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A Quick Look Back

Cleaned out the garage this weekend and found some old development software that I had used "back in the day".  The things that struck me were :
- The emotions that get evoked when I think about them -and-
- The core of development changes very slowly but the tools / technology churns away.

The first product was Symantec's "Visual Cafe" (1996).  This was an early Java 1.0/1.1 IDE that was a big hit for a short amount of time.  Back then it costs $299.00 when very few Java IDE's even existed.  Java is still here but Visual Cafe is long gone.

The other product (1996) was IBM / Apples "OpenDoc" technology along with SOM and it's implementation of CORBA.  Whew, what a mouthful.  This was a response to Microsoft's COM/DCOM and embedded technology used in Office (think Excel inside of a word document).  Terribly complex stuff that 1) failed to be adopted by a critical mass of developers and 2) supplanted by the internet.

Wow, what a time trip finding this stuff.  So what technology are you using today that will be extinct in a few years?

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