Removing the Cobwebs

For those who spent many decades in the IT Industry, they will have vivid memories of particular software, hardware, services & publications that were icons of the day, yet over time have disappeared or became irrelevant.
I'm Removing the Cobwebs.....so here is a trip down memory lane:

Byte Magazine
Can only be described as the Must Read computer publication of the early PC era. It started out in September 1975 and finally ended its print edition in July 1998. If you worked in the computer industry (specially during the late 70's and 80's), this really was THE most sought after publication.
Unlike most magazines of the time, Byte covered ALL aspects of the "small computer & software" industry and was not specific to only Mac, or DOS users. It was written in a style that provided in-depth and technical detail too. 
One memorable column was "Chaos Manor", written by the late Jerry Pournelle who was always very popular and had a huge following with power users.                                                                                                                      

Xenix
In the early 1970's Bell Labs (AT&T) developed Unix but did not sell the product to end users, preferring instead to license it to other vendors.  In the late 1970's Microsoft bough a license from AT&T, and in 1980 announced that it would provide a version for 16 bit microcomputers. Because they did did not own the rights to the Unix name, they called it Xenix.

Microsoft only sold it to OEM's and not directly to end users. In 1987, after SCO (Santa Cruz Operation) had ported Xenix to the Intel 80386 processor, SCO took ownership of Xenix, with Microsoft owning 25% of the company. In 1989 SCO released SCO Unix, and Xenix started to fade away, its last release was to be in 1991. In the early years of the Internet, many will remember SCO Xenix for it's built-in TCP/IP protocol, something that even Microsoft Windows did not have (until much later with Windows 95) without resorting to 3rd party products (see Trumpet Winsock, below).  My first internet email I ever sent was using SCO (in pure text mode). This was back in 1991.

MS-DOS
Microsoft Disk Operating System - Started its life as 86-DOS (By Seattle Computer Products) and was written by Tim Paterson. It was completed in only 6 weeks, designed to be a clone of Digital Research's CP/M and first shipped in August 1980.  In May 1981, Microsoft hired Tim Paterson, this as they needed an operating system for the IBM Personal Computer. Two months later, Microsoft bought 86-DOS for $75000 and renamed it MS-DOS. Microsoft was to license this to IBM, who in 1981 offered it as PC DOS, specifically on the very first IBM PC.
Within a year Microsoft was to license it to over 70 companies.  The rest they say is history with the last retail version (6.22) being released in 1994.

For the MS-DOS "expert", the Must Have technical publication of the 1980's was "MS-DOS Bible", written by Steven Simrin and published by The Wait Group. There were to be many editions of this, and I still have the Fourth Edition that was released for MS-DOS 5. Below is an earlier edition.

Larry Lounge Lizard
Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards was a graphic adventure game for MS-DOS released in 1987 by Sierra. It became legendary, even by those who would seldom if ever admit to playing computer games. Despite no advertising at all, within a year over 250 000 copies had been sold and it was a commercial success despite being widely pirated. In all, combined sales of the Larry Series surpassed 1.4 million copies. In 1991 PC Format magazine listed it in the top 50 best computer games of all time.

Trumpet Winsock
Was one of the very first (and most popular) implementations of the Windows Socket API that enabled Windows 3 to have TCP/IP network connectivity. It was written by an Australian, Peter Tattam in the early 1990's. As amazing as it seems, Microsoft had no support for the TCP/IP protocol stack at the time. In all the early editions of MS Windows, if you wanted access to the Internet, Trumpet Winsock was not only a vital necessity, it was legendary.
The world owes a great gratitude to Peter Tattam, who received almost nothing in return for this great effort as Trumpet Winsock was mostly either given away or used as shareware.

Gopher
Before HTTP (Browser Protocol) became legendary, The Gopher Protocol was used for the distribution, searching & retrieving of documents on the early internet. It is now commonly recognized as the predecessor of the World Wide Web.  If you used the Internet in late 1990 or 1991, you certainly would have used a Gopher client.

NCSA Mosiac Browser
Mosaic was the browser that popularized the World Wide Web. Mosiac was developed by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and was released in 1993. It was officially discontinued in 1997. Netscape Navigator was later developed (using many of the original NCSA authors). Later still, Mozilla Firefox would use its initial code. But it was the Mosiac Browser that popularized and made the Web what it is today.

WinVN (Usenet News Reader)
In the 1990's Usenet had become the place to be for discussions on almost any possible topic.  It was in many ways the perfect Bulletin Board and the range of topics was HUGE!  Sadly, by the early 2000's it started to die a slow death... even before the advent of Social Media. But then fast-forward 20 years and it appears that nostalgia and the efficiency of a simple and fast text based service has become popular again. New News Servers seem to be springing up all over again. Back in the day I found the WinVN Reader to be the most efficient and stable Reader out there. Best of all one did not need to do an install either as there was always a Zipped version available. Amazingly, after all these years, I am happily back using WinVN again (only software out of the entire list, above) as it still is a great piece of software, and still receiving version updates!

Edit: All of the above old software with the exception of WinVN have been "abandoned" by their developers, but luckily can still be found in a large database at: vetusware.com