Lecture
Orphaned technologies is a descriptive term for computer products, programs, and platforms that have been abandoned by their original developers. Orphaned technologies apply to software, such as abandonware and obsolete software, as well as to computer hardware and methods. In computer software and documentation standards, deprecation is a gradual phasing out of a software or programming language feature, whereas orphaning is usually associated with the sudden discontinuation, typically for business-related reasons, of a product with an active user base.
For users of technologies that have been withdrawn from the market, there is a choice between maintaining their software support environment in some form of emulation or switching to other supported products, possibly losing capabilities unique to their original solution.
Abandoning a technology does not happen solely because of a poor or outdated idea. There are cases, for example with certain medical technologies, where products are withdrawn from the market because they are no longer viable as commercial ventures. Some orphaned technologies do not undergo complete abandonment or obsolescence. For example, there is the case of IBM Silicon Germanium (SiGe) technology, which is a program that produces a doped alloy in situ as a replacement for the traditional implantation stage in the bipolar silicon semiconductor process. The technology had previously been orphaned, but was resumed again by a small team at IBM, so that it became a leading product in the mass communications market. Technologies orphaned due to the failure of their startup developers may be picked up by another investor. This is demonstrated by Wink, an Internet of Things technology that became orphaned when its parent company Quirky declared bankruptcy. The platform, however, continued to exist after being bought by another company called Flex
Here are some well-known examples of orphaned technology:
The Symbolics Inc operating systems Genera and OpenGenera were "orphaned" twice, since they were ported from LISP machines to computers with the 64-bit Alpha processor .
User groups often exist for specific orphaned technologies, such as the Hong Kong Newton User Group, the Symbolics Lisp [Machines] User Group (now known as the Association of Lisp Users), and Newton Reference. The Save Sibelius group arose because users of Sibelius (a scorewriter) feared that the application would become orphaned after its owners Avid Tech laid off most of the development team, who were subsequently hired by Steinberg to develop a competing product, Dorico .
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