Big Tech Deaths

2013 was definitely a year of big tech deaths one after another the tech giants declared the demise of everything. Here's a list of 10 biggest death of 2013, do pay your condolence and respect while you scroll through. 

1. Google Reader

Google, which counts about a zillion products among its offerings, also regularly cleans house and kills off numerous programs. The killing that raised the biggest stink this year was that of Google Reader.

2. BlackBerry, Dell, BMC as public companies

No more BBRY, DELL or BMC on Nasdaq. Well, we suppose it’s possible any of these networking companies that have gone private this year could return to the public market, but all have a ton of work to do. (BlackBerry also did away with the Research in Motion name this year.)

3. Cloud storage provider Nirvanix

After seven years, this company that pulled in $70 million in venture financing pulled the plug. To customers, the turn of events happened quickly, with Nirvanix giving just a few weeks notice that it was time to get your data the heck off its servers and onto your own on another provider’s.

4. Windows RT tablets (other than Microsoft Surface 2)

Microsoft’s Windows RT tablet partners have been dropping off one by one, with Dell and Asus among the latest throwing in the towel in 2013 on such ARM-based devices. 

5. AltaVista search enginee 

Yes, yes, the once novel search engine was actually still alive this year, hiding within the confines of Yahoo. Until Yahoo over the summer obliterated it and a handful of other little-used services such as RSS Alerts and something called Yahoo Neighbors Beta. 

6. Original iPhone 

Apple and most of its customers have moved on from the original 2007 iPhone 2G, with seven models being released since then, most recently the iPhone 5s and 5c. Apple in June labeled the original iPhone as “obsolete,” meaning no more repairs or parts from Apple stores. 

7. Hotmail 

Yes, you might still have a Hotmail address, but Microsoft at least behind the scenes killed off Hotmail in May, switching over to Outlook.com. 

8. Fuduntu Linux 

This cross between Fedora and Ubuntu, initially launched in late 2010 and optimized for low-power devices, met its end in April 2013. 

9. Roadrunner Supercomputer 

Roadrunner, the first supercomputer to break the once-elusive petaflop barrier — 1 million billion calculations per second — was decommissioned on March 31. The IBM system achieved petaflop speed in 2008, shortly after installation at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The lab’s Gary Grider said at the time that "Even in death, we are trying to learn from Roadrunner,” referring to experiments after the shutoff and before dismantling on topics such as operating system memory compression techniques. 

10. Yahoo T-shirt rewards 

Yahoo said in October that it will stop giving T-shirts as a reward for finding security vulnerabilities after a public shaming it's calling "t-shirt gate." The company received a drubbing from the Swiss security company High-Tech Bridge after it found four serious vulnerabilities in Yahoo's network, all of which have now been fixed. Starting Oct. 31, Yahoo will pay rewards ranging from $150 to $15,000 for vulnerabilities provided those flaws are new, unique or high risk.