[PCWorld]

Post your comments for The 30 Products and Services We Miss Most here

[Hudgens]

What? Not a mention of Infocom text adventures? I agree, the original Civ ruled in the extreme, but before it ruled, games like Zork and Planetfall and Deadline kept millions of people engrossed for days at a time. Those were the best games, bar none.SRH

[AceofdataBase]

I miss old Tandy products (like DeskMate, w0000!!!) and Sierra games like Oilswell and the first Hoyles.Why the heck would you miss parallel ports? :p

[Cosmo]

[quote name='AceofdataBase']> > Why the heck would you miss parallel ports? :pI have an old printer that I use. A parallel port would be simpler than the homemade, hackjob, adapter that I made.

[Soren]

laayyymmmme

[GraysonPeddie]

"HP, Compaq, HP, HP, and NEC," HP, HP, NEC, NEC, HP, Compaq, Compaq, NEC, NEC, NEC... (Keep on saying that with "HP," "Compaq," and "NEC!")Proofread! Proofread! Proofread!!!Proofread! Proofread! Proofread!!!Proofread! Proofread! Proofread!!!Need I say more? LOL!!!!!!:D

[shoes54]

when your laser disk dies we have 10 pioneer decks here at work gathering dust

[lthrower]

There's a lot I miss about the Windows 3.1 days. Back then you had innumerable options to configure your Windows environment. Using Norton Desktop or Borland Dashboard, you could have a completely different desktop experience from other Windows (or Mac) users. Nowadays, it's Start button - period. My favorite configuration was DOS 5.0 with Windows for Workgroups 3.11. Add Norton Desktop for WIndows 3.0, QEMM for memory management, Metz Task Manager (with tons of quick start buttons) and Icon Master (remember everyone making and posting their own?). Now that was the closest thing to driving with a stick shift that ever existed in the world of Windows!!Lloyd ThrowerWheaton, MD

[Messinger]

Alan Stafford got it almost right. The Tungsten T3 is the Palm to miss. Vibrating alarm, great memory heap, metal case, voice recorder, great stereo sound, and I could go on. A cottage industry has grown up, providing replacement batteries that perform much better than the original and even a FAT32 driver that will allow the T3 to read a 4GB secure digital card (alas, it can only write to a maximum 1.5GB SD). For those of us who are not yet ready to embrace a PDA disguised as a phone, the T3 was the zenith. Will we ever see its kind again, in the Palm OS world? It looks like perhaps not.

[Fritzzzz]

While the following statement may be true ("But Lotus moved slowly on releasing a Windows version, and when it did, the product simply couldn't match Microsoft's Excel.") -- it's worth pointing out that as of 2006, there are a lot of ways in which Excel still hasn't caught up to the version of Lotus 1-2-3 released in (I think) 1998 or 99. I still use 1-2-3 as my main spreadsheet program, and it's simply brilliant. Other than pivot tables, there is nothing significant that Excel does better than 1-2-3. For instant frustration, try printing in Excel -- with "fit to page", but with control over where the page-breaks should be. Har har. Or try "grouping" sheets the way 1-2-3 has done since release 3 (when this technique was called a "3-D worksheet") -- it simply can't be done. Excel is a pathetic excuse for a program. It only dominates because of Microsoft's approach to securing market share, not because it's the better program. I have both, so I can use pivot tables sometimes.

[Don7A]

I think information management software are still trying to catch up with Lotus Agenda, circa 1990. It could cross-reference by any keyword, and could sort by date, subject, contact or any other criteria you could make up. Outlook is a poor substitute, and Act! is just not thereDon7A

[JimmyM]

How caould you possibly forget to include Lotus Magellan?

[apecor]

Top Five Things I Miss:1. The sound of a dial-up modem--both the 14.4 and 28.8 kbps. Brings me back the first years I started using the internet, and sense of undiscovered country and the possibilites it offered back then.2. Prodigy internet service. Seeing those communities form in those early days was just inspiring.3. Iomega zip drives. Holding a hundred MBs on one disk just seemed huge back then. Who'da thought my iPod would be packed after 30 gigs now?4. Huge, heavy CRT screens.5. The banners my mom would make for my brother and me on our dot-matrix printer. Coming home and seeing the banners all over the house was a childhood experience I miss.

[ricklw]

I miss the Tandy 100/200 laptops.

[drjoewebb]

I missed Lotus Magellan for quite a long time, and XTree users had similar withdrawl. Now that PowerDesk is around, I finally have something that makes things as easy as Magellan did.And for long documents, Lotus Manuscript. It wasn't until 5 years after Lotus abandoned it in favor of AmiPro that Word got many of the functions Manuscript had.

[macrose54]

You know what I misss most, being a personal computer salesman in the late 70's through the late eighties eighties and bringing home 150 - 200k per year............ My x-wife misses that the most, too.

[DBigWoo]

ProComm Plus - We used it to move files off the PDP 11 onto a new PC (with 20Meg HD - you'll never fill that up!). And when you weren't working, it made a nice little BBS.DBase III - Access is nice, but nothing beats the simplicity of DOS Dbase. And all those lovely, gory color combinations!Novell's "Fire Phasers" - Always fun to add the "fire phasers 100" command at the end of someone's log-on script when they go for coffee.Programs that used the Parallel ports with a switched cable so that you can hook PCs together. Just had to take the software on all kinds of media and a swap cable with you and you were all set to move programs to other PCs. Saved me MANY return client visits and hours of disk swapping.I don't miss dongles (the copy protect idea). What a pain those were! Messed up more printers that I can count!

[nvnusman]

How about Amigas like the 500 with an upgrade to 1 meg. Workbench 2. Robocod. Octamed. Intergrated dedicated processors for sound, graphics and data transfer.MILLIONS OF COLORS! A true graphically oriented computer you could buy through the JC Penney catalog!Or Zork on that big nine-inch green screen of the Kaypro II! Logging into a "bulletin board" at 300 bps. Daisy-wheel printers -- just swap the wheel and you've got a whole new font!

[GraysonPeddie]

One computer that I do miss very much is IBM Aptiva L and R series. I like the R series of computers that you can have your computer case up to 6 fix away from your desktop, where there's a DVD-ROM and a floppy drive, but it's more than the cost of Aptiva L series ($3,000) that my mom can only afford.But hey--no big deal! I'll be building a new computer with Lian Li PC-343B Modular Cube Case. :)The other one that I miss, is IBM Home Director, which came with the IBM Aptiva series computer--but again, no big deal, since I can replace that with X10 ActiveHome Pro! :)

[OisMe]

Two software programs I miss that deserve to be included:From the nostalgia files: DESQview -- the first functional multitasker for DOS.For information management, still very much in use years after support and updates ceased happening, and to date unequaled in some of its capabilities: Ecco Pro. Programs like InfoSelect and OneNote cover some of the same ground, but can't replace it.