The earliest OSAlert articles and news postings have not been available online in many years, as they were mostly static HTML, and when we made the switch over to our v1 CMS, I just filed it away on my hard drive. But to celebrate our 10 year anniversary, let’s take a peek at what was hot in the OS world in 1997. Visit our OSAlert 1997 archive. We have some feature articles, opinion pieces, and a fascinating view of several days of daily news frozen in time (and chock full of dead links). Take some time to look it over. On an unrelated note, Read More if you are in, or have contacts in, the graphic design world and would like to help OSAlert.We were hoping to unveil our updated design and our fully-overhauled new back-end system for our tenth anniversary, but problems retaining a graphic designer have postponed that project yet again. If you know a great designer who’d be available right now to help us out, contact me. We’d like to help someone who can help us develop and establish the look and feel of OSAlert for the next 10 years.
10 Year Anniversary Blast from the Past
35 Comments
2007-08-30 12:58 am
“C/net is exposing the future Betamaxes and 8 track tapes of the technology world in a column entitled “10 Technologies that Don’t Stand a Chance.” Judge for yourself. BTW, one of those doomed technologies is Java.”
Some things never change, like CNet’s predictions.
Beta tapes are still around for pro use: Betacam, Betacam SP, Digital Betacam. So what if Betamax is dead?
I loved the quality of Betamax tapes in comparison to VHS and S-VHS.
Nowadays however, they will not make me fall into the trap of buying 2 standards… HD-DVD or BluRay ? pffff
keep them, my dvd/divx player is good enough for me.
I want to get The Wings of Honneamise on DVD.
Unfortunately, the upcoming re-release from Bandai Visual USA only bundles the DVD with the Blu-ray and HD-DVD editions, not as a stand-alone. That and using Japanese price levels ($80) for the U.S. market makes me a bit leary, not to mention the cost of an HD player.
A quick look at the internet archive shows that they predicted the following technologies would fail:
1) Push content
2) ISDN
3) 56k modems
4) Internet phones
5) NetPC
6) Spam-blocking software
7) PDAs
8) PC TV
9) Java
Interestingly enough, most of these really didn’t fail, but morphed into a slightly different, but ultimately successful technology.
– Push content: Morphed into RSS feeds and RSS aggregators.
– 56k modems: Substantial broadband penetration took a long time; 56k modems certainly had they heyday.
– Internet phones: VOIP anyone? Vonage, etc?
– Spam-blocking software: It’s integrated into everything now.
– PDAs: The “PDA” market proper is waning, but I don’t think smartphones and the iPhone are fundamentally different devices
– PC TV: Interestingly enough, all three major US networks have many of their TV shows available via streaming on their websites; of course, torrenting TV shows is huge too
– Java: Never succeeded properly in client space, but absolutely took over server space, which no one saw coming
“Macosrumors is also reporting that according to Motorola, the Power PC architecture has a lot of potential. How much? How about one gigahertz (1,000 MHz). (!)”
Blazing!
What was the upper level speed of the Motorola chip on the consumer market before Apple went to Intel?
From September 29th:
Here we are ten years later… still waiting. In retrospect, Gateway was apparently the only serious candidate, and even they weren’t serious about it. When they found out what Jim Collas had in mind, that was the end of that.
Three websites had their acts in order, and managed to maintain URLs for nearly 10 years:
C|Net (2 of 3)
AppleInsider (1 of 1)
StepWise (1 of 1)
Other than that, the web is like a virtual Library of Alexandria. It has all these tantilizing hints as to the volumes of information that it once contained, but which were destroyed by the savage hoards (website admins).
The Way Back Machine is your friend… Just prefix http://web.archive.org/web/*/ to any of the dead links there, and (hopefully) you’ll get to see the content.
From the link above for the Internet Archive Wayback Machine..
Data Retrieval Failure.
We’re sorry. We were unable to retrieve the requested data. We may be experiencing technical difficulties and suggest that you try again later.
See the FAQs for more info and help, or contact us.
Priceless
Also, do bear in mind that there is no backup of the Internet Archive. This is a basement run project using entirely legacy hardware. If a hard disk dies, that’s a whole chunk of Internet history lost right there. Scary when you think about it.
My god. This makes me think.
However, Wikipedia reports that “It is a member of the American Library Association and is officially recognized by the State of California as a library.” -doesn’t it mean it has some funding?
Edited 2007-08-27 10:03
Also, do bear in mind that there is no backup of the Internet Archive. This is a basement run project using entirely legacy hardware. If a hard disk dies, that’s a whole chunk of Internet history lost right there. Scary when you think about it.
That is the reason mirror sites exists
There are mirrors for the wayback machine?? COuld you front us some links to those or were you just being sarcastic?
–bornagainpenguin
This is a basement run project using entirely legacy hardware. If a hard disk dies, that’s a whole chunk of Internet history lost right there. Scary when you think about it.
I don’t see how scary it is to lose crappy HTML pages from 1997. If the hard disk died most people would never know. It would be as eventful as a blade of grass dieing on a prairie.
Web development has evolved over the years, as has technology, but it would be a mistake to let ‘old things’ that are ‘crap’ be destroyed because we have newer things now. Should we demolish the great wall of china, the pyramids of Egypt and the Parthenon of Greece? I think not.
That’s probably what the layperson said when the Library of Alexandria burned down.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_alexandria
Now, mind you, there is doubtlessly plenty of crap in those internet archives, but I think it rather rash of you to declare that it’s all junk just because most people won’t take the time to sift through it.
while there’s been a lot of exciting developments in the last ten years, I’m still surprised to see how stagnant the industry has been. The same key players are there, the Amiga and OS/2 stories are similar to what we see here these days.
Has the industry matured, or is it being held back?
It has been held back for sure. And every economist can tell you why. Monopolies tend to do that…
while there’s been a lot of exciting developments in the last ten years, I’m still surprised to see how stagnant the industry has been. The same key players are there, the Amiga stories are similar to what we see here these days.
The Amiga seems it has been trapped in a time loop.It's all the time the same history again and again with different players.The Amiga universe collapsed in a black hole?
seeing all these dead links, makes me feel bad – we ARE loosing our history on the web, aren’t we?
In 1997 –
The Computer My Mom Needs
By Joanne Rodgers
http://www.osnews.com/1997osnews/oped/11.97/mom.html
In 2007 –
The Return Of The 8 Bits?
By Michael Reed
http://www.osnews.com/story.php/17723/The-Return-Of-The-8-Bits
Great minds think alike. Mine just works much, much more slowly than hers
java a doomed technology, now look at it, good work osnews people.
If thats the original intro page @ link then me likes.
pity xmms couldn’t stick around lol
You want to take a peek at Audacious.
http://audacious-media-player.org/
Audacious is a fork of Beep Media Player, which itself was a fork of XMMS.
Wow, they had Google ad sense back in 1997!
Welcome to the new web, same as the old web.
Actually, the pages were querying a now-defunct ad network called “spinbox.” One search and replace later, Google ads!
Amiga lives.
OS/2 lives.
BeOS rules.
Linux is ready for the desktop.
Windows sucks.
It’s incredible how that 1997 looks like this 2007.
“Ending Mac OS licensing has many Apple fanatics up in arms, but the Mac’s days are numbered. Like it or not, the most compelling technologies in Apple’s future are a modern operating system mated to cheap, easy to configure Network Computers.”
Yay!
10 Technologies that Don’t Stand a Chance.
http://web.archive.org/web/19990224185426/www.cnet.com/Content/Feat…
Ralph Nader & The Microsft Menace
http://www.slate.com/Features/NaderMS/NaderMS.asp“ rel=”nofollow”>http://web.archive.org/web/19971210223956/http://web.archive.org/web/19990219165533/macweek.zdnet.com/mw_1142…
What’s an OS? IE-Windows integration – Wired
http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story/7933.html“ rel=”nofollow”>http://web.archive.org/web/19990220011903/http://web.archive.org/web/19990428114115/macweek.zdnet.com/mw_1141…
Amiga Lives! Purchased by Gateway – ZDnet
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/content/zdnn/0926/zdnn0014.html“ rel=”nofollow”>http://web.archive.org/web/19990116232124/