Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

OS/2 my beloved.

Nah, that time has passed and there's not much to miss from the base OS. What would be interesting is for IBM to publish the source to the Workplace Shell and the underlying SOM code so it might get a new life running on one of the free *nixes.

It ran lots of banking ATMs that were not hacked.

I was super excited for BeOS myself.

OS/2 ISV Stardock gave us Win8 start button.

BeOS-lineage Binder IPC continues in Android.

I'm booting and running Haiku on my Thinkpad. It's a from-scratch workalike of BeOS, and able to run Be software. Though, frankly, Be software is totally 1990s, so a lot of Linux software written for Qt has been ported to Haiku.

In the end I wound up with basically the same application software as on my Debian desktop, except running on Haiku instead of Linux. Haiku is noticeably snappier and more responsive than Linux+X+Qt+KDE, though.

Did an install of OS/2 3.0 recently, and it was just as wonderful as the first time I used it. That team got so much so right.

In late September or early October 1996, Fry's Electronics places a full page promo ad on the back of the business section of the San Jose Mercury News for OS/2 4.0 "WRAP [sic]" in 256 pt font in multiple places. Oops!

I was a little surprised to have to scroll this far down to see BeOS come up. The first Amiga mention wasn't far above it either.

OS/2 had the best API that I’ve worked with. We did major banking apps in the early 90s. OS/2 was vastly superior to Windows NT and Windows.

Still around, kinda: https://www.arcanoae.com/

Runs on modern Intel/AMD CPUs, but limited to 32-bit and low RAM limits. The OS/2 source is owned by IBM and IBM won't talk to you unless a number with 8 zeroes is involved.