The Tech Stack Graveyard

Here lies the technology time forgot

MSN Messenger. Ask Jeeves. Your MySpace Top 8. The technology that raised a generation is gone, and somebody really should mark the occasion.

So we built a graveyard. A proper one. Twenty headstones, each with an obituary, a cause of death, and a place to leave flowers. There is a robot tour guide called Alfred.

There is a hidden grave. There is a Death Watch where you can vote on which technology dies next.

Our developer Matthew gets genuinely emotional about dead technology, so consider this his memorial garden. Turn your sound on and go for a walk.

What happened to Adobe Flash? (1996-2020)

For over a decade, everything exciting on the internet lived behind a button that said Install Flash Player. Browser games, animations, entire websites. Then Steve Jobs refused to allow it on the iPhone, HTML5 caught up, and Adobe switched it off for good in December 2020.

What happened to Internet Explorer 6? (2001-2014)

The browser web developers built everything for and nothing worked in. Microsoft officially retired IE6 in 2014, though it haunted office computers for years afterwards. Its grave in our yard has a hand sticking out of it. That is not an accident.

What happened to MSN Messenger? (1999-2013)

Where British teenagers actually grew up. Away messages, nudges, signing out and back in so a certain someone noticed. Microsoft closed it in 2013 after everyone drifted to Facebook, and merged what was left into Skype. Which is its own sad story two graves along.

What happened to Ask Jeeves? (1996-2006)

The polite butler who let you search the internet by asking a full question in plain English. Google answered faster and Jeeves was retired in 2006. The twist: asking a machine questions in plain English is now the most valuable idea in technology. Jeeves was not wrong. Jeeves was early.

What happened to MySpace? (2003-2011)

It taught a generation HTML through glittery profiles and autoplay music, and your Top 8 caused real arguments. Facebook killed it by being cleaner and less likely to crash your browser. Tom sold up in 2005 and went travelling. Tom won.

What happened to Vine? (2013-2017)

Six-second videos that changed comedy forever. Twitter owned it, could not work out how to make money from it, and shut it down in January 2017. TikTok then built an empire on the same idea. People still quote Vines from a platform dead for the better part of a decade.

What happened to Skype? (2003-2025)

It invented free video calls for normal people. Microsoft paid 8.5 billion dollars for it in 2011, then slowly forgot why. When the pandemic made video calling the most important technology on Earth, Zoom took the meetings and Teams took the offices. Microsoft finally switched Skype off in 2025.

What happened to Google Reader? (2004-2013)

The perfect way to read the whole internet in one quiet place. Google shut it down in 2013 claiming declining usage, and the internet has never fully forgiven them. Fresh flowers appear on this grave daily.

What happened to Google+? (2011-2019)

Google's social network had everything except a single person asking for it. Forced into search results and YouTube comments, it still failed, and closed in 2019 after a data leak hurried it along.

What happened to Windows Phone? (2010-2017)

Genuinely good hardware and a lovely tile design, killed by the app gap. Developers never turned up, so neither did users. Microsoft ended support in 2017. The saddest grave in the yard, because it deserved better.

What happened to Adobe Dreamweaver? (1997-2013ish)

Macromedia's promise that anyone could build a website by drawing boxes. The boxes became thousands of lines of unreadable HTML. Adobe bought it, forgot about it, and then everyone else forgot about it too. Technically still on sale. Spiritually long gone.

What happened to Silverlight? (2007-2013)

Microsoft's answer to Flash, launched just in time for the mobile revolution to kill them both. Deprecated in 2013, fully ended in 2021, and beloved by literally dozens of people.

What happened to ColdFusion? (1995-????)

Technically still alive, which is why its grave has a hand sticking out of it. Last confirmed sighting: a government intranet, guarded by Barbara from IT, who is the only one with the password.

What happened to PHP 4? (2000-2008)

It powered the early internet, badly but heroically, held together with code copied from forums. PHP itself evolved into something genuinely good. PHP 4 refused to leave quietly, and some servers are still running it. We check on them like worried relatives.

Whatever happened to FTP deployment? (1990s-2010s)

Drag. Drop. Pray. How an entire generation put websites live, with no undo and no backups. Replaced by Git and modern deployment pipelines, which is to say, by the basic concept of not gambling with production servers.

What happened to table-based layouts? (1996-2005)

Before CSS could position anything, web pages were built from spreadsheet tables nested inside each other, sometimes nine layers deep. Flexbox and Grid ended the practice. The developers involved still flinch when Excel opens.

What happened to marquee tags? (1996-2003)

Scrolling text nobody asked for. It entered from the right and never stopped. Killed by taste, and eventually by the browsers themselves. Its epitaph in our graveyard scrolls. It is what it would have wanted.

Is Comic Sans dead? (1994-forever)

Designed for comic book speech bubbles, found on invoices, parking fines and at least one order of funeral service. It cannot be killed because it was never truly alive. Its grave has a hand sticking out of it, and the hand is holding a parish newsletter.

Is jQuery dead? (2006-ish)

The library that made JavaScript bearable, still installed on around three quarters of the world's websites long after modern JavaScript replaced everything it did. Not dead, exactly. Just haunting. Approach its grave with care.

The Metaverse (2021-2023ish)

Plot pre-ordered. Thirty-six billion dollars bought a virtual meeting room nobody turned up to. We are just waiting for someone to admit it.



The twentieth grave is not listed here. It is hidden. If your own tech stack came to mind while reading, you might want to go and find it.

The Death Watch: vote on who dies next

At the far end of the graveyard you will find a roped-off plot and a list of technology on life support. Fax machines. Cheque books. The server in the office cupboard. Cast your vote on which goes next, or nominate your own candidate. When one finally dies, it gets a full funeral here, a fresh headstone, and everyone who voted gets to say they called it.