Although 1999 might still feel like yesterday for some of us, in the world of technology the intervening years are practically an eternity. New websites, applications and devices pop up all the time, only to die off just as fast again for a variety of reasons. Amidst such chaos it’s always good to take a breather and reflect on all that we have lost, such as on the virtual graveyard that [Burak Ozdemir] created with hand-written obituaries and only the classiest of 90s-era web design.
Remembered are everything from instant messengers and social networks to web hosts and devices. Who still remembers their ICQ number? There was a good chance that you were also on GeoCities or similar web host back then too. Maybe you weren’t really into Google+, but some of us still have fond memories of its virtual hangouts that provided a connection to people around the world in a way not since replicated.
Not all of the entries are as well-known, of course, with not everyone remembering or ever having heard about services like Songza. A few rare entries on the list have punched a zombified hand through six feet of soil and shambled back into the daylight, such as the Pebble devices. Some entries are quite more recent, with many probably remembering Microsoft’s short-lived Tay that made clear that public chatbots need a lot of safety rigging, a lesson that was mostly remember by subsequent chatbots.
Although some things like forum signatures and personal homepages arguably still live on, the death of Clippy will definitely be mourned by many.
“Clippy will definitely be mourned by many”
No…..It will not.
Definitely not…
Today’s Clippy equivalent is the AI chat bots popping up on every website.
AI: I see you’re trying to complain about AI; would you like help with that?
Just now I had a funny conversation with Chat GPT about:
• military standards for bee smokers
• software design for bee smoker operation
• changes required if bee smoker is to use electronic fuel injection
• ways to integrate MAF and MAP sensors into a bee smoker
• additional engineering requirements if catalytic converter will be used
• ability to provide air with shop’s air supply instead of bellows or an electric turbine
• use of machine learning tools for energy recovery in a bee smoker
• preferred SoC if bee smoker UI is to be implemented in Android
• design of a bee smoker that can use NVIDIA RTX chips for running additional apps that will require ray-tracing (for gaming) or heavy computations (like AI models)
The best part is: nowhere did I use words like “imagine” to make it create (hallucinate) some fictional content. All by itself and without questioning reality it just kept spewing more and more insane engineering proposals as a response to a bunch of buzzwords.
Anyone who exhibits even a tiny bit of sanity would already stop, drop and roll if an electronic bee smoker was to use Cortex M4 MCU with a “signed firmware image verification, dual‑bank rollback, staged activation.”
By the time the discussion continued into integrating a catalytic converter with a bee smoker everyone else in the meeting would assume you’re high on shrooms.
If somehow the discussion lasted long enough to degenerate into proposals of integrating an RTX 4090 into a bee smoker, I assume everybody would go kung-fu fighting with kicks as fast as lightning. It would be a little bit frightening, but they’d fight with expert timing.
And you did all that because…
gonna guess “bored” and following Chat GPT down the rabbit hole…
Draining California.
…”buzzwords”… i think i see what happened there…
I’ll mourn that it could only die once.
My IT manager back then refused to disable Clippy & challenged me to do it myself. In the administrator-locked system I managed to overwrite a support file that it needed. Clippy didn’t reappear but I doubt that I got back the processor cycles.
Clippy.. Here in Germany he had been given a full name, even. Karl Klammer.
Makes wonder why he hadn’t have got a tie over here, too! :D
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Klammer_(Microsoft)
Is there an etymology attached to “Klammer” in German?
Being Afrikaans, I’m sure there will be a word in my language as well that could be very “descriptive” of Clippy…
Hm, good question. I’m just a layman, though, I’m afraid.
I think that “Klammer” (the clamp, the clip) comes from “klemmen” (to clamp).
So Karl Klammer translates to Carl Clamp or Carl Clip.
The paperclip is called Büroklammer in German (bureau clip/clamp, office clip/clamp).
But I don’t know the origin of “klemmen”, unfortunately.
I guess that Karl Klammer name was invented because there’s a thing about using same initial letters.
People seem to like that or it simply gets easy off their tongue.
Like Bob (the) Builder, Thomas (the) Train, Mickey Mouse etc.
Maybe also it seemed funny in 90s Germany to give a cartoon character a full name,
as if it was a real assistant working with you.
I mean, doing so fits the German stereotype of taking things way more serious than its needed. ;)
Also, “Karl” somehow sounds short, serious, concise, with a bit of authority, I think. But not negative.
It’s like a co-worker’s name in your office you can’t really classify in your mind going just by name (person could be anything).
I mean, Karsten Klammer or Konrad Klammer wouldn’t have had same effect, I think. Too humble.
Klaus Klammer would have worked, too, maybe. But it’s softer than Karl (Karl has that strong R sound, Karrrl).
Thus Karl sort of fits the slightly annoying/edgy character of what Clippy is.
Kevin Klammer would have been hilarious, I think. Would have sounded like Karl Klammer’s younger son.
But maybe I’m just interpreting too much here, not sure. 😅
PS: Afrikaans is a very fascinating language, I think. 😃👍
In the past I’ve came across some Youtube videos in Afrikaans, such as a few episodes of the Moomins..
That was quite a new experience to me (in a positive way).
Sounds very similar to what we would do in Afrikaans. For instance: Steven Seagal we would call ‘Stefan Seemeeu’ as a joke (Seagall sounds like Seagull, which in Afrikaans is ‘seemeeu’). It is only funny in Afrikaans… ☺
Quite logical actually, as even though Afrikaans was formed from Dutch, most Afrikaners are actually of German descent, from Germans that settled in South Africa in the 1800’s. Our German descent is still traceable through our DNA, with the majority of it being German, followed by Dutch, then French, and then Koi-San (the Dutch were very “liberal” in the 1600’s). My own ancestors originated in Switzerland, then migrating to Germany, and some then on to South Africa (before South Africa was officially a country).
Light pens and CRTS deserve a comeback
Do they really… sure the lightpen technology was pretty simple and straightforward on a hardware basis (latching the X and Y counter of the video generator) . Actually using it was another story, (unless you had a monitor laying flat and buried in your desk) holding the pen for longer than 5 minutes is tiring (try holding your arm against your modern monitor for 5 longer than minutes and tell me how you think). You can’t draw on dark screens, since dark screen do not generate a signal in the lightpen, so it cannot detect a position, although workarounds can be created, it would not be pleasant to watch (screen flashing entirely or locally). Long story short, it existed, but it never really caught on by the public, so the reason the technology and concept regarding home computing fizzled out is not surprising. The mouse simply is a better solution.
“Actually using it was another story, (unless you had a monitor laying flat and buried in your desk) holding the pen for longer than 5 minutes is tiring (try holding your arm against your modern monitor for 5 longer than minutes and tell me how you think). ”
Hmmm.
https://store.huion.com/products/kamvas-pro-16-v2?g
thats exactly his point, nobody uses those in a vertical orientation. every one of the pen displays is setup with a stand that lets you use it at like “draftsman table” angles. your hand rests on the screen. (and lots of ppl buy special gloves with only two full fingers to avoid oil buildup)
holy moly that was a trip down memory lane….. now i feel almost nostalgic….. almost.
Sadly, I had to add numbers to my yahoo e-mail address because my geocities email name was “already taken” when they got bought out. looks like I used about +75% of that old tech listed. Some of which (google hangouts, Looking right at you) I wish I could ditch the modern reincarnation and return to the origional.
The only disappointing part is that the whole website is written in HTML5 instead of using HTML3 or HTML4 and then filling the gaps (disabled features) with JavaScript. Sadly the optional music at the bottom is a 1.8MiB mp3 when they had the opportunity for a 1.8KiB midi (with JavaScript interpreter since midi playback has been disabled).
Hi! HTML 2.0 with extras would be cooler, even, I think.
In order to support IBM PCs (Minuet, GEMWeb, GeoWorks etc), Atari STs, Acorn PCs, Amigas or old game consoles (Sega Neptun etc).
Instead of JavaScript, PHP could be used, too.
It’s server based, so old computers won’t carry the burden so much.
But that’s just me, of course. I started with Netscape Navigator 2 in the 90s.
HTML 3 and 4 seem pretty new to me, thus.
Though Netscape Navigator at the time supported some drafts and extensions already.
Like digital photos from early 2000, the current websites will die very quickly. Constantly maintainable backends, frontends that rotten every month because some TypeScript library has updated.
Those aren’t even archived because dynamic content.
Look, we invented self-destroying history!
just now im phasing out the first email address I had from back in 1994. A dds.nl email was free back then and i was quite early, so i could choose my own nickname.
but search engine wise, i feel we are back in 2000 when you had to search on both yahoo and altavista as one was not enough to find your site or info. now i frequently switch seach engines all the time. and about the ai “solutions”: yeah, my mother has a opinion too…
My first landline number, my first car registration and my ICQ number, all still in my head and occasionally used as password seeds. A nice site to spend a few nostalgic minutes on.
I didn’t use ICQ enough to memorize my whole number but it was seven digits (which impressed my friends).
My iPhone text message sound is the “Uh-oh!” Only two people have ever recognized it.
RIP Rex PCMCIA PDA
Interesting site. Looks like I got jaded with the internet by about 1998 as much of the stuff after that, I’ve never heard of!
61643303 and I didn’t even have to look it up.
Does anyone remember the time when the cool kids in school had a pager?