What great software invention or idea never gained adoption?

webOS. It had multitasking, global search, worked with many backend services and a host of smaller features that took a decade to reach other mobile operating systems. But its apps were JavaScript, before HTML5 and PWAs made web apps low friction. And the market for smartphones is brutal. theverge.com/2012/6/5/3062611/palm...

There was this thing in the 90s where everyone was trying to make what I'd describe as "pluggable systems" for the desktop. Microsoft's OLE is a leftover of that and probably the only thing people know anymore these days (KDE has/had? something similar called KParts).

The most impressive incarnation was OpenDoc. The idea was that you don't think program-centric. Instead you have documents that can consist of elements originating from different programs. Like, as we still have it today, using an Excel table in a Word document, but more sophisticated and generalized.

Now we're back at square one, using primitive webbrowsers to hop from one company's website to the next, losing track of where all our stuff is...

Oh yes, that stuff is amazing! The closest thing I can think of is org-mode.

I remembered the only startup I'd ever backed called Plastc. It promoted a black credit card with an E-Ink display where the name and credit card number would normally be. The idea was a user could scan regular credit cards, loyalty cards, etc., into the memory of the Plastc card. So at check-out, the user would enter their pin and then select which card to pay with. They then swipe or insert the card and the data from the selected card is read into the machine. Not sure what happened to it, whether the company was mismanaged or if the product just wasn't viable, but it was such a cool ideas.

theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/4...

I don't understand why 3D photography doesn't gain traction. In the early days you had the ViewMaster. And now almost every cheap-ass smartphone has a camera much better than in those days, but (almost) never you can make 3D photos let alone videos 😢
My hope is on the lightfield cameras...

I remember like 10 years ago that I've got to implement some little app for Ginga-based HDTV receptors.
You have to use a declarative language for UI called NCL and for logic Lua, in a couple of minutes you have running cool things and I really thought that this could be the only way to write software for TV... of course AndroidTV appeared later and you know the history.

First thing I was thinking of too!

When Avi Bryant showed off his MagLev prototype, showing Ruby running on a Smalltalk VM, I thought I was seeing the future.

Sadly, he never intended to spend more than a summer on it, and nothing came of it. Huge letdown.

microtags

Modula-2 programming language en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modula-2

I'll be the one and say I loved windows on the lumia phones. Man what a pleasure the UX was to me. I really liked the tiles and the plethora of information you could get, just by staring at your screen long enough.
No tapping, swiping, nothing was needed, once you configured your tiles to fit your needs.

I do hope MS brings it back one day. I think it was just too different for most people to get widely adopted.

Microsoft's Macro Recorder, back in the Windows 3.1 / Windows 95 days. Basically it allowed recording user activity (mouse movements, clicks, keystrokes) and turning it into an editable VB script, making it a useful tool to automate repetitive processes like editing spreadsheets.

I seem to remember this technology was abandoned because of public fears it could replace office workers.

Wave got folded into a load of other products, so it's with us spirit.

I'd submit RSS. It is so helpful and convenient, but it's continuing to die. It's such a shame to see it go in real time.

The late Pieter Hintjens once said in a tweet that there are three things that more developers should know about:

1. State machines
2. The actor model
3. Model languages

We now have X-State for using state machines to manage state in web applications, and state machines are used extensively in game development.

The actor model doesn’t get as much love, but you have actor model frameworks for every language, plus you have Erlang, plus Actix is one of the fastest web frameworks (written in Rust) and I’m pretty sure it gets its name from the actor model.

But model languages? I still don’t really understand what those are. I remember Hintjens clarifying that they are not mere domain-specific languages. I think they are languages used for code generation? I’m not sure, and he isn’t around to ask.