to d |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Gobe Software 📖 1997 - 2002 the people who wrote clarisworks left claris, moved to portland and built the office suite that beos did not have. gobe productive shipped in august 1998 and was the strongest argument anybody ever made that beos was a machine you could work on. then be inc. walked away from the desktop, gobe found |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1986-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Corel Ventura 📖 1986 - 2002 three engineers out of digital research built ventura publisher and xerox put it out at the end of 1986, which made it the first serious desktop publishing package on the ibm pc. it ran on a copy of gem that came in its own box, because the pc had no window system worth building against yet. xerox b |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1990-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
General Magic 📖 1990 - 2002 general magic was a 1990 spinoff out of apple, founded by marc porat with bill atkinson and andy hertzfeld. it built magic cap, a pda operating system with a rooms-and-hallways interface, and telescript, a language for software agents that crawled the network on your behalf. sony shipped the magic l |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
BeSeen 📖 1998 - 2002 looksmart bought a texas company ten weeks after it incorporated and got a brand that handed out chat rooms and counters to anyone with a home page. four years later the arithmetic caught up, and the faq said so plainly: the cost had proven higher than was economically feasible. accounts were disabl |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
TrueType core fonts for the Web 📖 1996 - 2002 in 1996 microsoft began handing out eleven typefaces at no charge, for windows and for the macintosh, so a page could be designed at one end and arrive looking the same at the other. matthew carter drew verdana and georgia for the program, and comic sans reached the rest of the world through it. in |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Adobe PhotoDeluxe 📖 1996 - 2002 photodeluxe was the cd-rom adobe gave away with scanners so the box would feel full. version 1.0 sold over a million copies, version 2.0 was the best-selling consumer photo editor in the world, and then in july 2002 adobe replaced the whole product line with photoshop elements. nobody bought photode |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Caldera OpenLinux 📖 1997 - 2002 caldera openlinux was the late nineties business-targeted linux distribution from caldera systems in orem utah, descended from german lst software's distro and built around a graphical installer called lizard. the bundle included partition magic, wordperfect, and netware for linux, which made it sta |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Mac OS 9 📖 1999 - 2002 mac os 9 was the last of the classic mac os releases, the end of the system 7 lineage that had been running on apple machines since 1991. it shipped in october 1999. its final point release was 9.2.2 in december 2001. on may 22 2002 at wwdc steve jobs walked onto a stage with a black coffin holding |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
iPlanet 📖 1999 - 2002 aol bought netscape in 1999 and handed the server software straight to sun microsystems. the three year joint venture that came out of that sold web servers and directory servers under the iplanet name, a brand sun already happened to own from an unrelated purchase the year before. the alliance ran |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1991-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Sneak Prevue 📖 1991 - 2002 a laserdisc player sat in the cable headend with an amiga 2000 beside it, and a satellite feed told both machines what tonight's pay-per-view lineup was and what it cost. that was the whole product, running unattended in american cable systems from 1991. you stopped on the channel, watched two minut |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
HoTMetaL 📖 1994 - 2002 the first html editor anybody sold for money, out of toronto in 1994, built on top of an sgml engine that had been written for a stricter kind of document. that parentage is the whole personality: it knew what valid markup was and it told you when yours was not. six versions, a free edition that got |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Sonique 📖 1998 - 2002 sonique was the other winamp. mediascience built it in bozeman montana, lycos bought the company for thirty-eight million dollars in 1999, and the final 1.96 release shipped in march 2002 after the dot-com collapse ended the dev team. sonique 2 was almost ready when the layoffs hit and never made it |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1989-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia 📖 1989 - 2002 the first multimedia cd-rom encyclopedia, shipped by compton's newmedia in 1989 under encyclopaedia britannica's parent ownership. ownership passed through tribune, then the learning company, then mattel across the 1990s. britannica bought the publishing rights back in march 2002 and quietly ended t |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Visual InterDev 📖 1997 - 2002 visual interdev 1.0 shipped march 1997 inside the professional and enterprise editions of visual studio 97. it was microsoft's first integrated ide for building active server pages, with vbscript color coding and a script debugger that talked to sql server through built-in database tooling. version |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Blaxxun Contact 📖 1998 - 2002 a 3d browser plugin out of munich that you installed once to walk around cybertown or a bmw configurator inside your netscape window. it tried to render the vrml dream at 800x600 over dial-up and mostly succeeded, until the company that made it went out of business in early 2002 and the codebase pas |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1985-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Procomm Plus 📖 1985 - 2002 the dos and windows terminal emulator datastorm technologies shipped through the late 80s and 90s. it ran bbs sessions over modems and automated logins to compuserve, holding the #1 retail-software spot on pc magazine in november 1993. symantec ended v4.8 support in 2002 after passing the brand thro |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Conflict Catcher 📖 1992 - 2002 the mac os classic extension manager casady and greene shipped from 1992 to handle the boot-time chaos of competing inits and control panels. jeff robbin wrote the software and david pogue wrote the printed manual. version 9.0.1 was the last release before mac os x removed the architectural problem |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1969-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Eurocheque 📖 1969 - 2002 eurocheque was a paper cheque you could write in a foreign country and have a foreign shopkeeper actually accept, because a plastic guarantee card in your other hand promised the bank would cover it up to a fixed ceiling. fifteen european banking systems switched it on in may 1969, and at its height |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Aureate / Radiate 📖 1998 - 2002 steve gibson spent early 2000 disassembling a dll that had arrived on his machine inside a piece of shareware and stayed there after the shareware was gone. he wrote the removal tool, called the category spyware, and the word stuck to aureate first. the company renamed itself radiate that march and |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1990-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
GeoWorks Ensemble 📖 1990 - 2001 geoworks ensemble was berkeley softworks' bet that the millions of 286 boxes on desks in 1990 deserved a real gui without buying a new pc. it ran on dos, drew in 16 colors, came with a word processor and a calendar, and shipped through tandy and hewlett-packard bundles for two years. then windows 3. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Windows 95 📖 1995 - 2001 a million copies moved in four days, and microsoft had paid for the moment in advance: a rolling stones song, the empire state building lit in four colors, queues outside stores at midnight for a floppy set. underneath the party was a careful piece of engineering that kept ms-dos alive in the baseme |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1981-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
MS-DOS 📖 1981 - 2001 twenty five thousand dollars bought microsoft an operating system somebody else had written, and the ibm contract stacked on top of it did the rest. for two decades a drive letter and a backslash was what a personal computer showed you when you switched it on. windows covered it up, then windows sto |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
RealJukebox 📖 1999 - 2001 realjukebox was realnetworks' mp3 ripper and organizer, released in may 1999 for windows. by november 1999 a security researcher caught it sending unique user ids and listening habits back to realnetworks without disclosure. the privacy fallout marked the first major mp3-era spyware scandal and the |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
SafeWeb 📖 2000 - 2003 safeweb was a box on a web page. you typed an address into it and the site fetched that page for you over ssl, so anyone watching your line saw one encrypted connection to california and nothing about where you had gone. it was free and it needed no software, which is why it spread through saudi ara |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
BeOS 📖 1995 - 2001 beos was the cult operating system from be inc., the company started by ex-apple executive jean-louis gassée in 1990. it shipped first on the bebox in october 1995, then on regular pc and powerpc hardware, with a fresh kernel designed around multimedia and a desktop most users described as the faste |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1990-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Be Inc. 📖 1990 - 2001 palm paid about eleven million dollars for what was left of be in august 2001, and the shareholders voted the company out of existence that november. eleven years of engineering had produced an operating system people loved and a customer base too small to keep the lights on, because no machine make |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
bleem! 📖 1999 - 2001 bleem! was a playstation emulator sold in a box on a shelf while the playstation was still the console everybody owned. it read your own discs and ran them on a pc at a resolution the console could not reach. sony sued three times and never won, but the last suit was about patents and defending a pa |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
DriveSpace 📖 1993 - 2001 microsoft shipped doublespace with ms-dos 6.0 in march 1993, and it doubled the space on a hard disk by compressing everything into one hidden file that pretended to be the drive. stac electronics sued over the patents it was built on and won 120 million dollars in february 1994, and the injunction |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1985-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Cardfile 📖 1985 - 2001 the address book that shipped inside windows for sixteen years, built on the idea of a wooden box of index cards. you typed a name on the index line and whatever you wanted underneath, and the stack sorted itself. microsoft stopped installing it by default after windows 95, left it sitting on the di |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1987-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Lernout & Hauspie 📖 1987 - 2001 ypres, a small town in west flanders better known for a war, spent the nineties building the company that was going to own the human voice. lernout & hauspie made the speech engines and the synthesized voices that shipped inside microsoft products, hit a market value near ten billion dollars, and bo |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Microsoft BackOffice Server 📖 1994 - 2001 by late 1994 microsoft had a server operating system and a growing pile of server products that ran on top of it, and no single thing to sell a company that wanted the lot. backoffice was the answer: one part number, one license, nt server underneath and everything else stacked on it. six versions i |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Hotline 📖 1997 - 2001 hotline was what mac users used to share files between 1997 and 2001, before napster made the same thing easier on every other platform. a 17-year-old australian named adam hinkley wrote it. hotline communications inc. incorporated it in toronto and shipped a bundle of server software with a client |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Great Bridge 📖 2000 - 2001 norfolk, virginia is not where you expect the first commercial postgresql to come from, but that is where a newspaper conglomerate put fifteen months of money and the deepest bench of postgres talent anybody had assembled. great bridge shipped the software, gave away the documentation and could not |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Corel Linux 📖 1999 - 2001 michael cowpland stood at a comdex booth in november 1999 and said that dos had its ten years, windows had its ten years, and linux was next. the product behind the sentence was debian with a four-step graphical installer and a kde desktop, sold in a box for $49. twenty-one months later corel licens |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
FrontPage Express 📖 1997 - 2001 frontpage express was the free wysiwyg html editor microsoft shipped with internet explorer 4 and 5. it was a cut-down version of frontpage 97, bundled to make web pages easy for windows 98 and me users. internet explorer 6 dropped the bundle in august 2001 and that was the quiet end. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1982-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Micrografx 📖 1982 - 2001 paul and george grayson founded micrografx in richardson, texas in 1982 and shipped in*a*vision for windows 1.0 in 1986, which made it one of the very few companies willing to bet a product on microsoft's graphical shell before anybody had a reason to. that product became micrografx designer and the |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1980-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Informix Corporation 📖 1980 - 2001 $250 million of sales that were never made is what ended it. roger sippl put $200,000 of his own money into relational database systems in 1980 and shipped a database named after the machine it ran on, informix out of information on unix. by 1995 it was the number two relational vendor and the one o |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Connectix Virtual Game Station 📖 1999 - 2001 connectix put a playstation inside a macintosh for forty-nine dollars in january 1999, and sony sued three weeks later. the ninth circuit ruled in february 2000 that copying a console bios in order to build an emulator is fair use, which is the reason emulator authors still cite the case a quarter o |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Microsoft PhotoDraw 📖 1999 - 2001 photodraw was microsoft's attempt at a small-business image editor that sat between photoshop and illustrator. it shipped in june 1999 inside office 2000 premium and developer editions, got a second version in october, then quietly disappeared when office xp launched without it in may 2001. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Binder 📖 1995 - 2001 binder was a windows app that let you stitch a word document, an excel sheet and a powerpoint deck into one .obd file with a tab for each. it shipped with office 95, 97, and 2000 as a showcase for ole 2.0 compound documents, hardly anyone used it on purpose, and microsoft dropped it from office xp i |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Microsoft GIF Animator 📖 1996 - 2001 microsoft gif animator was a 523 kb freeware program from 1996 that stacked still images into one gif89a file and let you set how many times it looped. it arrived with image composer, which arrived with frontpage, which is how it ended up on machines belonging to people who had never chosen it. the |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Eazel 📖 1999 - 2001 eazel was founded in august 1999 by andy hertzfeld, who had written large parts of the original macintosh system software, on the theory that linux would never leave the server room until the desktop stopped being hostile. it raised twelve million dollars and shipped nautilus 1.0 on 13 march 2001, t |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1979-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
The Santa Cruz Operation 📖 1979 - 2001 caldera systems bought a unix business in may 2001 and got the seller's name thrown in with it, which is why the company that spent nine years suing ibm over unix carried a name belonging to people who had nothing to do with the lawsuit. the santa cruz operation had shipped unix for cheap intel hard |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Stormix 📖 1999 - 2001 february 1999, in a tower in vancouver, a web host spun out a linux company and spent two years turning debian into something you could buy off a shelf. it worked well enough to put sixty people on the payroll across three offices and badly enough that the money was gone by january 2001. the insolve |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Grendel 📖 1998 - 2001 jamie zawinski put grendel on the internet on 8 september 1998 with a line that doubled as an epitaph: nobody is actively maintaining it, but there it is. this was the mail client left over from javagator, netscape's cancelled attempt to rewrite the entire browser in java. volunteers picked the corp |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1981-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Great Plains Software 📖 1981 - 2001 fargo, north dakota is where a billion dollar accounting software company came from, which almost nobody outside the midwest believed until microsoft wrote the check. joseph larson started it in 1981, doug burgum mortgaged inherited farmland to buy in during 1983 and had bought out the other investo |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1991-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Berkeley Software Design 📖 1991 - 2001 rick adams and five members of berkeley's computer systems research group started it in 1991 to sell commercially what the university had been giving away. bsd/386 shipped in january 1992 at nine hundred and ninety five dollars with full source, against an at&t system v license that had run past twe |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Third Voice 📖 1999 - 2001 third voice was an internet explorer browser plug-in launched in may 1999 by a menlo park startup of the same name. it let any user post sticky notes on any web page, stored on third voice's own servers, visible via a sidebar to anyone else running the plug-in. a small red triangle marked pages that |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Allaire Corporation 📖 1995 - 2001 two brothers in minneapolis wrote a tool in 1995 for the problem everyone building a website was about to have, which was getting a database onto a page without writing a cgi program in c. they called the tag language cold fusion and moved the company to massachusetts. it went public in january 1999 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
WinFiles.com 📖 1994 - 2001 steve jenkins registered windows95.com in 1994 and built the directory people went to when a piece of hardware in their machine had no disk. shareware and drivers, sorted by hand into a tree you could actually walk. the name changed to winfiles.com in 1998, cnet paid eleven and a half million dollar |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Popular Power 📖 2000 - 2001 marc hedlund and nelson minar started popular power in january 2000 on a simple trade: install a java client, let it use your processor while you were not using it, get paid. the free half of the deal ran an influenza vaccine simulation and the paid half was supposed to sell those same cycles to com |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
ipchains 📖 1998 - 2001 kernel 2.1.102, 14 may 1998, is where it enters the tree, and by the 2.2 series it was the only way to configure a linux firewall. rusty russell wrote it as a rewrite of ipfwadm, which was itself lifted from bsd, and then wrote the thing that replaced it. netfilter and iptables went into the mainlin |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Claris HomePage 📖 1996 - 2001 claris homepage was the wysiwyg html editor apple's claris subsidiary shipped to compete with frontpage and pagemill. mac and windows, html 3.2, last release was version 3.0 in january 1998, which added templates for filemaker-driven database sites. discontinued in 2001 after claris was rolled into |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1991-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Walnut Creek CDROM 📖 1991 - 2001 walnut creek sold free software for money, and the sentence only sounds strange if you never had a modem. bob bruce started pressing shareware and public domain archives onto cd-rom in august 1991, back when six hundred megabytes in the mail beat any phone line alive, and the company grew into the p |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1986-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Macintosh Programmer's Workshop 📖 1986 - 2001 codewarrior took the paying developers and mac os x took the platform out from under it. apple's own development environment for the macintosh ran from september 1986 to late 2001, ending as a free download nobody was being paid to finish, with version 3.6 stopped at its seventh prerelease. the shel |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Adobe PageMill 📖 1995 - 2000 adobe pagemill was the first wysiwyg html editor a normal person could use. it launched in late 1995 for mac, shipped 30,000 copies in the first month, and set the template for everything that came after it including microsoft frontpage and macromedia dreamweaver. adobe killed it in 2000 after acqui |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1987-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Bookshelf 📖 1987 - 2000 bookshelf was the english-reference companion to encarta. one CD held the american heritage dictionary, a roget thesaurus, bartlett's familiar quotations, the world almanac. it shipped from 1987 to 2000 mostly as part of the microsoft home suite. by the time the last english edition came out, the co |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
PointCast Network 📖 1992 - 2000 pointcast was the first product that tried to push the internet at you instead of waiting for you to fetch it. for a year in 1996 it was the future of news. then everyone realized the future of news was a slow screensaver eating the company t1 line, and the future of news quietly went home. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Liquid Motion 📖 1998 - 2000 liquid motion was a microsoft authoring tool for web animations that compiled to java applets. it shipped in 1998 on top of technology microsoft picked up by acquiring a san francisco company called dimension x in may 1997. the pitch was that a java-based animation runtime would be more portable tha |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
MetaCreations 📖 1997 - 2000 kai krause built interfaces that looked like nothing else in software, dark curved panels with unlabeled dials you turned to find out what they did, and for three years metacreations owned the entire catalog those interfaces belonged to. in december 1999 it announced it was selling every one of thos |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1977-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
CATS 📖 1977 - 2000 on a friday in november 1977 the toronto stock exchange switched on a computer that matched orders and set prices without a human in the middle, starting with ninety stocks. paris bought the design in the early 1980s and emptied its own trading floor with it. twenty-three years later toronto replace |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1985-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Lotus cc:Mail 📖 1985 - 2000 cc:mail started in the mid '80s at a silicon valley startup called concentric systems, founded by robert plummer with hubert lipski and michael palmer. the company was renamed pcc systems and then cc:mail inc as the product became the standard lan email platform for novell netware shops. lotus devel |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1965-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Multics 📖 1965 - 2000 in april 1969 bell labs walked out of the multics project and took nothing with it except the idea. what the deserters wrote instead, on a discarded pdp-7 in new jersey, was unix. multics kept going without them for another thirty one years, sold about eighty systems, and became the first operating |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1989-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
RemoteAccess 📖 1989 - 2000 andrew milner started remoteaccess in australia in 1989 as a clone of quickbbs, and it turned into the most heavily extended shareware in the bbs world, with more than 1500 third-party utilities written against it. milner shipped his last version in may 1996 and left to run an internet service provi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1991-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
QBasic 📖 1991 - 2000 qbasic arrived in june 1991 with ms-dos 5.0 as the replacement for gw-basic, a full-screen editor with an interpreter behind it and a help system that held the whole language manual. it could not produce an executable, because that was the paid product. it shipped with two games whose source code wa |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1981-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
MacsBug 📖 1981 - 2000 a machine-level debugger apple gave away for nothing, which thousands of people who could not read assembly installed anyway. the classic mac os had no memory protection, so one bad pointer took down the whole machine and the only button on the bomb dialog said restart. macsbug gave you a second but |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Quick View 📖 1995 - 2000 right click a file in windows 95, pick quick view, and a window opened with the contents in it. no application, no wait, no license for whatever wrote the file in the first place. it shipped in windows 95 and windows 98, and in windows nt 4 on the business side. it ran out of c:\windows\system\viewe |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1990-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Windows File Manager 📖 1990 - 2000 22 may 1990 put winfile.exe in windows 3.0, two panes over a row of drive letters, and it stayed shipping long past the point microsoft had a replacement for it. explorer arrived with windows 95 and took the desktop, but file manager was still in the box for 98 and me, still 16-bit, because too much |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1990-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Spyglass, Inc. 📖 1990 - 2000 microsoft paid eight million dollars in january 1997 to make a contract go away. the contract was the 1995 license for spyglass mosaic, written as a royalty on every copy sold, and microsoft was giving internet explorer away with windows instead of selling it. a company in illinois had handed over t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1981-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Interleaf 📖 1981 - 2000 in 1985 a document system cost about sixty thousand dollars and arrived as furniture, sun workstations and a laser printer bought from interleaf as one turnkey unit. david boucher and harry george had built the first commercial editor that put text and graphics on the same wysiwyg page at near types |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Vizact 📖 1999 - 2000 vizact was microsoft's bet on a non-developer interactivity tool inside the office 2000 family. it was announced may 26 1999 and shipped in september 1999 at $150 as a standalone box. you imported a word document or a powerpoint deck, you applied one of around thirty visual effects, you got a webpag |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Stac Electronics 📖 1983 - 2000 five caltech graduate students opened a consulting shop in pasadena in 1983 and turned it into a chip company designing compression silicon for tape drives. the software they wrote on the side became stacker, and stacker became the patent case that cost microsoft 120 million dollars in 1994. the sil |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Personal Web Server 📖 1996 - 2000 personal web server was the free web server microsoft put in the add-ons folder of the windows 98 cd and in the nt 4.0 option pack. it let a desktop answer http requests and run a subset of classic asp, which meant you could test a site without uploading it anywhere first. the code was not even micr |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1989-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Cygnus Solutions 📖 1989 - 2000 making free software affordable was the slogan and it was also the whole business plan. three people started the company on 13 november 1989 and booked 725,000 dollars in the first year selling support contracts for compilers they gave away, which almost nobody at the time believed was a business at |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1989-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Visio Corporation 📖 1989 - 2000 seven january 2000, a stock swap worth roughly one and a half billion dollars, the biggest check redmond had ever written to that date. what it bought was a seattle company started by three people who walked out of aldus, whose one product was a drawing program built on the idea that a shape should |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Caldera, Inc. 📖 1994 - 2000 ray noorda lost the netware market to microsoft and then spent part of what was left of his fortune buying dr-dos off novell for four hundred thousand dollars. caldera, inc. filed an antitrust suit against microsoft the same day the purchase closed. it operated as a software company for about three |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1987-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
LANtastic 📖 1987 - 2000 artisoft shipped lantastic out of tucson arizona in 1987 as the first peer-to-peer pc network anyone could run without a dedicated server. by 1990 it had over 200,000 adapters installed, mostly in offices under twenty-five people. windows for workgroups in 1993 and windows 95 in 1995 turned every pc |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Windows Neptune 📖 1999 - 2000 neptune was supposed to be the version where home windows finally stopped being built on dos. one build, 5111, went out to developers in december 1999 and no further. a warez group put it on the internet on 24 january 2000 and the cancellation was in the trade press the next day. the work was merged |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Qmodem 📖 1984 - 2000 john friel iii wrote it in turbo pascal in 1984 and sold it as shareware, and it took the dos terminal slot away from pc-talk by being faster. for a decade it was how a large share of bbs calling actually happened, first over xmodem and later over zmodem. mustang software bought it and renamed the l |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
TBBS (The Bread Board System) 📖 1983 - 1999 the bread board system. philip l. becker's commercial multiline dos bbs package, first shipped in 1983. esoft inc. was incorporated around it in 1984. fully customizable by the sysop, so no two tbbs boards looked alike. active development ended in 1997. technical support cut off by the end of 1999. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Borland Sidekick 📖 1984 - 1999 borland sidekick was the first piece of software that taught dos users a popup utility was possible. ctrl-alt and a calculator appeared over your wordstar document. it sold a million copies in three years and made borland a household name in the early pc era. starfish software inherited it, nokia bo |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1964-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Dartmouth Time-Sharing System 📖 1964 - 1999 at four in the morning on 1 may 1964, two teletypes at dartmouth college got answers back from the same computer at the same time. john kemeny and thomas kurtz had built the thing so that students who were not engineers could touch a machine, and they wrote basic for it because fortran was too hard |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
NetGravity 📖 1995 - 1999 netgravity wrote the software that let a website serve its own advertising instead of renting the job out to somebody else's network. adserver shipped in january 1996 and ended up running at yahoo and inside a few hundred other publishers' machine rooms, which is where the modern shape of a banner c |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Banyan VINES 📖 1984 - 1999 banyan systems shipped vines out of westboro massachusetts in october 1984 with streettalk, a globally consistent directory service that nobody else had at the time. by 1989 vines was the sixth-largest enterprise lan os and the marine corps was running its global communications on it through the gul |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Microsoft NetShow 📖 1996 - 1999 netshow was the brand microsoft used between 1996 and 1999 for their internet-streaming stack. it shipped on iis 3.0 and ran on nt servers. the whole product line got renamed "windows media" in october 1999, four months before windows 2000 came out. the only place "netshow" still survives is the nsp |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1973-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
MECC 📖 1973 - 1999 mecc was the minnesota educational computing consortium, a state agency founded in 1973 to run time-sharing computers for minnesota public schools. it became the oregon trail publisher. the original oregon trail was a text version written for teletype terminals in 1971 by three student teachers, and |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1985-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Star Division 📖 1985 - 1999 a sixteen-year-old in lüneburg started selling a word processor his friends had written, and fourteen years later the suite it turned into held about a quarter of the german office software market. sun microsystems bought the company on 5 august 1999 for a reported 59.5 million dollars, having worke |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1988-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
PowerAnimator 📖 1988 - 1999 the liquid metal man in terminator 2 cost about 460 thousand dollars a minute of screen time, and he was modeled and animated in poweranimator on silicon graphics hardware that cost more than a car. alias shipped the software from 1988 and collected a scientific and engineering academy award for it |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
FastTracker II 📖 1994 - 1999 two members of a swedish demo group wrote a music tracker for dos and put it out in november 1994. the xm format that came with it held up to thirty-two channels and packed the samples inside the file, which is how a program with no company behind it ended up defining a decade of computer music. the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1951-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Wang Laboratories 📖 1951 - 1999 founded by an wang in 1951 on the back of his magnetic-core memory work. by the mid-eighties wang word processors sat on the desk of every secretary in roughly eighty percent of the fortune 2000. then the ibm pc arrived and multimate cloned the wang interface for it. the standalone word-processor be |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Impulse Tracker 📖 1995 - 1999 jeffrey lim released impulse tracker on christmas day 1995, a free dos program written in assembly, and within two years it was what you used if you wanted a module to actually sound good. the .it format carried filters and note behavior the older formats had no room for, and all of it ran in a text |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
ElectricalFire 📖 1997 - 1999 in january 1998 netscape cancelled the java compiler it had been building for a year, five months before it was due to ship. twelve months later it put the source on mozilla.org with a joke press release about president clinton and a crowd of a hundred thousand. three entries went into the changelog |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
UltraHLE 📖 1999 - 1999 two people working under the handles realityman and epsilon released an emulator that ran commercial nintendo 64 games on a home pc at a playable frame rate, three years into the console's life, when the scene agreed that was still years off. it got there by faking the console's library calls instea |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Kinetix 📖 1996 - 1999 autodesk renamed its multimedia division kinetix in 1996, weeks before it shipped 3d studio max for windows nt. the program was written for it by the yost group and it took the pc animation market quickly, past fifty-three thousand copies and close to two thirds of professional animation on the pc b |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1985-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Searchlight BBS 📖 1985 - 1999 frank larosa wrote searchlight for the trs-80 in 1985 and moved it to the pc two years later, and the thing that set it apart was that it looked like a program rather than a printout. it sold as shareware out of a one-man company and turned up in boardwatch and at bbs conventions across the united s |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
7th Level 📖 1993 - 1999 7th level was a texas cd-rom house built on the idea that a computer with a disc drive and a sound card was a comedy delivery machine. it licensed monty python, shipped three discs of it, and grew to nearly three hundred people in under three years. the games business stopped in november 1997 when t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1981-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Prevue Channel 📖 1981 - 1999 tulsa, oklahoma sent out a data stream, and in cable headends across the united states a commodore amiga turned it into a blue grid that scrolled forever under a synthesizer loop. united video ran it from 1981, called it prevue guide in 1988 and prevue channel in 1993, and by the middle of the ninet |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1986-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
The Major BBS 📖 1986 - 1999 tim stryker wrote a library that let a single dos machine hold dozens of phone calls at the same time, then built a bulletin board on top of it to prove the library worked. the proof became the product. through the early nineties the major bbs was what you bought if you wanted to run a board that pe |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Elastic Reality 📖 1993 - 1999 morphing was the effect of the early nineties and this was the program that did it properly. it came out of asdg in madison, wisconsin, an amiga software house that shipped a precursor called morphplus in 1992. instead of making you push a grid of control points around, it let an artist draw shapes |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1968-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Macsyma 📖 1968 - 1999 seventy percent of the symbolic math market in 1987, one percent by 1992. macsyma was written at mit's project mac from 1968 onward, in maclisp, and it was doing symbolic integration by rule a decade before anybody sold such a thing to a university. symbolics licensed it and then sold it off while d |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1985-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Opcode Systems 📖 1985 - 1999 dave oppenheim wrote a midi sequencer for the macintosh in 1985 and spent the next fourteen years deciding what a sequencer window looks like. studio vision put midi and digital audio on the same timeline in 1990, which is the arrangement every recording program uses now without crediting anybody. a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Music Central 📖 1996 - 1998 music central was the music-encyclopedia volume of the microsoft home cd-rom line. it shipped in 1996 with the guinness encyclopedia of popular music licensed in for biographies, and q magazine reviews licensed in for the album notes. music central 97 followed a year later with an msn-fed online com |
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| + |
| RIP |
|????-|
| ????|
|_____|
|
Wildcat! BBS 📖 1986 - late 1990s mustang software's commercial bbs package for ms-dos. 1986 release. sold to santronics on november 19, 1998. kept limping as winserver until the bbs scene itself ended. high-water-mark of paid bbs software. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1988-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
Quarterdeck QEMM 📖 1988 - 1998 the dos memory manager that taught a generation of pc users about emm386 and the 384k of upper memory above the 640k line. quarterdeck rode the late dos era from 1988 to 1997, then symantec bought the company in october 1998 and walked away from the dos utility line. windows 95 had already made the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1985-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
Quarterdeck DESQview 📖 1985 - 1998 desqview was a windowing multitasker that shipped four months before windows 1.0 and worked better than it for a long time. quarterdeck built the dos memory-manager-and-multitasker stack that bbs sysops swore by, then sold itself to symantec in october 1998 after the windows 95 release made the enti |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1982-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
Davidson & Associates 📖 1982 - 1998 davidson & associates was a schoolteacher and her husband selling drill software out of torrance, california, and by early 1994 it was doing forty million dollars a year on the blaster series. that money bought a small studio called chaos studios for 6.75 million dollars in february 1994, which is h |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
Award Software 📖 1983 - 1998 phoenix technologies spent most of the nineties as the second bios on asian-built motherboards and fixed that by buying the first one. award's modular bios booted an enormous share of the clone pcs sold between 1990 and 1998, and its setup screen was where you went to change a boot order or loosen a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
The Hornet Archive 📖 1992 - 1998 hornet was where pc demos and tracker music lived before scene.org existed. it opened on 4 september 1992 as the internet demo site on a university ftp server in wisconsin, then moved to florida and picked up the hornet name off the machine it landed on. its last home was ftp.cdrom.com, where it gre |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
NESticle 📖 1997 - 1998 icer addis released nesticle on 3 april 1997 and it was the first nes emulator that ran at full speed on the ordinary dos machines people already owned. five days after release somebody mounted his drive over the network and took the source code. he kept the project going for another year regardless |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1986-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
Norton Commander 📖 1986 - 1998 john socha started writing it in 1984 at cornell, peter norton computing shipped it in 1986, and the two-pane orthodox file manager paradigm landed everywhere. symantec bought norton in 1990 and kept norton commander for dos alive through the windows 95 transition. the final dos version 5.51 shipped |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
Windows Messaging 📖 1995 - 1998 august 1995 put an icon called inbox on every windows desktop on earth, and most of the people who clicked it had nothing to connect it to. underneath was microsoft exchange client, renamed windows messaging the following year, and it was the first thing microsoft shipped that treated a fax and an e |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1980-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
Brøderbund 📖 1980 - 1998 brøderbund was the eugene-then-novato software publisher founded in 1980 by the carlston siblings. it shipped prince of persia and the print shop in the 80s, then carmen sandiego and myst in the 90s. the learning company acquired it on june 22 1998 for about $420 million in stock. mattel bought tlc |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
MacWrite 📖 1984 - 1998 macwrite was the word processor that shipped with the first macintosh on 24 january 1984. paired with macpaint, it was the pair of killer apps that taught the world what a gui was. claris took it over in 1987 and pushed it through macwrite ii in 1989 then macwrite pro in 1993. microsoft word for mac |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1991-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit 📖 1991 - 1998 alan solomon started writing virus detection in 1988 out of a data recovery practice, and by 1993 the product had a queen's award and britain had a serious antivirus industry. on 9 june 1998 network associates announced it was paying more than $640 million in stock for dr solomon's group plc, and th |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
Viaweb 📖 1995 - 1998 viaweb was a 1995 web app for letting small merchants build and host an online store from a browser. paul graham, robert morris and trevor blackwell wrote most of it in common lisp. it ran as a service rather than as installable software, which was unusual for the time, and yahoo bought the company |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
Claris Emailer 📖 1995 - 1998 claris emailer was a mid-90s mac email client that did the one thing no other client did: it pulled mail from internet pop, aol, applelink and compuserve into a single inbox with applescript hooks and signature rotation. the final release was 2.0v3 on 22 january 1998, the same window apple was killi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
Taligent 📖 1992 - 1998 taligent was an object-oriented operating system that stopped being an operating system before it stopped being a company. apple bailed and hp bailed. ibm absorbed the last one hundred and ninety engineers into a laboratory in san jose. the pink project that started it in 1988 had promised to reimag |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Home 📖 1993 - 1998 microsoft home was the brand microsoft printed on its consumer shelf from october 1993, and by 1994 it covered more than sixty boxed titles with the category coded into the color of the box. purple meant reference, yellow meant kids. it worked for as long as a disc was the fastest way to get an ency |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
Macromedia xRes 📖 1994 - 1998 fred and richard krueger started fauve software in raleigh in 1992, and their first product, matisse, put layers into a commercial paint program a year before adobe put them into photoshop 3. xres was the high-resolution engine they built next, able to edit a file far larger than the machine's memor |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1988-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
ThunderByte Antivirus 📖 1988 - 1998 frans veldman built tbav in the netherlands from 1988 and shipped it as shareware, which is how a dutch one-man engine ended up on machines all over europe. it was the fastest scanner anyone had and the first mainstream one that would flag a virus it had no signature for, by reading what the code wa |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1979-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
Passport Designs 📖 1979 - 1998 canyon.mid sat in the media folder of every copy of windows from 3.1 through 2000, and passport.mid sat next to it from windows 95 on, and both came from a small california company that had been writing music software since before midi was ratified. passport designs put the first commercially availa |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Cinemania 📖 1992 - 1997 cinemania was a CD-ROM movie reference, one of the microsoft home suite of "encyclopedia on a disc" titles that included encarta and bookshelf. it shipped annually from 1992 to 1997. by the time the final edition came out, IMDb was on the web for free, and microsoft quietly stopped making it. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1990-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
DiskDoubler 📖 1990 - 1997 diskdoubler was a classic mac os utility that doubled your effective drive space by compressing files on the fly. it shipped in april 1990 from a tiny outfit called salient, went through fifth generation systems in 1992 and ended at symantec, where it was rebranded as norton diskdoubler pro and quie |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1988-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
Adobe Persuasion 📖 1988 - 1997 aldus shipped persuasion 1.0 on the mac in november 1988 as a presentation tool with an outline-driven editing model. a windows port followed in the early '90s. adobe inherited the product when it bought aldus in 1994. the last release, version 4.0, came out in 1996. by september 1997 the line was f |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1989-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
Autodesk Animator 📖 1989 - 1997 jim kent wrote it for the atari st first, as cyber paint, then rebuilt it in 1989 for dos machines with a vga card and two hundred and fifty six colors to work with. autodesk published it, animator pro followed in july 1991 at around eight hundred dollars, and for a few years this was simply how ani |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
PCBoard 📖 1983 - 1997 the high-end dos bbs package. clark development company shipped it from 1983 to 1996, sold more than 50,000 licenses, and went bankrupt in july 1997 without warning. the open web pulled the paid sysop business apart. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
Apple Cyberdog 📖 1996 - 1997 cyberdog was apple's bet that the internet client should be a set of openable, embeddable components rather than a monolithic browser. the beta arrived february 16, 1996, version 1.0 on may 13, 1996, and version 2.0 on april 28, 1997. by then steve jobs had already returned to apple and decided that |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1991-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
Borland C++ 📖 1991 - 1997 version 5.02 shipped in april 1997 and there was never another one. borland c++ had spent six years as the compiler you reached for on dos and then on windows 3.x, with an ide that put the editor and the debugger in the same blue box and made the whole thing feel finishable. c++builder replaced it t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
Apple OpenDoc 📖 1992 - 1997 opendoc was apple's bet that documents would be built from reusable parts. ibm and novell signed on through a non-profit called ci labs. jobs returned to apple in late 1996. he called the project a bullet to the head and ended it in the march 1997 cleanup. cyberdog, the opendoc-based internet suite, |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1982-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
WordPerfect for DOS 📖 1982 - 1997 wordperfect for dos was the word processor that the 1980s office actually ran on, a blue-and-white screen full of f-key shortcuts and the reveal codes view that let you see the formatting your text was carrying. version 5.1 in 1989 became the dos standard. version 6.0 hit more than sixty percent mar |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1989-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
NeXTSTEP 📖 1989 - 1997 nextstep was the operating system steve jobs built after he was forced out of apple in 1985. it shipped first on the next cube in september 1989, ran on a mach kernel with adobe display postscript on top, and pioneered the dock and the object-oriented frameworks that later became cocoa. nobody outsi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1988-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
InterCon Systems Corporation 📖 1988 - 1997 kurt baumann and mikki barry started a virginia software house in april 1988 to make macintoshes work on networks that were not macintosh, at a point when it was still an open question whether tcp/ip or osi would win. their suite picked up a web browser along the way, aol licensed it in 1995 for the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1987-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
Berkeley Systems 📖 1987 - 1997 after dark was the screensaver everyone had on their mac in the early 90s. chrome 1940s toasters with bird wings, drifting across a black void carrying pieces of toast. berkeley systems made it. sierra on-line acquired berkeley systems in 1997 for 13.8 million dollars and the brand quietly stopped. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1989-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
After Dark 📖 1989 - 1997 after dark was the modular mac screensaver canon. flying toasters drifted across a black screen carrying bread. that became berkeley systems' identity for a decade. it shipped for mac in 1989 and for windows in 1991. licensed editions for star trek and the simpsons followed. sierra acquired berkeley |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
The Voyager Company 📖 1984 - 1997 voyager started in 1984 selling laserdiscs and invented most of what a special edition is, from the widescreen transfer to the commentary track. that label was the criterion collection. from 1989 it did the same thing on cd-rom, publishing art spiegelman's maus as software, and in 1992 it put whole |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1982-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
Kurzweil Applied Intelligence 📖 1982 - 1997 the auditors from coopers & lybrand found it in the spring of 1994: sales booked against customers who had never signed anything, and the goods themselves sitting in a rented warehouse outside boston, shipped nowhere. kurzweil applied intelligence had built genuinely early speech recognition, dictat |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Creative Writer 📖 1994 - 1996 creative writer was a word processor for children microsoft shipped on cd-rom in early 1994 under its microsoft kids label. you walked your cursor through a building called imaginopolis while a purple cartoon helper named mczee narrated the toolbars. the file format was a proprietary thing called .m |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Fine Artist 📖 1994 - 1996 fine artist was a microsoft kids raster paint program announced on december 7 1993 and shipped in 1994 for windows 3.1 and ms-dos with a separate apple macintosh release. it shared the imaginopolis setting and the purple cartoon helper mczee with its sister product creative writer, so the two boxes |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Ancient Lands 📖 1994 - 1996 ancient lands was a microsoft home cd-rom released in 1994 as a single-subject reference companion to encarta. it covered three ancient civilizations across one disc with twenty-one animation sequences and about five hours of video. interactive tours through pyramid construction and athenian everyda |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1991-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Multimedia Viewer 📖 1991 - 1996 multimedia viewer was a microsoft authoring tool for windows cd-rom titles released in september 1991. it sat on top of winhelp, the same help-file engine windows 3.1 used for application help, with extra hooks for images and short audio and inline video. you wrote your content in rich text format w |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
FutureWave Software 📖 1993 - 1996 a drawing program for a tablet computer nobody bought, ported to desktops where it could not beat illustrator, then given a timeline and pointed at the web in a last attempt to be useful. that third version was called futuresplash animator and it shipped in may 1996. seven months later macromedia bo |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Schedule+ 📖 1992 - 2003 schedule+ was microsoft's pre-outlook calendar program, first released in 1992 for windows 3.0 and classic mac os as the companion to microsoft mail. it shipped in the box with office 4.x and office 95 and the early exchange clients. outlook 97 absorbed almost all of its features at launch on 19 nov |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
MCC Interim Linux 📖 1992 - 1996 owen le blanc wanted to install linux on a room full of university machines without assembling each one by hand out of ftp files, so in february 1992 he wrote a menu-driven installer and put it on two floppy disks. that made mcc interim linux the first linux distribution. the word interim was in the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1986-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
SoftKey 📖 1986 - 1996 softkey was a toronto software publisher founded in 1986 by kevin oleary and john freeman with a ten-thousand-dollar loan from oleary's mother. through the early nineties it merged with wordstar international and spinnaker software, and by the middle of the decade it was consuming the entire us edut |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
Copland 📖 1994 - 1996 copland was apple's attempt to build a modern operating system in-house before the 90s ran out. named after the composer aaron copland, the project started in march 1994 with plans for memory protection and preemptive multitasking on top of a new object-oriented driver model. by 1995 the internal co |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1990-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
CERN httpd 📖 1990 - 1996 cern httpd was the first web server. tim berners-lee wrote it on a next machine at cern and for six years it was the program that answered when something asked for a page. later versions could also sit in front of a network as a caching proxy, which is a second first nobody credits it with. the w3c |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1986-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
ChiWriter 📖 1986 - 1996 cay horstmann wrote a scientific word processor in roughly four thousand lines of c and sold it for ten years, to physicists and mathematicians who wanted an equation on screen and could not afford a workstation to get one. windows 3.0 made dos software unsellable and the windows version ran out of |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1988-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Mail 📖 1988 - 1996 microsoft mail was the lan-based email client that ran on every microsoft platform of the late 1980s and early 1990s, plus mac and os/2 for good measure. it shipped in 1988 on the mac with appletalk and arrived on the pc as ms mail for pc networks 2.1 in 1991. version 3.5 was the final release befor |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Anti-Virus 📖 1993 - 1996 microsoft anti-virus shipped inside ms-dos 6 on 30 march 1993 and knew about 1,234 viruses. it had no way of ever learning a 1,235th, because updates lived on a bulletin board and had to be fetched and installed by hand. the scanner was a stripped down build of central point anti-virus, licensed fro |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1991-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
Lotus Improv 📖 1991 - 1996 lotus improv was a spreadsheet that ran on a workstation almost nobody owned. it launched on nextstep in february 1991, got a windows port in may 1993, was shelved in august 1994 when the windows sales did not happen, and was officially killed by ibm-owned lotus in april 1996. it separated data from |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Bob 📖 1995 - 1996 microsoft's 1995 attempt to replace the windows desktop with a cartoon house, where each room was an application and each piece of furniture was a file. it shipped on 10 march 1995 with rover the dog as your guide. it sold roughly 58,000 copies against internal projections of millions. microsoft ret |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1991-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
Kaleida Labs 📖 1991 - 1996 an apple-ibm joint venture built to define the multimedia programming language of the cd-rom era. by the time kaleida shipped scriptx in late 1994, java and the browser were already eating the same problem. the two parents pulled the plug on 17 november 1995 and the entity ceased operations by mid j |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
Trumpet Winsock 📖 1994 - 1996 peter tattam wrote trumpet winsock at the university of tasmania and released version 1.0a in 1994 as shareware. for two years it was the cheapest way to put a windows 3.1 machine on the internet, the layer between the modem and netscape. windows 95 shipped with its own tcp/ip stack and the market f |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1990-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
Stacker 📖 1990 - 1996 stac electronics released stacker in 1990 and ran the dos disk compression market for the next four years. microsoft copied the design for ms-dos 6.0 doublespace, lost the patent suit in 1994, paid stac 120 million dollars plus a 40 million equity stake, and bundled compression into windows 95 anywa |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1985-|
| 1995|
|_____|
|
DeluxePaint 📖 1985 - 1995 deluxepaint was the amiga's paint program first and everything else's paint program after. dan silva wrote it at electronic arts. version one shipped in november 1985 with color cycling. the ms-dos port from 1988 became the tool the id software guys drew wolfenstein 3d sprites in. version five in 19 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1985-|
| 1995|
|_____|
|
XTreeGold 📖 1985 - 1995 xtree shipped at the west coast computer faire on 1 april 1985 from a small company called executive systems. the dos file manager grew into xtreegold by the late 80s and passed three million copies by '91. central point software bought the brand in 1993. symantec bought central point in '94. produc |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 1995|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Dangerous Creatures 📖 1994 - 1995 dangerous creatures was one of the first single-subject reference cd-roms microsoft home shipped in the wake of encarta. it came out in august 1994 for windows 3.1 with a leopard on the cover and an interactive atlas of dangerous animals inside, organized by country or by attack mechanism. the bbc a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 1995|
|_____|
|
Yggdrasil Linux/GNU/X 📖 1992 - 1995 adam richter put a whole linux system on a compact disc in berkeley in 1992 and made it boot without being installed first, which nobody had done. the company called it plug-and-play linux and sold it in shops next to the dos games for ninety nine dollars, with a motto about free software for the re |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1988-|
| 1995|
|_____|
|
Delrina 📖 1988 - 1995 415 million dollars in symantec stock closed on 22 november 1995 and ended a company that was seven years old. delrina was started in toronto in 1988 by four men who had all arrived in canada from somewhere else, and it was named after one founder's family. it sold electronic forms software until a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 1995|
|_____|
|
WinG 📖 1994 - 1995 microsoft spent 1994 trying to prove that windows was not the place games went to die, and the argument it made was a small library written by one engineer who had worked out that most video drivers on the market were broken and had gone ahead and fixed them himself. it worked. doom ran in a window |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1988-|
| 1995|
|_____|
|
Apple A/UX 📖 1988 - 1995 a/ux was apple's own at&t unix for the 68k macintosh, system v point 2 point 2 with bsd networking grafted on top of a regular mac toolbox. version 1.0 shipped in february 1988 for the macintosh ii. version 3.1.1 in 1995 was the last release. apple bought next in december 1996 instead, and the path |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1977-|
| 1995|
|_____|
|
Mark Williams Company 📖 1977 - 1995 robert swartz announced the end on usenet on 1 february 1995, in the newsgroup his own customers read. the product was coherent, a unix written from scratch that ran on a 286 and later sold for ninety-nine dollars and change, with a twelve-hundred-page manual in the box. at&t sent dennis ritchie to |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 1995|
|_____|
|
Turbo Pascal 📖 1983 - 1995 forty-nine dollars and ninety-five cents, at a time when a compiler cost several hundred and came in a box you needed both hands for. anders hejlsberg wrote the core in denmark, borland wrapped an editor around it, and the whole thing fit in memory and compiled faster than anyone believed until they |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1986-|
| 1995|
|_____|
|
Cotation Assistée en Continu 📖 1986 - 1995 the cac in cac 40 is a dead computer. cotation assistee en continu was the trading system the paris bourse ran from 1986, bought as a license from the toronto stock exchange, and it is what finally closed the shouting floor at the palais brongniart. the machine was switched off for a successor in 19 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 1994|
|_____|
|
Softlanding Linux System 📖 1992 - 1994 peter macdonald put a working linux system on a stack of floppy disks in may 1992, x window system included, and called it a soft landing for people bailing out of dos. it was the first release that handed you a graphical unix without making you assemble one, which made it the most installed linux i |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1979-|
| 1994|
|_____|
|
KnowledgeWare 📖 1979 - 1994 a hall of fame quarterback ran this one. fran tarkenton merged his atlanta software business into james martin's database design inc in the mid eighties, kept the knowledgeware name and sold information engineering, which promised that if you drew the diagrams properly the workbench would write the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 1994|
|_____|
|
Aldus Corporation 📖 1984 - 1994 aldus was the seattle company paul brainerd founded in february 1984 to ship pagemaker. brainerd coined the phrase 'desktop publishing' to describe what his software made possible. quarkxpress passed it in the pro market through the early 90s. adobe closed the merger on 31 august 1994 and the aldus |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 1994|
|_____|
|
ResEdit 📖 1984 - 1994 resedit was apple's graphical editor for the classic mac resource fork. it shipped from around 1984 as a developer tool and got adopted by power users who wanted to skin apps without writing code. apple stopped at version 2.1.3 in august 1994. mac os x dropped resource forks in 2001 and the tool was |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1987-|
| 1994|
|_____|
|
GO Corporation 📖 1987 - 1994 go corporation spent seven years and $75 million building penpoint, a pen driven operating system for tablet computers, at a point when nobody had worked out what a tablet was for. it shipped on tablets from ibm and on at&t's eo personal communicator, and jerry kaplan later wrote that the company ge |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1985-|
| 1994|
|_____|
|
PC Tools 📖 1985 - 1994 pc tools was the other dos utility canon. for ten years it sat on every power user's hard drive next to norton, sometimes instead of it, and the install base was big enough that symantec spent sixty million dollars in 1994 to make the rivalry stop. the central point team ended up writing norton navi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 1994|
|_____|
|
T/Maker 📖 1983 - 1994 deluxe corporation printed bank checks, and in june 1994 it paid around $20 million for a mountain view software company doing $15 million a year. what it was buying was clickart, which from 1984 put hundreds of small black and white drawings on floppy disks so that anybody with a macintosh could pa |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1980-|
| 1994|
|_____|
|
Central Point Software 📖 1980 - 1994 michael burmeister-brown named the company after the oregon town he started it in, and for its first years it sold one thing: a program that copied floppy disks the publishers had gone to real trouble to make uncopyable. copy ii pc paid for pc tools, which is what most people remember. by 1993 the c |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1981-|
| 1994|
|_____|
|
Watcom 📖 1981 - 1994 the computing center at the university of waterloo spent the 1960s and 70s writing teaching compilers, and in 1981 a professor and some of his former students turned that work into a company. watcom c shipped in 1988 at version 6 while borland and microsoft were still at version 5, a number chosen f |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 1994|
|_____|
|
MacDraw 📖 1984 - 1994 macdraw was the vector half of the original macintosh bundle, mark cutter shipped it alongside macpaint on january 24 1984. cutter had already built lisadraw for the apple lisa the year before. the 1988 macdraw ii rewrite added color for the macintosh ii hardware that had just shipped. by the 1991 m |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1985-|
| 1994|
|_____|
|
WriteNow 📖 1985 - 1994 writenow was written in assembly by two seattle programmers, sold by t/maker, and one of the fastest mac word processors of its decade. the assembly that made it fast also made it impossible to port to powerpc when apple changed architectures. by the time the rights passed through wordstar to softke |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1990-|
| 1994|
|_____|
|
Scream Tracker 📖 1990 - 1994 sami tammilehto, who signed his work psi and helped found the finnish demogroup future crew, wrote a music tracker for dos and gave it away. version 2.2 in 1990 was the one that spread. version 3 brought the s3m format and the ability to run sampled sound next to fm synthesis on the same card. it wa |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1987-|
| 1994|
|_____|
|
Timeworks Publisher 📖 1987 - 1994 a cambridge software house cloned ventura publisher, cut the price by an order of magnitude and made it run on a machine with no hard drive, which is the reason anyone outside a design studio got to do layout at all in the late eighties. it sold under a dozen different brand names in a dozen countri |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1982-|
| 1994|
|_____|
|
Spinnaker Software 📖 1982 - 1994 april 1982, cambridge massachusetts. bill bowman and c. david seuss worked out that the people buying home computers for their children did not read computer magazines, and bought advertising in good housekeeping instead. spinnaker shipped its programs in bright durable plastic boxes when the rest o |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1990-|
| 1993|
|_____|
|
Company of Science and Art 📖 1990 - 1993 providence, rhode island, 1990. four people started a company there and shipped one of the first cross-platform digital video tools, which nobody remembers. after effects came in january 1993 and aldus bought them six months later. the company lasted under three years. the program it wrote is still |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1989-|
| 1993|
|_____|
|
Unix System Laboratories 📖 1989 - 1993 novell finished buying it on 14 june 1993 for around $335 million in stock, and the thing it had bought was already damaged by its own lawsuit. usl was at&t trying to run unix as a business instead of a research artifact, and it spent its last two years suing berkeley over code that turned out to be |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1990-|
| 1993|
|_____|
|
TAURUS 📖 1990 - 1993 the london stock exchange board met on 11 march 1993 and accepted its chief executive's recommendation to cancel taurus. peter rawlins resigned the same day. the system was meant to replace paper share certificates with an electronic register and to settle trades in three days instead of a fortnight |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1987-|
| 1993|
|_____|
|
Microsoft QuickC 📖 1987 - 1993 borland shipped turbo c in 1987 with the first integrated development environment for c on the pc, at 99 dollars and 95 cents, and microsoft answered that autumn by undercutting it by five cents. quickc shipped at 99 dollars flat while the microsoft c optimizing compiler cost 450, and the trade was |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1989-|
| 1993|
|_____|
|
Lotus Magellan 📖 1989 - 1993 a dos desktop search and file viewer that bill gross and larry gross built and sold to lotus development. released in april 1989 at a list price of $195. the killer feature was fuzzy keyword search across an indexed hard drive without launching the original application. lotus shipped version 2.0 in |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1979-|
| 1992|
|_____|
|
WordStar 📖 1979 - 1992 wordstar was the first word processor to define what writing on a personal computer felt like. micropro shipped it in june 1979 on cp/m and ported it to dos in 1982. it held the market until wordperfect overtook it from 1985 onward. the last dos release shipped in december 1992 and updates stopped. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1980-|
| 1992|
|_____|
|
Beagle Bros 📖 1980 - 1992 the logo was lifted off a smith bros cough drop box and the staff directory listed employees named elsie dee and flo chart. bert kersey started it out of his house in san diego in 1980 to sell utilities to apple ii hobbyists, and shipped every disk unprotected on the theory that people who are trust |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1988-|
| 1992|
|_____|
|
Lotus Agenda 📖 1988 - 1992 mitch kapor designed lotus agenda after walking away from lotus 1-2-3, the program shipped in may 1988 as a dos personal information manager built around a free-form database concept that almost nobody understood on first try. about 200,000 copies sold at $195 each over four years. lotus stopped dev |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1980-|
| 1992|
|_____|
|
SuperCalc 📖 1980 - 1992 sorcim wrote supercalc in 1980 because adam osborne wanted a spreadsheet for his portable computer and could not get the rights to visicalc. it shipped free in the osborne 1 box next to wordstar and became the default spreadsheet of cp/m. it also resolved circular references by iteration, which exce |
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| RIP |
|1969-|
| 1991|
|_____|
|
Pansophic Systems 📖 1969 - 1991 four employees and $150,000 borrowed from an uncle, above a storefront in oak brook illinois in 1969, at a moment when selling software as a product on its own was a proposition most people in the industry did not believe in. panvalet gave ibm mainframe sites one place to keep source code and a way |
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| RIP |
|1980-|
| 1991|
|_____|
|
dBASE (Ashton-Tate) 📖 1980 - 1991 dbase was the database for the cp/m and ms-dos micros. wayne ratliff wrote it as vulcan at jpl in 1978. ashton-tate licensed it in 1980, rebranded it as dbase ii, and rode it through dbase iii and the disastrous dbase iv launch to become one of the big four pc software companies of the eighties. bor |
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| RIP |
|1974-|
| 1991|
|_____|
|
Digital Research 📖 1974 - 1991 pacific grove, california, 1974. a professor writes an operating system for a hobby machine and accidentally sets the standard for every 8-bit microcomputer that follows. six years later ibm arrives wanting a version for the pc, the meeting goes badly over a non-disclosure agreement, and the contrac |
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| RIP |
|1980-|
| 1991|
|_____|
|
Ashton-Tate 📖 1980 - 1991 ashton-tate was the database company in the early personal computer era, holding around 70 percent of the PC database market in the mid-1980s and sitting alongside microsoft and lotus as one of the three biggest pc software companies. george tate died in 1984, the dBase IV release in october 1988 sh |
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| RIP |
|1983-|
| 1991|
|_____|
|
Paperback Software 📖 1983 - 1991 on 28 june 1990 a federal judge in boston held that the menu structure of lotus 1-2-3 was protected expression, and adam osborne's company was the one standing in front of him. paperback software had built vp-planner to work like 1-2-3 keystroke for keystroke at a price lotus would not go near, and |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1980-|
| 1991|
|_____|
|
Xenix 📖 1980 - 1991 microsoft licensed unix from at&t in 1978, could not use the name, and called its version xenix. it never sold a copy to a person. it sold licenses to hardware makers at about five hundred dollars a seat, and by 1984 tandy was shipping so many of them that a radio shack chain was the largest unix ve |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1982-|
| 1990|
|_____|
|
Peter Norton Computing 📖 1982 - 1990 thirty thousand dollars and one ibm pc in 1982. a programmer in santa monica deleted a file he needed, worked out that dos had not really erased it, and sold the fix. symantec paid seventy million in stock for the company in august 1990 and kept the name and the folded-arms photograph on the packagi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 1990|
|_____|
|
Silicon Beach Software 📖 1984 - 1990 silicon beach software was the first serious third-party developer on the macintosh, started in san diego in 1984 by charlie jackson and his wife hallie, in the same year the machine shipped. it made dark castle, which is still the best-remembered mac game of the eighties, and superpaint, which beat |
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| RIP |
|1982-|
| 1990|
|_____|
|
Multiplan 📖 1982 - 1990 microsoft shipped multiplan in august 1982, before there was a windows and before there was an excel, and ported it onto something like a hundred different machines, down to the commodore 64 and a texas instruments home computer. over a million copies sold. it lost anyway to lotus 1-2-3, which ran o |
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| RIP |
|1987-|
| 1990|
|_____|
|
Photon Paint 📖 1987 - 1990 the seventeen year old who wrote it went on to direct paranormal activity. oren peli was working at a small israeli house called bazbosoft when he and two colleagues built the first bitmap paint program with 3d solid modeling and texture mapping inside it, and microillusions shipped it for the amiga |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1985-|
| 1990|
|_____|
|
Distributed Language Translation 📖 1985 - 1990 in the spring of 1979 a dutch software engineer heard a bbc world service item about balzac on his car radio and thought of esperanto as the pivot between every language pair in the european community. that idea became dlt: six funded years at bso in utrecht on eight million guilders from the dutch |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 1989|
|_____|
|
Red Ryder 📖 1984 - 1989 wat buchanon wrote it in microsoft basic in 1984 and gave it away on bulletin boards with a manual full of jokes about apple. after he died his friend scott watson rewrote the whole thing in c and kept asking for forty dollars, which is how a one-man operation in beaver falls, pennsylvania ended up |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1968-|
| 1989|
|_____|
|
Cullinet 📖 1968 - 1989 charles wang bought it in 1989 for around three hundred million dollars in stock, which was a modest price for the company that had argued software could be a product at all. john cullinane started it in 1968 selling packaged programs to mainframe shops in an era when you either wrote your own or to |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1959-|
| 1988|
|_____|
|
Applied Data Research 📖 1959 - 1988 seven engineers walked out of sperry rand in 1959 and built the thing nobody had built yet, which was a software company with a product to sell instead of hours to bill. autoflow drew the flowchart of your program and is generally cited as the first software ever sold on its own, after rca refused t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1974-|
| 1988|
|_____|
|
Kurzweil Computer Products 📖 1974 - 1988 on 13 january 1976 a machine read walter cronkite's sign-off out loud at the end of the cbs evening news, and stevie wonder, who caught the story on television that night, became the first paying customer. ray kurzweil had started the company two years earlier to solve omni-font recognition, which i |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 1988|
|_____|
|
MacPaint 📖 1984 - 1988 macpaint shipped with the first macintosh on january 24 1984. bill atkinson wrote it in 5,804 lines of pascal augmented by 2,738 lines of 68000 assembly. susan kare designed the ui chrome and the icon set. the bundling ended with version 2.0 in january 1988, by then macpaint was spun off to claris w |
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| RIP |
|1983-|
| 1987|
|_____|
|
Living Videotext 📖 1983 - 1987 dave winer built his first fortune on the outline, a document that folds into itself, and sold the company that made it to symantec in september 1987. thinktank came first and more came second, and more is the one people still describe as the best thing they ever used. what he did with the money aft |
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| RIP |
|1983-|
| 1987|
|_____|
|
Forethought, Inc. 📖 1983 - 1987 fourteen million dollars in july 1987, for a program that had been on sale barely three months. it was the first significant company microsoft ever bought. forethought had spent its first two years failing at something else entirely before powerpoint got built there, and the software has now outlive |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1978-|
| 1987|
|_____|
|
Seattle Computer Products 📖 1978 - 1987 twenty five thousand dollars in december 1980, then fifty thousand more the following july, and the operating system that would run the next fifteen years of desktop computing had changed hands for less than the price of a house. seattle computer products was a small board shop in tukwila that neede |
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| RIP |
|1956-|
| 1986|
|_____|
|
System Development Corporation 📖 1956 - 1986 half of santa monica's air conditioning, or so the joke went, was cooling one building full of vacuum tubes. the building belonged to a company rand had spun out in 1956 to write the software for the sage air defense system, a job nobody had done at that scale before because nobody had needed to. it |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1962-|
| 1985|
|_____|
|
Informatics General 📖 1962 - 1985 in january 1962 walter bauer talked two colleagues at trw into leaving with him to start a company that sold software, at a point when software was not a thing anybody sold. informatics opened in an empty house in woodland hills on forty thousand dollars of capital. mark iv, its file management and |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 1985|
|_____|
|
MacBASIC 📖 1984 - 1985 bill gates wanted the applesoft license renewed and named a price for it: apple had to stop shipping its own basic for the macintosh. apple agreed in august 1985, let the language go to microsoft for one dollar, and told donn denman to destroy four years of work. the beta was already loose by then, |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1982-|
| 1985|
|_____|
|
PC-Talk 📖 1982 - 1985 a book publisher who had owned a computer for about two weeks wrote a communications program in ibm basic, then decided to distribute it the way public television raises money. copy it, pass it on, send twenty-five dollars if you liked it. up to half of the people who took it paid, which nobody expe |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1979-|
| 1985|
|_____|
|
VisiCalc 📖 1979 - 1985 visicalc was the first killer app. dan bricklin and bob frankston shipped it through software arts on october 17, 1979 for the apple ii, and it became the program that made a non-programmer want a personal computer for the first time. by 1983 lotus 1-2-3 had taken the ibm pc spreadsheet market and v |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1981-|
| 1984|
|_____|
|
Atari Program Exchange 📖 1981 - 1984 dale yocum's idea was that atari should publish the programs its own customers were already writing, print them in a quarterly catalog with the author's name on them, and send that catalog to everyone who had mailed in a warranty card. it worked immediately and became a profit center, which in 1981 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1982-|
| 1984|
|_____|
|
Ovation Technologies 📖 1982 - 1984 windows on the world, 107 floors above manhattan, a press conference for a program that no outsider had ever run. ovation was announced in november 1983 as five applications in one box, aimed straight at lotus 1-2-3, with several million dollars behind it and a tandy distribution deal already signed |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1972-|
| 1980|
|_____|
|
Traf-O-Data 📖 1972 - 1980 $360 bought the intel 8008 this whole thing was built around, and the prototype that followed came in near $1,500 two years later. two friends out of the same seattle school wanted to sell traffic engineers a machine that read the punched paper tape coming off roadside counters, and when king county |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1961-|
| 1973|
|_____|
|
Compatible Time-Sharing System 📖 1961 - 1973 november 1961 is when a modified ibm 709 at mit ran several terminals at once and time-sharing stopped being an argument on paper. fernando corbato's group gave the field the password login and one of the first electronic mail programs, then handed the whole design over to multics. the last one, the |