Plan 9 from Bell Labs comes to my mind (papers & manpages): By the creators of unix, tight integration of networks (better than other systems I have seen so far), UTF-8 all the way down, interesting concept with process-wide inherited namespaces.
It used up way too many weirdness points, though, and was fighting the old Worse is Better fight. It lost, and we are left with ugly and crufty unices today.
Another one that comes to mind is Project Xanadu. It was quite similar to the modern web, but a lot more polished and clean in design and concept. It probably failed because a really late delivery and by being too slow for the hardware at the time.
I guess that’s mostly the problem: ambitious projects use up a lot of weirdness points, and then fail to gain enough traction.
A project that will probably fall into the same category is Urbit. If you know a bit of computer science, the whitepaper is just pure delight. After page 20 I completely lost track. It’s fallen victim to a weirdness hyperinflation. It looks clean and sane, but I assign ~98% probability that its network is never going to have more than 50.000 users over the span of one month.
I think it (weirdly) especially hits a strange place with the “forgotten” mark, in that pieces of it keep getting rediscovered (sometimes multiple times).
I got to work w/ some of the Plan 9 folks, and they would point out (with citations) when highly regarded papers in OSDI had been built (and published) in Plan 9, sometimes 10-20 years prior.
One form of this “forgotten” tech is tech that we keep forgetting and rediscovering, but:
maybe this isn’t the type of forget the original question is about, and
possibly academia itself is incentivizing this (since instead of only getting one paper out of a good idea, if it can get re-used, then that’s good for grad students / labs that need publications)
Plan 9 from Bell Labs comes to my mind (papers & manpages): By the creators of unix, tight integration of networks (better than other systems I have seen so far), UTF-8 all the way down, interesting concept with process-wide inherited namespaces.
It used up way too many weirdness points, though, and was fighting the old Worse is Better fight. It lost, and we are left with ugly and crufty unices today.
Another one that comes to mind is Project Xanadu. It was quite similar to the modern web, but a lot more polished and clean in design and concept. It probably failed because a really late delivery and by being too slow for the hardware at the time.
I guess that’s mostly the problem: ambitious projects use up a lot of weirdness points, and then fail to gain enough traction.
A project that will probably fall into the same category is Urbit. If you know a bit of computer science, the whitepaper is just pure delight. After page 20 I completely lost track. It’s fallen victim to a weirdness hyperinflation. It looks clean and sane, but I assign ~98% probability that its network is never going to have more than 50.000 users over the span of one month.
+1 Plan 9.
I think it (weirdly) especially hits a strange place with the “forgotten” mark, in that pieces of it keep getting rediscovered (sometimes multiple times).
I got to work w/ some of the Plan 9 folks, and they would point out (with citations) when highly regarded papers in OSDI had been built (and published) in Plan 9, sometimes 10-20 years prior.
One form of this “forgotten” tech is tech that we keep forgetting and rediscovering, but:
maybe this isn’t the type of forget the original question is about, and
possibly academia itself is incentivizing this (since instead of only getting one paper out of a good idea, if it can get re-used, then that’s good for grad students / labs that need publications)