@cstross online clothing retail is dominated by boo.com
flash became the runtime platform for the web (they never made javascript go fast) macromedia bought adobe and won the browser wars by hollowing out MS IE
@cstross
> …What survivors from the glorious-future-that-wasn't would you like to memorialize in this shared fictional nightmare?
VRML. VR chat catches on; it works well enough over the 9600 baud network and chatting with blocky avatars across the globe is novel enough that the VR market never goes fully bust.
And Java. Except it's called Oak. It runs on cable set top boxes and VR headsets and DVD players.
Monkey's paw: global disinfo and political polarization via VR chat; OakWorms malware
> Macintosh® Powerbook™ is all that's left of the glory that was Apple: a range of black plastic PowerPC business laptops sold by Lenovo. Main value proposition: they run COBOL business applications real good.
Reminds me of IBM PC AT/370 which could also run CICS, COBOL, and other business-critical software.
@slothrop I had an Archos Jukebox 20 before I got my first iPod (a 2nd generation one). The JB20 was quite a chonk, the LCD display was horrible, the UI was clunky, and the audio out suffered from hiss. Also, USB 1.1 was s-l-o-w when it came to filling a 20Gb hard disk. On the other hand, it used four user-replaceable NiMH AA cells and could kinda-sorta be hacked and upgraded by the owner.
@cstross on that timeline, all small business software is written in MS-Excel or Macromedia Flash (the boss won't buy you the MSDN subscription that you need to get any of the professional developer tools that are part of the software patent pool, and anything built with your old student-licensed tools is only signed to run on an education PC)
@gabe@anthony_steele@dmarti I regret to say that as of last month I could find NO SIGN on the internet of SCO's circa-1993-95 Widget Server (a Tcl-based high level scripting interface for writing GUI applications that could display in a terminal using a Curses UI or graphically via X11/Motif). A shame: it was elegant and in theory extensible to other display protocols (it was a client/server architecture). SCO used it to script the OpenServer system administration GUI.
@cstross@gabe@anthony_steele@dmarti ugh that open server text “gui” was soo awful. And don’t get me started on what they did to /etc/* “my god, it’s full of symlinks”
@gabe@Unixbigot@anthony_steele@dmarti Yes, SCO management being full of it was a major contributory factor in me running away to Scotland. (I could see the writing on the wall as far back as late 1994).
@cstross@anthony_steele there are even two legal version of Perl/Tk -- Microsoft Visual Perl/Tk and SCO Open PerlWare (a cornucopia of choices compared to version control, where the only fully licensed system is MSFT Visual SourceSafe)
@dmarti@anthony_steele You think you're joking but there REALLY WAS a product, circa 1995-99, called "Visual COBOLScript for Windows 98: CGI Programming Edition".
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