QOTD: Which Dead Companies Do You Miss?

[asgallant]

Interplay, Microprose, Black Isle, pre-douchebaggy EA, Cyrix, IBM's x86 and laptop divisions, DEC.

I don't miss 3dFX - my Voodoo 3 gave me more problems than any other piece of hardware I have ever owned (though Creative Labs' Sound Blaster Live comes in a close second). I don't miss Maxtor - every HDD I ever bought from them failed within one year, and the replacement drives also failed within a year - though I wish they had been bought up by someone other than Seagate. I suspect Seagate's recent problems are due to the ghost of Maxtor haunting the manufacturing facilities.

 

[nerrawg]

I miss Second Take as well, didn't realize they got the axe - thought they were just on vacation or something

 

[lapalm]

I gotta say Black Isle.

 

[Guest]

I miss Humongous Entertainment. Games for kids these days are insipid product tie-ins with no entertaining qualities. Pajama Sam, Putt-Putt, Freddie Fish, etc are awesome games for kids!

 

[midian191]

Canopus made a 6MB 3d card when everyone else was making 4MB 3d cards (3dfx days).

 

[hexploit]

Abit will be sorely missed. 🙁

 

[MajesticJG]

I miss the other x86 companies, too, like Via and Cyrix. I ran a 5x86-133 from AMD forever and loved that machine.

I miss the glory days of 3Com when the 3C905 was awesome, and, of course, 3dfx - I ran the Voodoo, Voodoo II and Voodoo 3 and loved them all.

 

[baladorr]

I miss Canopus and Bullfrog the most. Long live Peter Molyneux! I still play Dungeon Keeper to this day. Probably my favorite game of all time. Magic Carpet was the bomb too.

Please bring back second take!

 

[jkflipflop98]

3dFX. . . they pretty much invented 3D acceleration. Computers would be boring work tools without 3DFX. God bless em.

 

[g-thor]

I miss Atari. Yes, I know the name (as a brand) still exists, but I miss the original Bushnell Atari and the Tramiel Atari. I loved my original Atari 400 and, later, my Atari 1040STfm. Amazing hardware in its time.

 

[Guest]

Apple , sure you'll say that Apple is still around and doing better then ever but let's face it , the old apple is gone.
I remember owning a PC and seeing the Linux distros for PowerPC then thinking , man that would be so cool , having something other than x86 which is from what I know a piece of crap as an architecture. And thinking about OS X and how cool that is , Unix and all.
Now Apple is just a company selling fancy PCs mostly to ignorant people or the ones that care about the looks. It's growth was made at first by selling iPods. After working with OS X I was disappointed, I'd rather use Windows.
As for the companies that are really gone, I guess Abit mostly , I've got an overclocked NF7-S which served me so well running in my mother's PC.

 

[trkorecky]

Galoob (pre-Hasbro). Long live the Game Genie!

 

[matt_b]

[citation][nom]asgallant[/nom]IBM's x86 and laptop divisions[/citation]
Yeah, Lenovo just isn't the same as the old IBM Thinkpads, those things are/were tanks. I have a few that are from the late 90's and early this decade that have only needed batteries replaced. Tell that to all the HP, Dell, and Toshibas I have had that have bitten the dust. As far as the IBM x86, at least you can find them or their technology in all of the gaming consoles still to this day.

Oh yeah, and 3DFX, I loved the Voodoo 3 I had. It's a shame that OpenGL never took off as well as Microsoft's marketing with DirectX/Direct3d. Otherwise we may not be so addicted to Windows for gaming (about the only thing worth using it for anymore).

 

[Timbo70]

Sinclair, Oric, Dragon. BBC/Acorn, Atari(hardware) and Commodore. Loved being in the UK in the eighties :-

Sinclair ZX80/81 in kit form
Sinclair ZX Spectrum
Oric 1/Atmos
Dragon 32/64
Commodore vic20/C64, Amiga A1000/500/2000/4000
Atari 600/800XL ST
BBC A/B
Acorn Electron Archimedes

You cannot beat the 8/16 bit eras for me and the dawn on the 32 bit

Spent long hours programming the humble spectrum 16k with 32k Ram pack using sinclair basic. Those where the days. Kids do not have this with Playstations and Xboxes, Sony Microsoft hang your heads in shame charging for a programming environment 🙁

 

[Guest]

DEC. Alpha processor. 'nuff said. Damn Compaq and HP to hell for killing off the Alpha. I still have a loaded XP1000 at home (21264 @ 667 Mhz) that runs Linux, OpenVMS, and of course Tru64. Real 64 bit computing - starting in 1992!! Oh Alpha, how I miss thee.

 

[Guest]

Gateway. I realize that they're still around, but I'm talking about the original Gateway, run by Ted Wait before he stepped down, brought some other dude in, and then came back to try to save the company.

I worked for them for two years and to date, remains by far the best company I've ever worked for. It was an honor and a joy to work for them and I would have worked for a country store 'till the day they closed if my service manager hadn't gotten me fired (long story short: she was a meth-head, was stealing stuff, pinned it on me, store manager knew it was Bogus, district manager wouldn't override the firing, meth-head manager caught a month later - fired).

 

[gto127]

In computers I miss DEC Digital equipment corporation. Their technology was at least a generation ahead of the competition. Some of the modern AMD& Intel designs are based off earlier DEC work on the Alpha.
In consumer electronics I miss the old Nakamichi corporation.(when it was owned by the Nakamichi family). They had some of the best sounding equipment made.

 

[eraigames]

I miss Black Isle Studios which was responsible for the original Fallout games......
I also miss FASA Studios who made the best Mechwarrior games. Microsoft just does not get it right.

 

[ryaninomaha]

#1 Commodore. Had it not been for them I doubt I would be the computer nerd that I am today!

#2 Origin. The Original Wing Commander and Ultima online. Wow, those games were sooooo ahead of thier time.

#3 3dfx. Voodoo2 anyone?

 

[apache_lives]

3Dfx definitly - still own working samples of the Banshee, Voodoo1, Voodoo2 (SLI pair!), and a few Voodoo3's - dam nvidia.

Also miss the badass gaming companys that made games such as DukeNukem3D, Carmageddon, Blood, Doom etc - real down to earth gaming fun! The magic these days seems to be gone.

I know a company that should be gone - MSI - rubbish products.

 

[Spathi]

Tseng Laboratories.
and
Sinclair Research Ltd.

 

[DjEaZy]

... i still have a special PC with Win98SE and 3Dfx VooDoo Rush in it... Bullfrog waz a good game company... would like to see a remake/rebirth of Dungeon Keeper... ZX Spectrum 48K and 128Kb model with TR-DOS...

 

[mavroxur]

[citation][nom]robjen1019[/nom]Years ago I had a computer with a NexGen 90mhz processor. I believe that AMD scarfed the company up.[/citation]


AMD bought them in '96. The IP they acquired was implemented in the K6 processors.

 

[mavroxur]

Micropolis made some good HD's back in the day, and AST made servers that were built like tanks (albeit, overpriced even for the day).

 

[t85us]

[citation][nom]JimmiG[/nom]Probably Commodore. I was an Amiga user until about 1998. The Amiga is still "kind of" alive (Amiga OS 4.1 was released in September 2008), but it's not the same as it was owning an Amiga in the mid 90's.3dfx would be a close second. I've owned a Voodoo1, Voodoo3 and Voodoo5 before moving on to Nvidia and then ATI. Good times.[/citation]


hey there !

i still have a WORKING commodore64 with floppy disk. a few weeks ago ive played donkey kong, popeye and elevator LOL danm good games those days...
by the way, its still a working sincalir and a sintez with joystick (a russian version of spectrum, with english bios and keyboard)

i miss cyrix, 3dfx, lotus 3d challange and SUPAPLEX ) LOL