I’m sure this has been thought about and pointed out before, but here goes my thought of the day:
What happens to all the old great software applications? It’s not just idle curiosity that compelled me to think about this, but the fact that there is a ton of heritage, great design and well, the roots of history that are swept away with every new product release or marketing splurge.

A couple of things prompted me to think about this. First was reading Esther Dyson’s blog a few weeks ago:
“…Quantrix, a startup that offers more powerful modeling than you can get in a spreadsheet, but complementary to a spreadsheet and as simple as one. Think Improv, the stunning modeling tool that Lotus developed for Steve Jobs’ NeXT machine, or Metaphor, the company that came (indirectly) out of PARC…”
I’ve never, ever, heard of these tools. They sound cool, and could offer at least a glimpse into the successful designs from the past. But where are they to play with, explore and learn from?
Another trigger for this is because I’ve been re-reading Dust or Magic? (fantastic book, btw) and there are a ton of examples of great software applications, not to mention interactive CD-ROMs (Voyager interactive CDs anyone?), mentioned that simply don’t exist or are completely forgotten about.
The application that keeps cropping up and keeps being mentioned is HyperCard. Every time I hear about this application I want to get hold of it. Apple still sell it apparently, but it’s been graveyard material for years. Apple should either make this OSX compatible, update the shit out of it and let it create self contained SCORM compliant .swf files (imagine *how* cool that would be), or open source it.
And I just read in a mailing list about Lotus’ Agenda, another intriguing application that sounded like the perfect information organiser. But it died off, subjected to marketing failure and whatever political intrigue determines that cool products die.
And what about old content? Almost all professions have a rich history from hundreds of years of experience (the law profession’s entire business model is built on understanding and utilising prior efforts :-), but the IT, e-learning, software etc industries seem determined to erase prior efforts, almost pathologically. And yet it’s just bits – the collective computing industry should theoretically have an easier time to store and taxonimise (is that a verb?), blimey, perhaps even just give old stuff away then other industries.
Imagine art galleries for old content and software. Pontificating critics. Software retrospectives. It gets done for games – I visited a show dedicated to gaming last year in the Barbican – very cool, very interesting and had never been done before. And most of the show was possible because of emulation.
But it’s not all whining (upcoming pun intended :-) This is being done for software some places. Take outliners. Dave Winer built More, apparently a fantastic outlining application for the Mac. In fact you can download it from outliners.com. More was sold to Symantec years ago and after years of being mothballed, Winer managed to persuade Symantec to release it for free. I know this because Winer made the effort to write about it’s history and put the program online.
Now, I use OmniOutliner, a rather nifty outliner, that apparently was modelled on More. There has been a flurry of debate from some die hard More users about enhancing OmniOutliner. They described features etc. I downloaded the program and can see what they mean – a rich, living history of a great program and one that is having a positive influence on current software design.
On a completely unrelated note, I’m writing this off-line on a train, so frustratingly can’t do the usual googling to check facts and find links – here’s hoping the embedded google search does it for me :-)