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Musée d'un Meilleur Passé

Progress stinks: witness all the good things which fell by the way-side for crap like MS Windows.

• 10) The attention to detail for a complete system, as embodied by the deveopment of the OM series, seems a dream that would never stand up in today's business world - it took 6 years to ensure it was right.
• 9) Informix's DataBlades; fortunately they live on care of IBM.
• 8) Honda's classic CB750 remains a key bit of history. (I got one from a friend for $100 once, but it is long gone - it was a great bike.)
• 7) Minolta sold off it's digital SLR camera stuff to Sony, and not much has been heard about them since. A shame since the Maxxum 7D was nice, apart from the dumb name. In particular, it had a lot of the controls available via manual dials and switches, rather than via an annoying rats nest of evil hierarchical menus. (Update: one can hope that Sony's extensions of the line will keep some of the manual-ness?)
• 6) Believe it or not, we could still learn a thing or two from venerable OS/2.
• 5) All those Lisp and Smalltalk progeny.
• 4) The now-all-too-expensive-on-eBay HP 16C calculator.
• 3) Tandem hardware.
• 2) The NeXT OS and UI. (But their 'finder' and dock suck.)
• 1) troff and LaTeX.