Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with tex stuff dot com.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tex Stuff. I'm Jonathan Strickland,
Speaker 1: and today I have a special guest host, a friend
Speaker 1: of mine from way back. He is currently the senior
Speaker 1: editor over at Bloomberg, not not the a senior editor.
Speaker 1: His title actually, or his role is very specific. I'm
Speaker 1: going to introduce him and let him say what his
Speaker 1: role is, because otherwise I will muck it up. Nate Lankson,
Speaker 1: Welcome to tex Stuff. Thank you very much. Yes, the
Speaker 1: joyous difference between job title and job role senior editor Bloomberg.
Speaker 1: But I'm actually running to just ledatorial for Europe, Middle East,
Speaker 1: in Africa. It's a long devotion, Yeah, Nate, Nate's he's
Speaker 1: got a lot of responsibility on his shoulders doing a
Speaker 1: bang up job too. And uh and Nate and I
Speaker 1: know each other from several years. Actually we we both
Speaker 1: started as as fans of c net and buzz out
Speaker 1: Loud and then um Nate went on to work for
Speaker 1: Senet and then b Wired and now works at Bloomberg.
Speaker 1: And through it all he has he has patiently endured
Speaker 1: my friendship, so I appreciate that and and your many podcasts,
Speaker 1: you know, a podcast a podcast listener as well as contributor.
Speaker 1: And it's amazing that this is the first time I've
Speaker 1: ever had you as a guest on this show. Because
Speaker 1: we've known each other for so long and uh and
Speaker 1: and our interests are so aligned. We've talked a lot
Speaker 1: about collaborating. A part of the issue is that Nate
Speaker 1: has this irritating habit of being English, so he there's
Speaker 1: a there's a five or sometimes six hour time difference
Speaker 1: between us. Yes, bloody marvelous, isn't it be wonderful? If
Speaker 1: bright Well, my fans will love it because now there's
Speaker 1: someone who has a true English accent as opposed to
Speaker 1: the the one I sometimes attempt and and and mangle
Speaker 1: along the way. And Nate is joining me to talk
Speaker 1: about Internet Explorer, and the reason why we're talking about
Speaker 1: it is that it's a web browser has a very
Speaker 1: long history, and that history now seems to have an
Speaker 1: end cap to it because Microsoft appears to be leaving
Speaker 1: Internet Explorer behind and embracing a new product that currently
Speaker 1: is codenamed Projects Spartan, but we'll probably have some different
Speaker 1: name once it actually goes live. So we're going to
Speaker 1: cover the dramatic history that's filled with uh tons of
Speaker 1: interesting stories, as it turns out. And to really get started,
Speaker 1: we have to turn the clock back before there was
Speaker 1: ever any web browsers at all, at the birth of
Speaker 1: the first web browser, which we can trace back to
Speaker 1: Christmas Day, December nineteen wo M C M X see
Speaker 1: as the Romans right, I'm glad you took that. Whenever
Speaker 1: I start thinking about Roman numerals, I have to start
Speaker 1: dialing I X I I uh, which only makes sense
Speaker 1: for the listeners here in America. Um So, Tim berners
Speaker 1: Lee was working at at CERN, same people who are
Speaker 1: responsible for the Large Hadron Collider, and had developed a
Speaker 1: program that would allow for the retrieval and display of
Speaker 1: information UH in a way that would make sense, make
Speaker 1: it easy to navigate. This would become the first web browser,
Speaker 1: which is kind of funny because without the web browser,
Speaker 1: you really don't have a worldwide Web. You definitely had
Speaker 1: an Internet because the Internet is a network of networks
Speaker 1: and a lot of people I realize maybe this isn't
Speaker 1: as bad as it used to be, but a lot
Speaker 1: of people often will say web and mean Internet or
Speaker 1: vice versa. They'll use the terms changeably I've described it
Speaker 1: in the past. Touch of the two people who get
Speaker 1: this wrong as the Web is the car on the
Speaker 1: highway that is the internet, right. They they are the
Speaker 1: websites on top of the net, right, And there are
Speaker 1: other vehicles on that same highway. Right. Because the email
Speaker 1: does not have to be web based uh FTP, you know,
Speaker 1: file transfer protocol, other protocols. Um. In fact, the way
Speaker 1: I originally really made use of the Internet back in
Speaker 1: the day was through the tel net chat client. I
Speaker 1: used that a lot when I was in college as
Speaker 1: a way of distracting myself and making friends with people
Speaker 1: who were more into the same things I was into.
Speaker 1: I went to for the first two years of my
Speaker 1: schooling a small community college in rural Georgia, and a
Speaker 1: lot of the people I was around didn't share the
Speaker 1: same interests I did, so telling it was one of
Speaker 1: those things that allowed me to go beyond that. But
Speaker 1: that was before I had ever heard of the World
Speaker 1: Wide Web and web browsers UM. So we have to
Speaker 1: remember that this time before there were browsers there, there
Speaker 1: were there were not really any user friendly ways of
Speaker 1: accessing information. You kind of had to really dive into
Speaker 1: the tech and understand commands in order to get anything
Speaker 1: out of it. Even if those commands were fairly simple,
Speaker 1: it was an high enough barrier of entry that there
Speaker 1: were only a few of us playing in that in
Speaker 1: that world at that time, right, I mean, there were
Speaker 1: like people in colleges and research facilities and governments that
Speaker 1: had access to it for various official purposes. There were
Speaker 1: very few like fun applications outside of some wacky people saying, hey,
Speaker 1: this computer that's crunching numbers for your your astronomy class,
Speaker 1: we can also make it play tic tech toe. I
Speaker 1: mean around about this time, there were also other similar
Speaker 1: sort of projects they think that we're going on at set,
Speaker 1: like people built sort of not competing necessarily, but there
Speaker 1: were other programs that were created to sort of browse
Speaker 1: in a in a more visual way, right, And and
Speaker 1: it turns out that this was a brilliant idea. And
Speaker 1: another little thing to to fall back on is just
Speaker 1: a quick explanation of what's going on with a web browser.
Speaker 1: For those of you who are you know, more casual
Speaker 1: fans of technology, this might be helpful for those of
Speaker 1: you who you know, are really deep in the field.
Speaker 1: This is going to sound incredibly simplistic, but we have
Speaker 1: to talk about what a client is and what a
Speaker 1: server is. So your client is essentially your machine, the
Speaker 1: device you're using to end up retrieving information from some
Speaker 1: other computer a server which actually holds the information that
Speaker 1: you are interested in. So if you are using a
Speaker 1: web browser to visit a web page, there is somewhere
Speaker 1: in the world a computer that has all that information
Speaker 1: on it and it gets the rest from your browser
Speaker 1: the client and says, all right, well, here's what you
Speaker 1: ask for, and send it across the internet. Your browser
Speaker 1: is in charge of displaying that information in some way
Speaker 1: that hopefully is useful and informative. And that's the basic
Speaker 1: relationship that the web browser is built around. It's not
Speaker 1: the only client server relationship, but it's a great example
Speaker 1: of one, I mean, and it's it's interesting because, as
Speaker 1: I'm sure we will be coming too later, the relationship
Speaker 1: between the idea of a client server model really has
Speaker 1: not changed. And in fact, when you get into the
Speaker 1: likes of the Chrome OS, the browser is just a
Speaker 1: dumb client. It's a client terminal model for the entire
Speaker 1: OS and essentially, but we're moving forward twenty five years
Speaker 1: before we get at that point. The nice thing is
Speaker 1: that this model works so well that it ended up
Speaker 1: being the foundation for a lot of different applications, including
Speaker 1: the Chrome operating system and uh and of course we're
Speaker 1: seeing more and more serve uses and applications migrating to
Speaker 1: the Internet side of things where we see this this uh,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's kind of a seesaw act. Right on
Speaker 1: one side, we see hardware manufacturers that are still saying, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: you really want the strongest, fastest machine possible. And meanwhile
Speaker 1: all the service providers are saying, we're handling all the
Speaker 1: heavy lifting. You just need a device that can connect
Speaker 1: to us. That way we get to control all the stuff. Uh.
Speaker 1: So it's it's but it's because of this relationship that
Speaker 1: that kind of infrastructure is even possible. I mean that,
Speaker 1: I mean, that's the interesting thing. Also, just as a
Speaker 1: slight related tangent, I suppose about More's law, which is
Speaker 1: celebrating an anniversary at the moment, is that it's always
Speaker 1: been assumed that we need the most biggest and fastest
Speaker 1: power in our computers because we want to do more
Speaker 1: and more things locally. Which, in a way, if that
Speaker 1: was always going to be true, you would need less
Speaker 1: and less on the on the service side outside of
Speaker 1: the well the realms of um the web. But of
Speaker 1: course now it's becoming much more about efficiency and and
Speaker 1: low cost and and um thinness in our devices, and
Speaker 1: so we don't need that sort of huge lifting power
Speaker 1: within the machines we're currently using ourselves, which makes a
Speaker 1: browser the perfect interface for a modern machine because it
Speaker 1: just needs to be the go between, the conduit between
Speaker 1: the very powerful server and the very small, powerful, less
Speaker 1: powerful desktop machine or laptop or tablet or notebook or
Speaker 1: what have you. And it means More's law has may
Speaker 1: actually become irrelevant before it actually becomes wrong. You know,
Speaker 1: we may not need that power, that sort of doubling
Speaker 1: of power every eighteen months, because we have actually no
Speaker 1: need for that power anymore. And in fact, More's law
Speaker 1: originally was all about the financial side of you know,
Speaker 1: the fact that there were these financial drivers that were
Speaker 1: incentives to create these increasingly more power a full and
Speaker 1: smaller components on a square inch of silicon. Now we're
Speaker 1: getting to a point where if if we don't need that,
Speaker 1: then there's less incentive. So there may be a point
Speaker 1: of pride among some you know, engineers and computer scientists
Speaker 1: who want to keep pushing that envelope and try and
Speaker 1: make it um, you know, try and beat their record
Speaker 1: in a way. But if the the demand isn't there,
Speaker 1: then like you said, Moore's law could become obsolete before
Speaker 1: we hit that fundamental limit from the laws of physics
Speaker 1: that had gone through the same exponential growth that More's
Speaker 1: law predicted for um silicon um, you would be able
Speaker 1: to do a hundred miles on one tenth of a
Speaker 1: millilita of fuel and that would cost you twenty five
Speaker 1: cents in a car that costs twenty five cents. And uh,
Speaker 1: in order to get back to the world that where
Speaker 1: this is, this is being you know, this is a
Speaker 1: relevant thing. UH, going back to the early nineties. This
Speaker 1: is these are the days where early nineties I was
Speaker 1: in high school about to go into college. UM and
Speaker 1: early to mid nineties that's my high school college years. Uh.
Speaker 1: In the those early nineties, you started seeing lots of
Speaker 1: different programmers build their own web browsers. A lot of
Speaker 1: them were within cerns, some of them were in colleges
Speaker 1: and universities, and we started to see more people get
Speaker 1: access to it because it was very clear that this
Speaker 1: was going to be a useful tool to navigate information.
Speaker 1: We move on to February and that's when Mark and
Speaker 1: Reason and Eric Bana of the National Center for Supercomputing
Speaker 1: Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana champaign A
Speaker 1: eight and C. S A, our mutual friend Tom Merritt
Speaker 1: I believe, went to the University of Illinois UH in
Speaker 1: C s A. They decided to introduce a browser themselves
Speaker 1: that was the Mosaic Browser. It was on Unix, it
Speaker 1: was also for the the X Windows platform UM and UH.
Speaker 1: There their colleague Alex Todec created a version that could
Speaker 1: run on Macintosh computer. So this was a browser that
Speaker 1: could run on cross platforms. Although uh the appearance of
Speaker 1: web information vary depending upon what platform you were using,
Speaker 1: So it wasn't a m a smooth experience across all platforms.
Speaker 1: It wasn't something that was It wasn't like you were
Speaker 1: going to get the exact same experience on one machine
Speaker 1: as on another, but you could get to the information.
Speaker 1: UH and I had a lot of features that said,
Speaker 1: apart from the earlier web browsers, like things that we
Speaker 1: take for granted now, like bookmarks, you know that would
Speaker 1: being able to to mark a specific web page is
Speaker 1: something of interest so that you can easily navigate to
Speaker 1: it in the future. It was really important also things
Speaker 1: like icons and pictures as opposed to just text, which
Speaker 1: made it more attractive to look at um and it
Speaker 1: was free to use. And it's important to mention this
Speaker 1: beforehand because it turns out a lot of the the
Speaker 1: stuff they worked on would later find its way into
Speaker 1: other future web browsers. By market, Drissa would partner with
Speaker 1: Jeff clark and who was the founder of Silicon Graphics.
Speaker 1: They created Mosaic Communications. It was later renamed to Netscape Communications,
Speaker 1: and they started to develop a web browser for the
Speaker 1: consumer market. So that's gonna sound really familiar to anyone
Speaker 1: who was, you know, using computers around the time of
Speaker 1: the first browser Wars. Netscape should definitely ring a bell.
Speaker 1: This is around the time that that Windows is basically
Speaker 1: about to go gold and and go on sales, so
Speaker 1: we're still in Windows three point one era at the moment.
Speaker 1: I think, and uh, and I mean the Netscape navigator,
Speaker 1: I think was the very I might have used Mosaic
Speaker 1: when I was in college, come to think of it,
Speaker 1: But I'm pretty sure. I quickly transition to Netscape Navigator
Speaker 1: and that became my browser of choice in those days. Um,
Speaker 1: you know I didn't ask you, Nate, what browser do
Speaker 1: you typically use when I use Safari for almost everything,
Speaker 1: So you are you are clearly a Mac owner. I
Speaker 1: am a Mac owner. I I love Safari because I
Speaker 1: use almost no add ons at all, because I just
Speaker 1: want speed and fast and I need it to sink
Speaker 1: everything and so far as always work really well for me,
Speaker 1: that makes sense. I detest Safari with a passion that
Speaker 1: burns brighter than a thousand explaining funds. But it's mostly
Speaker 1: because I don't use a Mac. If I did use
Speaker 1: a Mac, then, like, if you're in the Apple infrastructure,
Speaker 1: it's amazing. If you're all in, it's phenomenal. If you're
Speaker 1: only kind of sort of in, it gets really irritating
Speaker 1: really quickly. But then I'm all in on the Google infrastructure,
Speaker 1: so I use Chrome. Yes, that's the difference, you see,
Speaker 1: because the browser is the thing you use the most,
Speaker 1: I would imagine, and so if your phone is the
Speaker 1: thing that you carry and use the most in the day,
Speaker 1: then it stands to reason that you're going to want
Speaker 1: to use a browser that it's best on a phone, right,
Speaker 1: and that's kind of peeking ahead to some of the
Speaker 1: issues with Internet Explorer. Uh So, so we get the
Speaker 1: n c s A licensing the commercial rights to Mosaic
Speaker 1: to a company that was called at the time spy Glass.
Speaker 1: The company no longer exists, so that should tell you
Speaker 1: how things turn out in the future. Spy Glass ended
Speaker 1: up licensing that same technology to other companies, including Microsoft,
Speaker 1: So the Mosaic code ends up making its way to Microsoft.
Speaker 1: Um and that was really important to Microsoft because, as
Speaker 1: Nate was saying, they were preparing Windows for launch and
Speaker 1: they really wanted to have a component in there that
Speaker 1: would be a web browser, and they had decided that
Speaker 1: it made more sense to license that technology from someone
Speaker 1: else rather than trying to develop it in house. So
Speaker 1: that's what led them to spy Glass and licensing the
Speaker 1: Mosaic code. Uh October, Netscape would release a beta version
Speaker 1: of their project, which was codenamed Mozilla that will become
Speaker 1: important later to It was designated zero point nine six
Speaker 1: b H. I decided early on that when I we
Speaker 1: started looking at the actual builds of Internet Explorer, we're
Speaker 1: gonna look at whole numbers only, because otherwise the path
Speaker 1: leads to madness. You mean you're not going to consider
Speaker 1: Chrome version twenty six point nine point six two point
Speaker 1: three six four a seminal release. I mean it was beautiful, really,
Speaker 1: I mean that the fact that it it improves so
Speaker 1: much upon the President accessor that came out earlier that
Speaker 1: same day is phenomenal. But no, I'm going to skip it. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So we move on to to August. That is the
Speaker 1: day Microsoft released the Windows operating system. Uh man, I
Speaker 1: still remember the commercials for Windows they had. They had
Speaker 1: this little band, the Rolling Stones, that had a song
Speaker 1: called start Me Up that played during the Windows ninety
Speaker 1: five commercials. Because that was also the introduction of the
Speaker 1: start button on Windows, the little button that wouldn't quit
Speaker 1: or people wouldn't let the little button quit. And they
Speaker 1: introduced a web browser which they named Internet Explorer. Made
Speaker 1: a lot of sense, it was it was, in fact,
Speaker 1: a way to navigate through the Internet, specifically the World
Speaker 1: Wide Web. But this is this is the point I
Speaker 1: just interjected, because this is the thing that I've always
Speaker 1: hated about Internet Explorer is that it's a web browser, right.
Speaker 1: Why is it not called Web Explorer. I think, uh,
Speaker 1: I think they were afraid they might have, you know,
Speaker 1: some sort of confusion with spiders or something. I don't know, Nate,
Speaker 1: It's it confuses me to but yeah, Internet Explorer one
Speaker 1: point oh came out with Windows. They had an agreement
Speaker 1: with spy Glass, which was incredibly clever. Some might call
Speaker 1: it sneaky and underhanded. Their agreement with spy Glass, So
Speaker 1: Spyglass makes the the code the tech analogy that Internet
Speaker 1: Explorer runs on Internet Explorer. The agreement with Spyglass was
Speaker 1: that Microsoft would pay a quarterly fee to spy Glass.
Speaker 1: All right, that's cool, and they also agreed to share
Speaker 1: royalties for Internet Explorer. But Microsoft also decided to bundle
Speaker 1: Internet Explorer with Windows, so Internet Explore itself wasn't on sale,
Speaker 1: and so if you're not selling it, you can't make royalties,
Speaker 1: which means they didn't have to share any money from
Speaker 1: the Windows sales to Spyglass. Yeah. Pretty sneaky. Um that
Speaker 1: would end up biting them a little bit later, but
Speaker 1: at then, you're right, at the time they were just like, hey,
Speaker 1: we really scored on this. Now when they started, only
Speaker 1: six Microsoft employees. According to every source I saw only
Speaker 1: six people in Microsoft were actually working on Internet Explorer,
Speaker 1: which is kind of hard to believe today. Um and
Speaker 1: at the time, the web was not what you and
Speaker 1: I are used to. It had about twenty basic tags
Speaker 1: and HTML that allowed you to construct pages and change
Speaker 1: the style things like tables and and the font size
Speaker 1: that kind of stuff. So it's really really basic. And
Speaker 1: if you ever look at screenshots of old browsers and
Speaker 1: old web pages, I mean, it mostly looks like the
Speaker 1: blandest Wikipedia page you have ever seen, with no pictures
Speaker 1: or anything like that. A lot of the early ones
Speaker 1: don't have any pictures on them because if you did
Speaker 1: put a picture on it, then you were shooting yourself
Speaker 1: in the foot. Most of us did not have any
Speaker 1: fast connection to any kind of networks, so accessing a
Speaker 1: website with pictures meant that you would start, you know,
Speaker 1: you navigate to the page, walk away from your computer
Speaker 1: for ten minutes, and then come back to see if
Speaker 1: the pictures it all loaded. I remember it well. I
Speaker 1: particularly remember it when I was trying to view pictures
Speaker 1: on the now defunct page. Cat scan why people would
Speaker 1: use flatbed scanners to scan the undersides of their cats,
Speaker 1: And yeah, you I could actually walk away and be
Speaker 1: very British and make a cup of tea while waiting
Speaker 1: for the photo of the cat to arrive on my computer.
Speaker 1: I guess this is the point where I I I
Speaker 1: mentioned that Nate has too particular great passions in life,
Speaker 1: which include metal and cats. Yes, and the other ones,
Speaker 1: but they are the ones I am known for. It
Speaker 1: seems those are the those are the two I whenever
Speaker 1: I hear anything from you on social media, there's a
Speaker 1: there's a probably at chance it's going to fall into
Speaker 1: one of those two categories. Yeah. So there's still quite
Speaker 1: a few other things. But they don't they don't they
Speaker 1: don't hit as high as slice on the pie chart. Yes,
Speaker 1: that's very true, very true. So one of the things
Speaker 1: about the limitations of HTML that were that was a
Speaker 1: particular thorn in the sides of early web browsers and
Speaker 1: web users was that the limitations meant people had to
Speaker 1: find creative ways around those limitations to create rich user experiences.
Speaker 1: I don't think did they ever use that term in
Speaker 1: the UK, the rich user experience that experience. Yes, I
Speaker 1: mean we we probably heard it quite a bit. I
Speaker 1: don't remember it particularly, but I imagine it was there
Speaker 1: amongst all the other ones like zip drives and yeah right,
Speaker 1: all right, uh yeah, the rich user experience. That was
Speaker 1: something where the idea was that you wanted to create
Speaker 1: a an experience for the user that went beyond just
Speaker 1: simple text lines and pictures. So one of the earliest
Speaker 1: ones would be middies that would loop and there'll be
Speaker 1: no way to stop them. H Do remember those? Yes,
Speaker 1: I do remember those, Yes, middies, My goodness, middies. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: So just the days of my space where you would
Speaker 1: go to someone's MySpace page. I mean this that goes
Speaker 1: beyond what we're talking about here, but even then, oh
Speaker 1: the not not I'm not sad to see those days go. However,
Speaker 1: what it meant was that people had to create software
Speaker 1: that would be a plug in, an enhancement to a
Speaker 1: web browser to allow users to access certain types of content,
Speaker 1: largely streaming content, whether it was audio or video. So
Speaker 1: if you had a web browser in those days, you
Speaker 1: had to often enhance it with these plug ins, which
Speaker 1: made the browsers clung here slower. They they required more memory,
Speaker 1: and those days also memory was not as um plentiful
Speaker 1: as it is today computer memory, so your whole computer
Speaker 1: would start to run more slowly if you tried to
Speaker 1: access anything that had any kind of you know, video
Speaker 1: or flash animation. Flash is another example, some plug ins
Speaker 1: that you had to have in order to get more
Speaker 1: out of the web pages. We would not see advances
Speaker 1: to HTML for a while that would address this. The
Speaker 1: whole point of HTML five is to take away the
Speaker 1: need for all these different uggins that often can become
Speaker 1: security vulnerabilities. UM. The idea of being that this way
Speaker 1: we can support those those different functions natively within HTML
Speaker 1: and not have to have a Swiss Army knife style
Speaker 1: web browser where you've added all these extra features. UM. Anyway,
Speaker 1: the first version of Internet Explorer was a thousand bare
Speaker 1: bones as you can get, and the second one came
Speaker 1: out November twenty second, nineteen. So if you remember I
Speaker 1: said the first one came out August, I E two
Speaker 1: comes out November twenty that that's an incredibly narrow window
Speaker 1: for an entire version upgrade. You know, it's uh fast,
Speaker 1: does not really go into it. This one was for
Speaker 1: Windows ninety five and Windows NT three point five and
Speaker 1: Windows INT four point oh, so that means within three
Speaker 1: once you get a full version upgrade. But that was
Speaker 1: actually kind of typical in the early days because the
Speaker 1: browsers were being We're getting more and more advanced very quickly.
Speaker 1: Everyone was really interested in this. This was the days
Speaker 1: when the media was starting to take notice of the
Speaker 1: World Wide Web and it was going beyond just uh,
Speaker 1: the the governments and colleges and research facilities. So with
Speaker 1: that focus, you wanted to really get your browser too
Speaker 1: to be uh, you know, a destination people wanted to
Speaker 1: go to. The people needed this technology. There was another
Speaker 1: feature that they thought people needed an Internet to explore
Speaker 1: it too. I remember what's delicious cookies? Oh you know what?
Speaker 1: Those are important? Um, they have been misused and that
Speaker 1: is unfortunate. They can cause huge problems. They are definitely
Speaker 1: one of those things you've got to worry about if
Speaker 1: you are concerned about Internet privacy. However, that being said,
Speaker 1: head it's also nice to be able to navigate to
Speaker 1: a website. You're in the middle of doing something you
Speaker 1: have to shut down and leave. When you navigate to
Speaker 1: that same website on that same machine, you can pick
Speaker 1: up right where you left off. That's thanks to cookies.
Speaker 1: So cookies are just really short, short bits of data
Speaker 1: really just a short, short range of bits if you
Speaker 1: want to get down to it, and the act as
Speaker 1: kind of identifier and a placeholder so that when you
Speaker 1: start a session with a web page the website, the
Speaker 1: web server can keep track of who you are and
Speaker 1: what you are doing, so that if you do leave
Speaker 1: for some reason and come back, you can pick up
Speaker 1: where you left off. So in retail, for example, if
Speaker 1: I put something in my shopping cart, but I haven't
Speaker 1: completed the transaction and I leave the website, the next
Speaker 1: time I go back to that website, I might still
Speaker 1: have that item in the shopping cart, because the cookies
Speaker 1: tell the server, hey, it's that same dude who just
Speaker 1: can't commit to purchasing this squeaky toy for his dog
Speaker 1: to be a great example for me. Um. So cookies
Speaker 1: definitely had their place, but obviously have been They've got
Speaker 1: a lot of There's a lot of bad rap about
Speaker 1: cookies too, because of things like the idea of tracking
Speaker 1: um web browsing activity and and sharing things that you
Speaker 1: might have thought were private otherwise. But they come from
Speaker 1: a good place, they do, and they are useful. Let's
Speaker 1: be honest, they are very useful. The web would not
Speaker 1: be what the web is now in a bad way.
Speaker 1: I think. Were it not for cookies, well yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean they just allowed the Internet to be more personal. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: You you know, the idea that that your experience on
Speaker 1: the web is at least in some part defined by
Speaker 1: and tuned to you, so that you have the experience
Speaker 1: you want, or at least if you're working at it,
Speaker 1: you can have the experience you want. I wish that
Speaker 1: it were effortless, so that just through the use of
Speaker 1: the web it becomes the way you want. For some people,
Speaker 1: it becomes the way it is rather than the way
Speaker 1: they want it to be because they don't know the
Speaker 1: tricks to, you know, kind of tune it as much
Speaker 1: as they would like. But without cookies, it would not
Speaker 1: be possible at all. You would just have the same
Speaker 1: experience every single time you logged into any web page.
Speaker 1: It would be as if you were there day zero,
Speaker 1: like that's the first time you had ever visited it,
Speaker 1: and you would have to go through whatever it is,
Speaker 1: you know, like whether it's logging into a service or
Speaker 1: adding things into a list, whatever that might be. You
Speaker 1: would have to do that every single time. If it
Speaker 1: weren't for things like cookies. Yeah. Um, the next version
Speaker 1: of Internet Explorer number three, if you're keeping count, wouldn't
Speaker 1: come along until August thirteen, So they went almost a
Speaker 1: full year, unthinkable without coming up with a new version.
Speaker 1: This was the first one to really start to get
Speaker 1: some traction in the web browser wars because uh, the
Speaker 1: other browsers had. First of all, you gotta keep in mind,
Speaker 1: it was still a pretty small piece of the overall population.
Speaker 1: Pie There weren't that many people online on the web.
Speaker 1: In um there were, there were lots, but if you
Speaker 1: compared to the number of people who weren't, it was
Speaker 1: a tiny number. Uh. That being said, there were things
Speaker 1: like like um Netscape and Mosaic and other browsers that
Speaker 1: were already they already had a good share of the market,
Speaker 1: so I was just starting to pick up. By the
Speaker 1: end of ninety seven, it accounted for about a third
Speaker 1: of the browser market, just under round. And that gets
Speaker 1: us into the browser wars, which are like star Wars
Speaker 1: but more boring. Um. But in my notes, I wrote,
Speaker 1: many botons died to bring us this information. I so
Speaker 1: out of uh my depth to even understand why that
Speaker 1: is funny. The guy who hasn't even seen old Star
Speaker 1: Wars films. Yeah, it hurts me to hear that. But
Speaker 1: then again, my former my my original co host, Chris Palette,
Speaker 1: I don't think even to this day has seen the
Speaker 1: movie Jaws. So he's he killed a small piece of
Speaker 1: me that day when he revealed that information. But that,
Speaker 1: of course is a quote from Star Wars and New
Speaker 1: Hope when mon Mathma is explaining the um collection of
Speaker 1: the data of the Death Star um that many Botans
Speaker 1: died to bring us this. Uh. Internet Explorer three was
Speaker 1: also the first browser that did not use the Spyglass
Speaker 1: source code. There were elements of Spyglass technology in there,
Speaker 1: so that was still listed in the about page on
Speaker 1: Internet Internet Explorer. They kind of had a you know,
Speaker 1: a license a little bit about how some of the
Speaker 1: technology was licensed from them, but they had moved away
Speaker 1: from Spyglass to start working on a different source code
Speaker 1: to underlie Internet Explorer. And it was the first one
Speaker 1: to introduce internet mail to Internet Explorer and News one
Speaker 1: point zero and the Windows address Book. Neither of those
Speaker 1: things would matter for very long, but they were included
Speaker 1: in the Internet Explorer three uh, and they added in
Speaker 1: the support for lots of the plug ins that Netscape
Speaker 1: could use, and that goes back to what I was
Speaker 1: talking about earlier. It increased the ability for Internet Explorer
Speaker 1: to access certain features that otherwise would just be unplayable.
Speaker 1: Get a little red x saying this doesn't work here.
Speaker 1: Um yeah this also. By the way, one of the
Speaker 1: reasons why I love the development of HTML five and
Speaker 1: the conversion to HTML five is that I also remember
Speaker 1: the days of those plug and leading to lots of
Speaker 1: opportunities for hackers to create fake uh alert messages saying hey,
Speaker 1: I know you want to see this, but you can't
Speaker 1: unless you first download the plug in or up update
Speaker 1: your plug in so that you can watch it. But
Speaker 1: in fact, instead of it actually being a plug in,
Speaker 1: it was a virus that you were agreeing to download
Speaker 1: and install to your machine. So you get one of
Speaker 1: those messages saying, oh, you want to watch this, but
Speaker 1: you need to update to the latest version of real
Speaker 1: Player for example. Uh. And it wasn't actually a real
Speaker 1: Player update or or installed file. It was an install
Speaker 1: file for some malware that ran that that was rampant
Speaker 1: at a certain point in the history of the Internet.
Speaker 1: So the the slow migration away from the plug in
Speaker 1: days is something that I've been waiting for for a
Speaker 1: long time because I get tired of answering those questions.
Speaker 1: Um I E three also and support for cascading style sheets.
Speaker 1: Now this again very technical part of it, but it's
Speaker 1: basically an easy way to define the style the appearance
Speaker 1: of a web page. One of the things that was
Speaker 1: a big challenge in the early days of web browsers
Speaker 1: was making sure that the web page was going to
Speaker 1: show up the way the web designer intended it. Um, Nate,
Speaker 1: did you ever have to build a website without the
Speaker 1: use of a whizzy wig editor or something where you
Speaker 1: had to do it in like a text editor? Um?
Speaker 1: I told myself to do it. Um yeah, I do.
Speaker 1: I do that in text and my my girlfriend Kate
Speaker 1: actually still does. She She she can type responsive web
Speaker 1: stuff out in by hand. It's quite impressive. That is impressive.
Speaker 1: The first web pages I ever built, which I am
Speaker 1: not going to share, so don't even bother looking for them,
Speaker 1: because they're awful. If they do still exist somewhere out there,
Speaker 1: I am embarrassed by their presence. But at any rate,
Speaker 1: I also did that the old school way, where you
Speaker 1: had a text editor hyped in all the markup language
Speaker 1: and the actual content of the web page. Then you
Speaker 1: would have to save it, then open up a browser
Speaker 1: and navigate to the the proper address of that page,
Speaker 1: which probably wasn't even published online yet, it was just
Speaker 1: native on your computer, look to see if it was
Speaker 1: actually showing up properly in the web browser you were using,
Speaker 1: and then if anything wasn't, you had to quit out,
Speaker 1: go back into your text editor, change things there, and
Speaker 1: do it all over again. The bad thing in the
Speaker 1: early days is that even if you've got it to
Speaker 1: work properly on whichever web browser you were using, there
Speaker 1: was no guarantee that someone else's web browser, a different
Speaker 1: web browser, was going to show it in that same way.
Speaker 1: So you might take entire you know, hours to painstakingly
Speaker 1: create and craft a web page, and if anyone was
Speaker 1: using a different web browser, they might get a totally
Speaker 1: different experience anyway, so that you don't know how easy
Speaker 1: you've got it with your dynamic websites and your responsive designs.
Speaker 1: You know, back in those as we were working out
Speaker 1: how to write out tables in text editors, or there
Speaker 1: was this one piece of software that I have been
Speaker 1: a getting for free at some point, and it used
Speaker 1: d HTML and it was actually it was whizzy Wig,
Speaker 1: but it was it was like dragon drop and all
Speaker 1: the positions were sort of relative, so you could have
Speaker 1: objects anywhere and it was brilliant. Right for those of
Speaker 1: you who don't remember, don't know what that acronym stands for,
Speaker 1: it's what you see is what you get. The idea
Speaker 1: being that you have an editor that lets you edit
Speaker 1: within like you you were actually seeing what the web
Speaker 1: page looks like as you're building it, so you don't
Speaker 1: have to do this swap between code and the appearance
Speaker 1: of the page. It's all there, like you might be able.
Speaker 1: Most of them have an HTML editor components, so you
Speaker 1: can switch it to HTML and just see the markup
Speaker 1: language and type in that way if you want to.
Speaker 1: But a lot of them have it where there are
Speaker 1: different templates that are built out. Their entire business is
Speaker 1: based on that, and some of them do it incredibly well.
Speaker 1: I used them, in fact, when I'm building web pages
Speaker 1: these days, because while I remember doing HTML coding, uh,
Speaker 1: that was also when there were very few tags, So
Speaker 1: I don't think I could do it today because it
Speaker 1: would look like a website from if I were to
Speaker 1: build one today. Uh, that way, and and while that
Speaker 1: would be comedic, it would not be very useful. Um.
Speaker 1: Internet Explorer three was also when we got a very
Speaker 1: important development with I E. That is the logo of
Speaker 1: the lower case, so that you get that icon the
Speaker 1: lower case that represents Internet Explorer. I don't know what
Speaker 1: our world would be like if they had gone with
Speaker 1: something else w the web. Maybe you know it's madness,
Speaker 1: Nate's mad Yes, that's that. That would have led to
Speaker 1: great strife in the world. Uh. And nine days after
Speaker 1: I E three came out, security experts discovered a backdoor
Speaker 1: vulnerability that they called the Princeton word macro virus loophole,
Speaker 1: so it had a very catchy name. Backdoor vulnerabilities are
Speaker 1: seriously bad news no matter what software you're talking about.
Speaker 1: That's the sort of vulnerability that gives an attacker access
Speaker 1: to your machine at whatever level you are logged in at. So,
Speaker 1: if for example, you had your Windows machine, you are
Speaker 1: logged in as an admin on that machine. Let's say
Speaker 1: that's the level of access you have, and if this
Speaker 1: is your personal computer, then yes, that's the access you have.
Speaker 1: This backdoor would give people that access, which is bad news.
Speaker 1: I mean, they could make your computer do whatever they
Speaker 1: wanted to at that point, installed software that you didn't
Speaker 1: intend to have installed, or direct your computer to attack
Speaker 1: other other computers. Mostly I would just I would just
Speaker 1: mostly open people's CD draws, print things out, leave messages
Speaker 1: on that screen, you know, fire up the Simpsons Dust game,
Speaker 1: that kind of stuff. I do know, I do know.
Speaker 1: I have seen that happen. I remember seeing someone who
Speaker 1: had UM allowed that and their c D drawer the
Speaker 1: little the little drive door would open and close over
Speaker 1: and over and there, like I don't know what's happening,
Speaker 1: except what's happened is you've downloaded something you shouldn't have
Speaker 1: that has handed over control to your computers. So we're
Speaker 1: gonna start in safe mode and we'll begin from there
Speaker 1: and see if we can fix this. Yeah. And and
Speaker 1: it's still buns like buddy while we're at it. Yeah yeah, man. Well,
Speaker 1: in all, Internet Explorer would account for about a third
Speaker 1: of the browlser market, like I was talking about. That's
Speaker 1: where they really started to get traction. And in nine
Speaker 1: the n c s A stops supporting the development of Mosaic,
Speaker 1: so the the web browser that really started all this
Speaker 1: off in a real way had finally kind of run
Speaker 1: out of steam on the developed inside. But the the
Speaker 1: browsers that still use that basic technology and had continued
Speaker 1: to develop it, they they kept going, like Netscape Navigator
Speaker 1: continued on, although of course they had they had forked
Speaker 1: off of the Mosaic source code, so it was not
Speaker 1: the exact same stuff that was Mosaic. It had changed
Speaker 1: an evolved on its own. It's kind of like if
Speaker 1: you look at an evolutionary tree and you see where
Speaker 1: two different species have forked same sort of thing here,
Speaker 1: except we're talking about computer programs obviously, and n was
Speaker 1: also in. Spyglass threatened Microsoft with a contractual audit because
Speaker 1: of that quarterly fee royalty arrangement we talked about earlier.
Speaker 1: The fact that they were getting this quarterly fee but
Speaker 1: not really any royalties had kind of upset Spyglass because
Speaker 1: they said, well, when we agreed to this, the implication
Speaker 1: was that Internet Explorer or whatever the web browser was
Speaker 1: going to be called at that time, was going to
Speaker 1: be a separate product. It was gonna be something sold
Speaker 1: by Microsoft instead of bundled with Windows UM and ended
Speaker 1: up prompting Microsoft to settle with spy Glass. I think
Speaker 1: the sum I see most frequently is eight million dollars,
Speaker 1: which it's not a small amount of money, but when
Speaker 1: you compare it to some of the huge deals going
Speaker 1: on seemingly casually in the world of tech and especially
Speaker 1: the world of the Internet, it's a pittance tiny mountain.
Speaker 1: And for Microsoft, yeah, oh yes, especially for Microsoft. Eight
Speaker 1: million dollars it's probably what they have in between the
Speaker 1: cushions of their executive lounge couch. You just sort through
Speaker 1: there and kind of spare eight or nine million dollars,
Speaker 1: I'm sure, um, which I think, if you convert into
Speaker 1: English currency is approximately fifteen pounds. I'm not entirely sure.
Speaker 1: I'm not good with that sort of thing, but I
Speaker 1: know it's like the exchange rates so old messed up.
Speaker 1: At the moment, all I know is that whenever I
Speaker 1: visit London and I'm always looking for deals because I
Speaker 1: realized I don't know, I honestly don't know how much
Speaker 1: money I'm spending right now. Um. Internet Explorer four comes
Speaker 1: out in that is marketed with the slogan the Web
Speaker 1: the way you want it, uh, which I guess is
Speaker 1: true if you don't want it to be particularly good. Um.
Speaker 1: It also handled rich text files and plain text email
Speaker 1: in their internet mail and news program, which was now
Speaker 1: Outlook Express for. It's called Outlook Express for, but it
Speaker 1: really was the first Outlook Express. This is where we
Speaker 1: run into Microsoft's habit of numbering things in a way
Speaker 1: that probably makes sense to someone in Microsoft and no
Speaker 1: sense to anyone else. Like, I don't know, why is
Speaker 1: Windows ten Windows ten when it could have been Windows nine,
Speaker 1: Apart from the fact that calling it Windows nine could
Speaker 1: have caused some confusion with people who are running legacy
Speaker 1: systems that store lie on Windows in an era. In
Speaker 1: an aera, Jonathan, my friend, where we have the iPhone
Speaker 1: five S and the Galaxy S five, I think we
Speaker 1: are in an era where we need to have Windows
Speaker 1: ten and OS ten. Yeah, okay, all right, I'm fine
Speaker 1: with that, I guess I honestly, at this point we
Speaker 1: could just say, all right, letters and numbers make no
Speaker 1: difference in the world of the Internet, so just just
Speaker 1: just go with it. Um, so we don't have HTML
Speaker 1: email support and an Outlook Express for that, you could
Speaker 1: just do rich text files and plain text emails, so
Speaker 1: you didn't get any of the incredibly fun stuff like
Speaker 1: people sending you pictures in the middle of their emails. Ah,
Speaker 1: And what if you're detecting some lackluster enthusiasm in my voice,
Speaker 1: it's because those jokes only go so far with me.
Speaker 1: So please don't send me emails with lots of pictures
Speaker 1: in them. But first of all, my my outlook immediately
Speaker 1: blocks them unless I tell it to allow the photos.
Speaker 1: But you're just wasting bandwidth. Really, um, I'm not a
Speaker 1: huge fan of those, but but obviously makes it look
Speaker 1: better than it would if it were just a rich
Speaker 1: text file. And they integrated real Player as a streaming
Speaker 1: media player within Internet Explorer. For um, do you remember
Speaker 1: those days, Nate, where yes I do. I do, the
Speaker 1: beautiful days of real Player playing inside Internet Explorer. Yes,
Speaker 1: those those wonderful days. I love those days. I'll tell
Speaker 1: you every interesting Real Player fact. Real Player used to
Speaker 1: be brilliant, m right, real What real did was fantastic.
Speaker 1: It actually made video stream properly back in the day.
Speaker 1: While the player itself might have been a clunky mess,
Speaker 1: the compression they used was genuinely some of the most
Speaker 1: innovative online technology in my opinion. Um, The problem is
Speaker 1: that everything else about it was awful, and bundled is
Speaker 1: a plug in also made a clunky experience, so it
Speaker 1: just it just always felt like a pole piece of technology.
Speaker 1: But actually what he did was fantastic. Yeah. There was
Speaker 1: a time where I mean I just remember so this,
Speaker 1: this held true for very way too long, where there
Speaker 1: were competing plugins and in order to for you to
Speaker 1: be able to watch video online, it meant that you
Speaker 1: had to have three or four plug ins on your browser.
Speaker 1: Because one site would use one format, another site would
Speaker 1: use someone be flash based, someone be uh, you know,
Speaker 1: a real player base. You would have all these different
Speaker 1: competing formats, and you didn't have a lot of options
Speaker 1: of like a one player fits all kind of solutions.
Speaker 1: So it ended up meaning that you had to add
Speaker 1: all these different plug ins if you wanted to be
Speaker 1: able to experience all this different media across different sites.
Speaker 1: I don't miss those days at all. I mean Microsoft
Speaker 1: really held onto it for a long time. Silver Light
Speaker 1: was one of those things that when I would encounter
Speaker 1: it online and I would see something like, oh, you
Speaker 1: need to download silver Light to see this, I thought, really,
Speaker 1: we are we really still there? Yeah? Can we get
Speaker 1: beyond that? And just have everyone say, Okay, I wanted
Speaker 1: to be the person to or the entity to define
Speaker 1: what the standard was, but at some point I have
Speaker 1: to admit my approach is not what has been considered standard,
Speaker 1: and I'm going to get on board with what everyone
Speaker 1: else is doing. It wasn't like that for a very
Speaker 1: long time. In fact, you could argue it's still not
Speaker 1: like that with certain types of media. But it just
Speaker 1: made it. It made it no fun really, like you
Speaker 1: would go to a side thing, Oh, I have to
Speaker 1: add another place in, which again added that vulnerability. If
Speaker 1: you had to add in plug in after plug in,
Speaker 1: eventually you got um, you know, you got conditioned to
Speaker 1: the point where you thought, oh, of course I'm gonna
Speaker 1: need another plug again to see whatever this thing is.
Speaker 1: Never mind the fact that it's a plug in that
Speaker 1: I don't recognize and that I've never you know, heard
Speaker 1: of before. I'll go ahead and install it, and then
Speaker 1: you make your system vulnerable. It's just one of those
Speaker 1: things that was a necessity at the time. And I think, really,
Speaker 1: what what plugins did is they just fueled innovation. You know,
Speaker 1: like a lot of what is plugging, what was a
Speaker 1: plug in back in the day, is now either baked
Speaker 1: into the browser or is baked into HTML itself. You know,
Speaker 1: when you think about HTML five supporting new video formats
Speaker 1: um you know, like web m that Google is behind.
Speaker 1: You know, that's something that back in the day you
Speaker 1: would need, you know, a plug in for. You don't
Speaker 1: need those anymore, And it was probably a necessary life cycle,
Speaker 1: that's true. I mean without it, then web pages would
Speaker 1: be very bland and limited and would not be nearly
Speaker 1: as important or influential as the web has become over
Speaker 1: the years. I mean, you know, this is also we're
Speaker 1: looking at now. We're looking at the late nineties when
Speaker 1: we're starting to get to a fever pitch of what
Speaker 1: the web could be, uh, you know, which of course
Speaker 1: culminated in and then collapsed with the dot com bubble bursting.
Speaker 1: Um that whole era, everyone was starting to see what
Speaker 1: the web could potentially be. But if we relied simply
Speaker 1: upon what HTML could deliver back in those days, the
Speaker 1: web would have been a lot more you know, utilitarian
Speaker 1: and less interesting. So I definitely agree that the plug
Speaker 1: ins were a necessary part. It was also just as
Speaker 1: living through it. It just was also frustrating. UM I
Speaker 1: for also supported dynamic HTML for the first time, which
Speaker 1: allowed for more interactive web pages. Again that rich user
Speaker 1: experience we were talking about earlier, that was an important element,
Speaker 1: and by bundling Internet Explorer with Windows, Microsoft ends up
Speaker 1: leveraging itself into a sixt in market share of all
Speaker 1: web browsers. This was a huge story to really turned
Speaker 1: things around, going from an underdog to the major player
Speaker 1: out of all browsers. So not just um, you know
Speaker 1: Mozilla's or or Netscape rather uh netscapes Navigator. Now, if
Speaker 1: you add in all the different competitors, they paled, but
Speaker 1: it was partly because the market share for PCs far
Speaker 1: outweighed other computer platforms, especially for businesses and casual users. UM.
Speaker 1: I mean, you obviously still had a lot of Unix
Speaker 1: machines running server software and in in various research and
Speaker 1: and R and D areas things like that. But if
Speaker 1: you're talking about the average person, they owned a PC.
Speaker 1: The Mac was not a competitor really at this time. Uh.
Speaker 1: And that meant that if you were going to buy
Speaker 1: a PC and you had a web browser just bundled
Speaker 1: in with it, it made sense to go ahead and
Speaker 1: use it. In fact, for people who were not really
Speaker 1: savvy with the web that was there. It was it
Speaker 1: was either A O L. Was the web here in
Speaker 1: the US, or it was an Internet to Yeah, and
Speaker 1: it was here too. The A well, some of my
Speaker 1: first Web experiences were h were A O L. The
Speaker 1: World garden, yep, happy, happy times simple. Yeah. Isn't it
Speaker 1: great when an entity that decides what is and isn't
Speaker 1: the web for you? That makes that makes life so
Speaker 1: much easier? So may this is where we get into
Speaker 1: where Microsoft runs into some trouble because of this policy
Speaker 1: of lumping Internet Explorer in with its operating system, UH,
Speaker 1: the United States government brought a lawsuit against Microsoft Corporation.
Speaker 1: In fact, the Department of Justice was looking at an
Speaker 1: antitrust suit saying that the company practiced predatory strategies to
Speaker 1: push other companies out of the web browser market and
Speaker 1: the operating system market, as it turns out, saying that
Speaker 1: because they had packaged Internet Explorer with the operating system,
Speaker 1: and because the operating system was really the only game
Speaker 1: in town for the most part, for operating systems had
Speaker 1: the majority market share. If you were buying a PC,
Speaker 1: more often than not, it was going to have Windows
Speaker 1: preloaded on it. They were essentially saying you have stacked
Speaker 1: the deck against any competing company and you're pushing them out,
Speaker 1: and that's not fair. It's that's why we're bringing this
Speaker 1: antitrust suit against you. This was big news, and it
Speaker 1: wasn't the only place where Microsoft was having issues. That
Speaker 1: it was also having problems in Europe. There were European
Speaker 1: antitrust suits brought against Microsoft. They were actually looking at
Speaker 1: more interesting things in a way. They were looking at
Speaker 1: how there were also allegations that the operating system had
Speaker 1: been designed so that it worked really well with the
Speaker 1: Internet Explorer and bit work so well with any other browser,
Speaker 1: almost as if Microsoft had taken pains to create an
Speaker 1: operating system that would on purpose decrease the use and
Speaker 1: utility of competing web browsers. And that was a huge
Speaker 1: red flag. Um, So you had these these massive antitrust
Speaker 1: lawsuits going up against Microsoft that wouldn't be resolved for years.
Speaker 1: I mean, we all know these lawsuits can last ages. Uh,
Speaker 1: And in fact, it wouldn't pan out in the US
Speaker 1: until two thousand one, and there would be this enormous settlement.
Speaker 1: And originally the ruling told Microsoft of the Department Justice said, hey,
Speaker 1: you're gonna have to split your company into two companies.
Speaker 1: You're gonna have to have one that is building the
Speaker 1: operating system business and one that's building the software that
Speaker 1: exists on top of the operating system. But they're gonna
Speaker 1: have to operate as two separate entities, because if you
Speaker 1: packaged them all together, you have an unfair advantage over
Speaker 1: anyone who wants to build software for that operating system. Ultimately,
Speaker 1: that did not happen. I mean, if you are aware
Speaker 1: of Microsoft is a single company hasn't been split. But
Speaker 1: that was originally what the ruling was, um, and it
Speaker 1: was a huge It was a huge news item in
Speaker 1: the day because anyone who wanted to use any other
Speaker 1: web browser was already mad at Microsoft for appearing to
Speaker 1: make it more difficult to use those web browsers. So
Speaker 1: I remember those days well too, because already at that
Speaker 1: point I was not a huge and like I said,
Speaker 1: I had been using Netscape Navigator as my early web
Speaker 1: browser for years and years, partly because when I first
Speaker 1: started using the web, I was a college student. So
Speaker 1: I got Netscape Navigator for free because it was a
Speaker 1: college application, UM, I didn't have to purchase it. In fact,
Speaker 1: I was I was pretty stingy about purchasing one for
Speaker 1: a long time. I was like, why should I pay
Speaker 1: for this thing that I've had for free for so long? Um,
Speaker 1: And I didn't like the way Internet Explorer rendered web
Speaker 1: pages or the user interface or anything. So I was
Speaker 1: very upset at this time when I heard about about this.
Speaker 1: I mean, this was I. Internet Explorer at this point
Speaker 1: was actually available on the Mac. This was one of
Speaker 1: the last ones actually that was available in the Mac
Speaker 1: I E five I think was the very last one
Speaker 1: they made. Yeah, so you could actually you could actually
Speaker 1: use Internet Explorer on the Macintosh at this time. Yeah.
Speaker 1: To be fair, though, the Mac was not not what
Speaker 1: it is today in those things this was. This is
Speaker 1: that These are also the days where Steve jobs have
Speaker 1: been forced out of Apple for a while and was
Speaker 1: just starting to come back to redefine what the Mac was.
Speaker 1: This is almost almost exactly the time he came back,
Speaker 1: and this was just before the iMac was released, if
Speaker 1: not almost depending on the particular part of the history
Speaker 1: where we're on, almost month wise at the moment, this
Speaker 1: is this is when that happened. Yeah, so we've got
Speaker 1: this this lawsuit going on. It hasn't starts. I was
Speaker 1: the the dominant web browser, which was not helping Microsoft's
Speaker 1: case and that lawsuit. It was essentially being pointed at
Speaker 1: a c if if people are complaining about how this
Speaker 1: browser matches up against other browsers, how can you argue
Speaker 1: that the customer satisfaction or the desire for this particular
Speaker 1: web browsers, what's driving the dominance in the market. It's
Speaker 1: clearly because it's tied so intricately with the upberating system.
Speaker 1: That would be the kind of argument that the Department
Speaker 1: of Justice would level against Microsoft. But it was I mean,
Speaker 1: this was I at this point was just so key
Speaker 1: to Microsoft. Yeah, it had like a thousand people working
Speaker 1: on it at this point, just on the browser, from
Speaker 1: from the six people of I E one to the
Speaker 1: one thousand and a hundred million dollars being being invested
Speaker 1: every quarter into or actually every year at this point
Speaker 1: into Internet Explorer. This is then the I E five
Speaker 1: days because that came out in March. Um they had
Speaker 1: had a couple of preview versions come out. Was when
Speaker 1: they officially launched it. Ah, this was the one that
Speaker 1: would come with Windows second Edition as well as Windows
Speaker 1: two thousand and the dot com boom. I mean, this
Speaker 1: is a thousand people working on Internet Explorer, a hundred
Speaker 1: million dollars a year. This is this is the these
Speaker 1: are the months just before the dot com bubble burst.
Speaker 1: And it's also this is one where if you were
Speaker 1: a user, you probably wouldn't have noticed a huge difference
Speaker 1: in the interface between four and five, but a lot
Speaker 1: of the stuff that was going on behind the scenes
Speaker 1: right the back end of the browser had been upgraded,
Speaker 1: which prompted Paul four ought to that I E five
Speaker 1: point oh is I E four point oh done right? So,
Speaker 1: in other words, the the things that were innovative in
Speaker 1: Internet Explorer four, but we're still kind of clunky. We're
Speaker 1: now much more smooth in the new version. So I
Speaker 1: E five was seen as a big step up, um,
Speaker 1: and that was really important because we had this huge
Speaker 1: boom of innovation in the dot com world, which as
Speaker 1: we all know, was not sustainable uh long term anyway,
Speaker 1: but it was. There was There was no greater moment
Speaker 1: of focus in the media upon the Internet than at
Speaker 1: this time. I would argue even today, as as instrumental
Speaker 1: and important as the Internet is, and as we have
Speaker 1: all these different ways of accessing it, including applications that
Speaker 1: can work with the web or separately from the Web,
Speaker 1: things like Twitter and Facebook. I would say that in
Speaker 1: this time, the late nineties going right into two thousand,
Speaker 1: that was when we were at the eek a focus
Speaker 1: on the Internet, specifically on the World Wide Web. Um
Speaker 1: and uh, you know this is it's funny because if
Speaker 1: you look at the news reports from a couple of
Speaker 1: years before this, that was when you had like the
Speaker 1: the stuff that was caught on camera but not originally broadcast,
Speaker 1: where you had news anchors kind of talking about what
Speaker 1: is this web thing? What is that? What's that a
Speaker 1: symbol for? What is email? Like it was exactly. It
Speaker 1: went from that to everyone now has to have a website.
Speaker 1: If you were a business, you had to have a website.
Speaker 1: Didn't matter if you had anything important to put on there,
Speaker 1: but you had to have a website. Um. You know
Speaker 1: that was that was the day and and I E
Speaker 1: five was the perfect browser at the perfect time to
Speaker 1: really you know, tap into that, which is is good
Speaker 1: because I E six would be at almost degree turned
Speaker 1: from that. So so before that, just one little sad
Speaker 1: bit of news on March two thousand, Spyglass was bought
Speaker 1: out by Open TV, and Spyglass became no more. Now
Speaker 1: that was, of course, the company that had licensed the
Speaker 1: mosaic technology from the n C s A and then
Speaker 1: further licensed it to Microsoft. It no longer existed as
Speaker 1: a entity of its own at that point. Alright, guys,
Speaker 1: this is where I'm going to split up the episodes.
Speaker 1: Like Nate and I were saying, it's just way too
Speaker 1: much information to make it a single episode. Uh, we
Speaker 1: will continue this conversation with where Internet Explorer went from
Speaker 1: this point forward and where it's going next, which seems
Speaker 1: to be the end of Nowhere Street. And we'll also
Speaker 1: talk about the successor to Internet Explorer. And it's a
Speaker 1: name that I just learned today because when we recorded
Speaker 1: the episode, Microsoft had not yet announced it. But we
Speaker 1: now know that Project Spartan is Microsoft. We'll talk about
Speaker 1: that more in the next episode two, although we'll still
Speaker 1: be using the word Spartan because I can't go back
Speaker 1: to time and fix that anyway. If you have any
Speaker 1: suggestions for future episodes of Text Stuff, whether it is
Speaker 1: a specific topic, a guest I could have on the show,
Speaker 1: guest host that you love to have here on Tech
Speaker 1: Stuff with me let me know, Send me an email
Speaker 1: said addresses tech stuff at how stuff works dot com,
Speaker 1: or drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter or
Speaker 1: Tumbler at all three, I am tech Stuff H s W.
Speaker 1: And we'll talk to you again really soon. For more
Speaker 1: on this and thousands of other topics is how stuff
Speaker 1: works dot com