Dead end tools and technologies you wished you hadn't bothered with

[Fred Bloggs]

You need to try a defence project, they spend a couple of years writing down, reviewing and editing requirements documents before ignoring them and hacking the system out like everyone else in years 3 and 4, and then chuck it away in year 5. Lucrative stuff if you can get involved in the early stages ! They also keep quiet about the chucking away bit so you don't get a bad reputation either.

That sounds just like the nuclear industry. I have heard of engineers who have worked all their lives on projects and have retired never having seen single project ever get built. I remember when I was at ICI for about 15 years, it was the same there too. They'd spend the entire project budget thinking about the risks, running out of money and canning the job because "there is no market". Of course, if they'd just built the plant first off they would have made a lot of cash. Alas, ICI no longer exists. Neither does the UK nuclear industry. It is a miracle it lasted as long as it did.

[gadgetman]

My list (some obscure ones here):

lisp
TCL (except for the odd TiVo hack)
Expect
ALL
PL/M

[Churchill]

DME
PLAN
S3
VME - and not the bus!!!
GEORGE (3 & 4)

[bobhope]

GEORGE (3 & 4)

George! How old are you? I remember that from University in our (ancient) history of computing courses. That was almost twenty years ago.

[Churchill]

George! How old are you? I remember that from University in our (ancient) history of computing courses. That was almost twenty years ago.

42

[DiscoStu]

I spent a year as a Notes developer.

That's a year of my life I'm never going to get back

[Sysman]

I spent a year as a Notes developer.

That's a year of my life I'm never going to get back

I spent a year* reading the papers and doing crosswords while I was waiting for an ancient machine to finish compilations.

* 2 year contract. I reckon I've got the ratio about right.

Oh, a year doing RPG II on an ICL system. The end users smuggled in a mini at a fraction of the cost when the head of IT was on holiday

[Lockhouse]

Many years ago I did 18 months as the lead technical analyst (these days I'd have been an "architect" ) on a retail project for a large French computer manufacturer when the client pulled out of the deal just before it went live. 100 man years of work went onto a single 6250bpi tape which I still have in my loft.

[Ruse]

SQLWindows
SQLBase

Gupta Technologies/Centura went bust in 2001

[expat]

Centura is still around, I even have it as a nice-to-have on one contract that I have applied for.

RPG II was cool. I even wrote a cross-reference program for it, in RPG II itself; it was a surprisingly appropriate tool for the job (because the source code had a fixed column layout, and the program liked to process fixed-layout data).