Look back in sorrow. Modern tech's cool, but many things used to be so very much better than now.
I love my Android phone in some ways - what it can do is wonderful. The formfactor of my Nokia E90 was better in every single way, though. Give the Nokia a modern CPU, replace its silly headphone socket, MiniUSB port & Nokia charging port with a standard jack & a MicroUSB, make the internal screen a touchscreen, and I would take your arm off in my haste to acquire it.
Comparably, my Psion 5mx was a far better PDA than the Galaxy Note 2 I have now. My old Nokia 6310i was the best mobile phone I have ever had, or heard of or seen. Given modern cloud sync, I'd be quite interested in going back to a separate phone and PDA if I could have an updated Psion and updated 6310.
Psion EPOC was a better mobile OS than Android is, with better apps - although obviously Android scores massively on Internet capabilities & so on. Android is the best I've seen, though - I really dislike iOS and WinPhone.
I am sure that given a day, I could find you a thousand names of people who would attest that Win7 was a better desktop than Windows 8. Probably as many that WinXP was better than Win7 with a bit more work. Me, I liked Win2K better than anything later, and aspects of Win95 and even NT3 outdid it.
Office 97 I only use now because of the file format; it deteriorated after 95, which was the acme. I'd use the 32-bit Word and Excel from Office 4.3 if I could find them - Word 6 was more than enough for me, all that came later is pure bloat.
Early Windows arguably had better database apps than Access was - Lotus Approach was good, for instance. Lotus Organizer is so vastly superior to the abomination of Outlook as a PIM that the comparison would be laughable if it were not tragic.
CIX's Ameol was the best online-discussion-handling tool ever written in about 1993-1994; it degenerated with v2. It was an outstanding email client, too. If only it could handle modernities such as IMAP and handled attachments and so on better, I might use it still.
Classic MacOS had much to commend it over any other GUI OS of the Internet era, although OS X improved on it in more ways than it was inferior. I still miss drawers & the elegance of the System Folder. The best OS X was 10.6, though; 10.7 & 10.8 start to blur the vision with cruft & crap.
Novell Netware 3 was *the* classic server OS. Also just about the fastest ever written. The rot set in with v4, which offered almost no improvements of any kind in the small-business area I worked in. Everything since then was bloated into unrecognisability and not a single one of Netware's strengths or desirable features was brought across into SUSE Linux after the Novell purchase.
For that matter, for all TCP/IP's ubiquity, IPX/SPX was simpler to work with & did everything I ever needed. For years I just layered TCP/IP on top purely for Internet connectivity, nothing else. Hell, even NetBEUI and Appletalk were less of a pain than IP.
Then came IPv6, which made TCP/IP almost infinitely *more* of a pain to work with.
Of course, pre-GUI, there were some blinding apps that never made it across. Some of the truly great pre-GUI wordprocessors were WordPerfect for its portability, its range of drivers, its speed & the much-missed "show codes" feature, LocoScript for its hardware integration, MS Word for a good clean UI on DOS.
There are no good outliners in the GUI era. The category died with DOS, and it's a shame, because they were phenomenal tools. There were some Mac ones, but nothing close to PC Outline, say.
Arguably the best BASIC ever was BBC BASIC V on Acorn RISC OS, and RISC OS can also teach every other GUI OS ever some important lessons about how to design a GUI file manager. It also gave the world solid-window-drag, inbuilt-antialiasing, and is the original progenitor of the Windows Taskbar. Almost forgotten now, for all that it still lives and runs a treat on the Raspberry Pi - far better than Linux does, the OS that the Pi was designed and intended to run.
This is not some idle fancy of mine, Dave. I've given it serious thought. The last time I conducted a straw poll, I found few that agreed with me, but no, in many ways, the whole damned IT industry seems to me to be in a death-spiral of reciprocal copying and creeping featuritis, with very few original ideas & a continual loss of usability & practicality, replaced with more and more and more ticky-boxes on features tables.
It has some way to go before it is so moribund that something fresh can come along and completely replace it, but I can see it happening.
One of the problems is that there are too few people left who actually know its history, know where it came from, how and why. Many of the old hands are far too keen to seize onto the new shiny.
On the web, advertisers rule all, more than ever. Some print magazines used to run damning reviews highlighting the deep crapness of some products. It's very very rare to see that today.
hav
It is an axiom that /no/ product is perfect. /Everything/ has flaws. If a review does not point out as many things wrong with a product as aspects to praise, then that review is broken and needs to be rewritten - but there is barely an editor in the business today who would order that. Or if there is, I don't know where they are, because I know no such site.
Comparably, my Psion 5mx was a far better PDA than the Galaxy Note 2 I have now. My old Nokia 6310i was the best mobile phone I have ever had, or heard of or seen. Given modern cloud sync, I'd be quite interested in going back to a separate phone and PDA if I could have an updated Psion and updated 6310.
Psion EPOC was a better mobile OS than Android is, with better apps - although obviously Android scores massively on Internet capabilities & so on. Android is the best I've seen, though - I really dislike iOS and WinPhone.
I am sure that given a day, I could find you a thousand names of people who would attest that Win7 was a better desktop than Windows 8. Probably as many that WinXP was better than Win7 with a bit more work. Me, I liked Win2K better than anything later, and aspects of Win95 and even NT3 outdid it.
Office 97 I only use now because of the file format; it deteriorated after 95, which was the acme. I'd use the 32-bit Word and Excel from Office 4.3 if I could find them - Word 6 was more than enough for me, all that came later is pure bloat.
Early Windows arguably had better database apps than Access was - Lotus Approach was good, for instance. Lotus Organizer is so vastly superior to the abomination of Outlook as a PIM that the comparison would be laughable if it were not tragic.
CIX's Ameol was the best online-discussion-handling tool ever written in about 1993-1994; it degenerated with v2. It was an outstanding email client, too. If only it could handle modernities such as IMAP and handled attachments and so on better, I might use it still.
Classic MacOS had much to commend it over any other GUI OS of the Internet era, although OS X improved on it in more ways than it was inferior. I still miss drawers & the elegance of the System Folder. The best OS X was 10.6, though; 10.7 & 10.8 start to blur the vision with cruft & crap.
Novell Netware 3 was *the* classic server OS. Also just about the fastest ever written. The rot set in with v4, which offered almost no improvements of any kind in the small-business area I worked in. Everything since then was bloated into unrecognisability and not a single one of Netware's strengths or desirable features was brought across into SUSE Linux after the Novell purchase.
For that matter, for all TCP/IP's ubiquity, IPX/SPX was simpler to work with & did everything I ever needed. For years I just layered TCP/IP on top purely for Internet connectivity, nothing else. Hell, even NetBEUI and Appletalk were less of a pain than IP.
Then came IPv6, which made TCP/IP almost infinitely *more* of a pain to work with.
Of course, pre-GUI, there were some blinding apps that never made it across. Some of the truly great pre-GUI wordprocessors were WordPerfect for its portability, its range of drivers, its speed & the much-missed "show codes" feature, LocoScript for its hardware integration, MS Word for a good clean UI on DOS.
There are no good outliners in the GUI era. The category died with DOS, and it's a shame, because they were phenomenal tools. There were some Mac ones, but nothing close to PC Outline, say.
Arguably the best BASIC ever was BBC BASIC V on Acorn RISC OS, and RISC OS can also teach every other GUI OS ever some important lessons about how to design a GUI file manager. It also gave the world solid-window-drag, inbuilt-antialiasing, and is the original progenitor of the Windows Taskbar. Almost forgotten now, for all that it still lives and runs a treat on the Raspberry Pi - far better than Linux does, the OS that the Pi was designed and intended to run.
This is not some idle fancy of mine, Dave. I've given it serious thought. The last time I conducted a straw poll, I found few that agreed with me, but no, in many ways, the whole damned IT industry seems to me to be in a death-spiral of reciprocal copying and creeping featuritis, with very few original ideas & a continual loss of usability & practicality, replaced with more and more and more ticky-boxes on features tables.
It has some way to go before it is so moribund that something fresh can come along and completely replace it, but I can see it happening.
One of the problems is that there are too few people left who actually know its history, know where it came from, how and why. Many of the old hands are far too keen to seize onto the new shiny.
On the web, advertisers rule all, more than ever. Some print magazines used to run damning reviews highlighting the deep crapness of some products. It's very very rare to see that today.
hav
It is an axiom that /no/ product is perfect. /Everything/ has flaws. If a review does not point out as many things wrong with a product as aspects to praise, then that review is broken and needs to be rewritten - but there is barely an editor in the business today who would order that. Or if there is, I don't know where they are, because I know no such site.