Most famous PC deaths and after-lives

The announcement that development work on Winamp would be discontinued was received with great sadness web-wide. The media player, once popular, has lost significance, which is also indicated by the fact that the release of its Android version was last time Winamp hit the news. Microsoft, however, showed willingness to acquire it, though it is a question whether the two parties can reach an agreement.

Modern ITC history serves with abundant examples for ups and downs in this industry. Index have selected some software that ran on almost every single computer in the 1990s and early 2000, but has become outdated, discontinued or replaced by far more advanced software.

In the 1990s, it would have been difficult to find a computer that did not have an ACDSee 32 image viewer. It provided a convenient way to thumb through your picture gallery, and was capable of basic picture editing: rotating, increasing or decreasing brightness, contrast or setting an image as wallpaper on your desktop. Very much enhanced, 64-bit versions exist today, but they are too complicated for viewing pictures, and professionals prefer working with Adobe products.

MSN Messenger / Windows Live Messenger is not in vogue any more either, it was replaced by Skype, and similar programmes of the kind. ICQ also belongs to the past, although it was the number one chat technology for a long time, and a very popular one too. It became outdated, users lost interest, and switched to other products. It still exists, and also has an iOS version for Android.

It is far less popular than it once used to be, but mIRC is still surviving. It has become just as unnecessary for average users as ACDSee 32 although it is very simple with the puritanism of command-line systems, and works without any superfluity.

PowerDVD is also on the way to oblivion. With the spread of ultrabooks, many machines do not even have an optical disc drive, although DVD players installed in PCs seemed an absolutely good alternative to desktop DVD players around the turn of the millennium.

Napster ran into difficulties over copyright infringements, but the seed had been sowed: file exchange systems spread. However, Napster became just one option among many others by the turn of the millennium. DC++, Kazaa and Soulseek have spread, and the world has begun to resemble a gigantic copying factory without Napster all the same. The next “dinosaur to become extinct” will presumably be torrent that have replaced file exchange systems.

When Microsoft introduced Outlook Express fifteen years ago, e-mail meant 3-5 megabyte free accounts or accounts offered by internet providers. These could be connected to the mail clients. Millions of people got to hate IMAP and POP3 settings for good, but the system worked. However, it was gradually superseded by gmail and other webmail providers.

Past tense applies to one of Google’s popular services, the Reader that was also a practical one at the time. The same applies to the popular browser of the 1990s, to Netscape Navigator, the big loser in the first war of browsers.