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

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

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

40 comments

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DamonHD
WordStar (non-document mode).

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

toast0
Joe is pretty WordStar like, and also includes jstar which I think is more or less a preset to be WordStarrier.

I've been using it for most of my programming since ~ 1995.

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

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

tyrotoxism
There's an existing app called Swinsian that is basically old iTunes as described.
cookiengineer
woltlab burning board or phpbb:

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

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

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

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

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

vunderba
Microsoft PDS (aka Quickbasic). QB64 is an okay substitute but since it's compiled rather than interpreted it loses a lot of the magic that made BASIC special back in the day.
hnthrowaway0328
I think QuickBasic is a compiled language but QBasic is the interpreted one?
vunderba
so QuickBasic (4.5, etc) give you the option to compile your source for purposes of distribution but while you are coding/testing/etc it's purely interpretive.

QB is the free to use bundled version for MS-DOS that doesn't have this feature.

dakiol
Winamp (for macOS, for instance)
runjake
Eudora, an old email client.
smarri
A birds eye view, turn based game, based on the Aliens film. I played it on apple Mac maybe 25+ years ago. Have never been able to find it since. It always ended with the famous quote from the film "it's game over man, game over".
admissionsguy
RescueTime before they removed most features. The old version still technically exists, but is unmaintained and broken. It's really the weirdest regression I have seen in consumer software.
visox
Do have some nostalgia towards ICQ, think it was great at finding people based on interest and geo-location. Dont think there is anything like that now, but i also think it cant be copied.
gadders
Lotus Notes. Still beats Outlook for searching for emails and is easily better than the pile of refuse that is SharePoint for document libraries, workflows etc.
dagw
I think Lotus Notes must be one of the most controversial pieces of software ever released. One of my first jobs was developing a document and project management workflow system using Lotus Notes 4 and Domino and found it not only quite quick and easy to use, but looking back I have to say Notes was way ahead of its time with a lot of what it offered. Yet every time I mention Notes among IT people, most of them who have used it respond with visceral hatred.
gadders
I started my career as a Lotus Notes developer so have a soft spot for it, even v3.

When I started with with Notes it was pre-internet as well so having a system in London and New York that could replicate only updates over a not-very high bandwidth link to the US was amazing.

But I've recently had to create document storage and approval sites with a simple workflow and it's horrible in SharePoint.

dagw
Notes was a bit weird in that it was actually a pretty great rapid application development environment and 'no-sql' (way before that term became trendy) document store that was sold as a mediocre email client.
dagw
slrn. Although I think what I actually miss is old usenet and the community I had there.
janpavlque
- an IM that doesn’t suck. All modern IMs (Facebook Messenger and such) are garbage compared to old-school desktop apps.

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

toast0
Digitally Imported will work just fine with Foobar, if you have a paid account. ;p

(They've got some sister sites if you don't like electronic dance music)

interbased
I really miss AIM and MSN Messenger. Also Xfire for integration with games.
cookiengineer
Trillian and Pidgin, combined with Hamachi... Those were the golden days of pre-online but also online gaming.
pavluha
Windows 7 was the best _windows_ based OS for me.
mrKola
Macromedia Fireworks
bindd
There was an image-editor I used to use and it was a joy. IrfanView, I think, it was!

I would like to have that back if I could!

kleer001
Does google reader count? The social aspect was delightful