Comment by anthk

2 months ago

Ehhh... I disagree.

Java -> Bloated compared to Icon/TCL

VB -> OKish, but TCL/Tk and a bit of C did wonders under Unix.

NT -> Good, advanced

95 -> Mediocre against Amiga/Mac.

MSO -> Polished turd and uberused, giving disasters such as the renaming on Genomics and tons of papers now being void.

MPEG -> Good, bound to TV and multimedia standards.

QT -> Propietary crap, but QT3D was and it's still interesting. Lqtplay from libquicktime plays them well.

MP3 -> Opus and OGG preferred here

Acrobat/PDF -> PostScript and DJVU

Netscape/FrontPage -> Damn crazy bloat with opaque formats on tons of stuff not bound to proper terminology. Even using Emacs editing HTML pages seems easier. Composer looked easier than FP, for sure.

Videoconf -> Yes, h323 and friends.

IDE's -> A lot of them were better under DOS or very bloated under Windows, such as Eclipse, Netbeans...

PC/Console -> Yep, 3DFX/Glide and free Unixen, but consoles went downhill, the PC was set ahead since the Unreal engine.

2 comments

anthk

musicale 2 months ago

DOS IDEs (Turbo Pascal etc.) do seem pretty great, but they wouldn't help you build GUI apps the way you could with VB, Delphi (a successor to Turbo Pascal), Java, etc. Tcl/Tk is also a product of the 1990s, both open source and commercial, which made GUI app development faster and easier, though I am not sure if it had a good IDE.

(I think we're indebted to Sun for wasting money on things like Java and Tcl/Tk, projects that weren't closely related to their core business but which benefited the rest of the industry.)

Most of the things you mention are also products of the 1990s, providing additional evidence for the claim that software advanced quite a bit on both the proprietary and free software sides during that decade.

musicale 2 months ago

> MSO -> Polished turd and uberused

I think this may be judgment in retrospect. The original combination of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint was undoubtedly useful and became more so with integration. It's too bad that competition from Lotus, Apple/Claris, WordPerfect/Novell/Corel, open source alternatives, etc. didn't affect Office's dominance. Google had a great head start over Office 365 with Docs but didn't pursue it.