I think that it’s interesting to look back at calls that were wrong to try to help improve future ones.

Maybe it was a tech company that you thought wouldn’t make it and did well or vice versa. Maybe a technology you thought had promise and didn’t pan out. Maybe a project that you thought would become the future but didn’t or one that you thought was going to be the next big thing and went under.

Four from me:

  • My first experience with the World Wide Web was on an rather unstable version of lynx on a terminal. I was pretty unimpressed. Compared to gopher clients of the time, it was harder to read, the VAX/VMS build I was using crashed frequently, and was harder to navigate around. I wasn’t convinced that it was going to go anywhere. The Web has obviously done rather well since then.

  • In the late 1990s, Apple was in a pretty dire state, and a number of people, including myself, didn’t think that they likely had much of a future. Apple turned things around and became the largest company in the world by market capitalization for some time, and remains quite healthy.

  • When I first ran into it, I was skeptical that Wikipedia would manage to stave off spam and parties with an agenda sufficiently to remain useful as it became larger. I think that it’s safe to say that Wikipedia has been a great success.

  • After YouTube throttled per-stream download speeds, rendering youtube-dl much less useful, the yt-dlp project came to the fore, which worked around this with parallel downloads. I thought that it was very likely that YouTube wouldn’t tolerate this — it seems to me to have all the drawbacks of youtube-dl from their standpoint, plus maybe more, and shouldn’t be too hard to detect. But at least so far, they haven’t throttled or blocked it.

Anyone else have some of their own that they’d like to share?

    • tal@lemmy.todayOPEnglish
      4·
      6 days ago

      Context:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-mobile_PC

      An ultra-mobile PC,[1] or ultra-mobile personal computer (UMPC), is a miniature version of a pen computer, a class of laptop whose specifications were launched by Microsoft and Intel in Spring 2006. Sony had already made a first attempt in this direction in 2004 with its Vaio U series, which was only sold in Asia. UMPCs are generally smaller than subnotebooks, have a TFT display measuring (diagonally) about 12.7 to 17.8 centimetres (5.0 to 7.0 in), are operated like tablet PCs using a touchscreen or a stylus, and can also have a physical keyboard.

    • Trainguyrom@reddthat.comEnglish
      1·
      4 days ago

      I thought the idea of a tiny computer that you carry around with you would have taken off more too. Whether a CPU module like with the flopped EOMA68 project (tl;dr for those who don’t want to read the whole mailing list archive, repeated manufacturing challenges caused the project to run out of money before products could ship and the guy running it seemed to have a mental health crisis not long after that) or in the format of the Intel Compute Stick or an all-in-one computer built into a monitor or keyboard.

      As a side-note, I briefly worked at an MSP last year that used whatever scavenged computers for employee computers instead of actually spending money on its employees. I was initially given a single 20 year old VGA monitor to work from, and was tasked with pulling drives from computers to prepare them for recycling. I spotted an all-in-one PC with a decent 1080p display (it ran an i3-6100m and only had a single SODIMM slot for memory, so not a very cost-effective option for a Linux PC) and noticed that it had an HDMI input port, so it got a second life as my main computer monitor for the 5 months or so that I worked there. Honestly 6/10 monitor, there’s some really good 1080p displays available for about $100 these days, and being not primarily designed as a monitor, I had to hit the button use the passthrough mode every time I booted my work computer (and after every power loss the embedded computer would try to boot and kick off the passthrough mode), but it was a very acceptable display for the circa ~2016 it hailed from