Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Javan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
Speaker 1: and how the tech are you? It's time for a
Speaker 1: classic episode of tech Stuff. This episode originally published on
Speaker 1: May four, two thousand fifteen, So Hey, star wars day.
Speaker 1: It is titled The Story of Internet Explorer, Part One,
Speaker 1: which I guess means you can probably have a pretty
Speaker 1: good idea of what next week's classic episode is going
Speaker 1: to be. This episode featured special guest Nate Langson. Nate
Speaker 1: is awesome, great tech journalist. I should have him on
Speaker 1: the show again. It's been too long since I last
Speaker 1: spoke with him. Hope you enjoy. Nate is joining me
Speaker 1: to talk about Internet Explorer, and the reason we're talking
Speaker 1: about it is that it's a web browser has a
Speaker 1: very long history, and that history now seems to have
Speaker 1: an end cap to it because Microsoft appears to be
Speaker 1: leaving Internet Explorer behind and embracing a new product that
Speaker 1: currently is codenamed Projects Spartan, but we'll probably have some
Speaker 1: different name once it actually goes live. So we're going
Speaker 1: to cover the dramatic history that's filled with uh tons
Speaker 1: of interesting stories, as it turns out, and to really
Speaker 1: get started, we have to turn the clock back before
Speaker 1: there was ever any web browsers at all, at the
Speaker 1: birth of the first web browser, which we can trace
Speaker 1: back to Christmas Day, December nineteen wo m C m
Speaker 1: x C, as the Romans would call it. Right, I'm
Speaker 1: glad you took that. Whenever I start thinking about Roman numerals,
Speaker 1: I have to start dialing I X I I uh,
Speaker 1: which only takes sense for the listeners here in America.
Speaker 1: Um So, Tim berners Lee was working at at cern
Speaker 1: saying people who are responsible for the large Hadron Collider,
Speaker 1: and had developed a program that would allow for the
Speaker 1: retrieval and display of information UH in a way that
Speaker 1: would make sense, make it easy to navigate. This would
Speaker 1: become the first web browser, which is kind of funny
Speaker 1: because without the web browser, you really don't have a
Speaker 1: worldwide Web. You definitely had an Internet because the Internet
Speaker 1: is a network of networks and a lot of people
Speaker 1: I realize maybe this isn't as bad as it used
Speaker 1: to be, but a lot of people often will say
Speaker 1: web and mean Internet or vice versa. They'll use the
Speaker 1: terms changeably. I've described it in the past. Touch the
Speaker 1: two people who get this wrong as the web is
Speaker 1: the call on the highway that is the internet, right.
Speaker 1: They they are the websites on top of the net, right,
Speaker 1: And there are other vehicles on that same highway, right.
Speaker 1: Because the email does not have to be web based
Speaker 1: uh FTP, you know, file transfer protocol, other protocols. Um.
Speaker 1: In fact, the way I originally really made use of
Speaker 1: the Internet back in the day was through the tel
Speaker 1: net chat client. I used that a lot when I
Speaker 1: was in college as a way of distracting myself and
Speaker 1: making friends with people who were more into the same
Speaker 1: things I was into. I went to for the first
Speaker 1: two years of my schooling a small community college in
Speaker 1: rural Georgia, and a lot of the people I was
Speaker 1: around didn't share the same interests I did, so telling
Speaker 1: that was one of those things that allowed me to
Speaker 1: go beyond that. But that was before I had ever
Speaker 1: heard of the Worldwide Web and web browsers um. So
Speaker 1: we have to remember that this time before were there
Speaker 1: were browsers there, there were there were not really any
Speaker 1: user friendly ways of accessing information. You kind of had
Speaker 1: to really dive into the tech and understand commands in
Speaker 1: order to get anything out of it. Even if those
Speaker 1: commands were fairly simple, it was an high enough barrier
Speaker 1: of entry that there were only a few of us
Speaker 1: playing in that in that world at that time, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, there were like people in colleges and research
Speaker 1: facilities and governments that had access to it for various
Speaker 1: official purposes. There were very few like fun applications outside
Speaker 1: of some wacky people saying, hey, this computer that's crunching
Speaker 1: numbers for your your astronomy class, we can also make
Speaker 1: it play tic tech toe. I mean around about this time,
Speaker 1: there were also other similar sort of projects they think
Speaker 1: that we're going on at certain like people built sort
Speaker 1: of not competing necessarily, but there were other programs that
Speaker 1: created to sort of browse in a in a more
Speaker 1: visual way, right, And and it turns out that this
Speaker 1: was a brilliant idea. And another little thing to fall
Speaker 1: back on is just a quick explanation of what's going
Speaker 1: on with a web browser. For those of you who
Speaker 1: are you know, more casual fans of technology, this might
Speaker 1: be helpful for those of you who you know, are
Speaker 1: really deep in the field. This is going to sound
Speaker 1: incredibly simplistic, but we have to talk about what a
Speaker 1: client is and what a server is. So your client
Speaker 1: is essentially your machine, the device you're using to end
Speaker 1: up retrieving information from some other computer a server which
Speaker 1: actually holds the information that you are interested in. So
Speaker 1: if you are using a web browser to visit a
Speaker 1: web page, there is somewhere in the world a computer
Speaker 1: that has all that information on it and it gets
Speaker 1: the request from your browser the client, and says, all right, well,
Speaker 1: here's what you ask for, and send it across the internet.
Speaker 1: Your browser is in charge of displaying that information in
Speaker 1: some way that hopefully is useful and informative. And that's
Speaker 1: the basic relationship that the web browser is built around.
Speaker 1: It's not the only client server relationship, but it's a
Speaker 1: great example of one, I mean, and it's it's interesting because,
Speaker 1: as I'm sure we will be coming too later, the
Speaker 1: relationship between the idea of a client server model really
Speaker 1: has not changed. And in fact, when you get into
Speaker 1: the likes of the Chrome OS, the browser is just
Speaker 1: a dumb client. It's a client terminal model for the
Speaker 1: entire OS and essentially, but we're moving forward twenty five
Speaker 1: years before we get at that point. The nice thing
Speaker 1: is that this model works so well that it ended
Speaker 1: up being the foundation for a lot of different applications,
Speaker 1: including the Chrome operating system and uh and of course
Speaker 1: we're seeing more and more services 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 Moore'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 and biggest and
Speaker 1: fastest power in our computers because we want to do
Speaker 1: more and more things locally. Which, in a way, if
Speaker 1: that was always going to be true, you would need
Speaker 1: less and less on the on the service side outside
Speaker 1: of the well the realms of um the web. But
Speaker 1: of course now it's becoming much more about efficiency and
Speaker 1: and low cost and and um thinness in our devices,
Speaker 1: and so we don't need that sort of huge lifting
Speaker 1: power within the machines we're currently using ourselves, which makes
Speaker 1: a browser the perfect interface for a modern machine because
Speaker 1: it just needs to be the go between, the conduit
Speaker 1: between the very powerful server and the very small, powerful,
Speaker 1: less powerful desktop machine or laptop or tablet or notebook
Speaker 1: or what have you. And it means More's law has
Speaker 1: may 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, Moore'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 powerful and smaller components
Speaker 1: on square inch of silicon. Now we're getting to a
Speaker 1: point where if if we don't need that, then there's
Speaker 1: less incentive. So there may be a point of pride
Speaker 1: among some you know, engineers and computer scientists who want
Speaker 1: to keep pushing that envelope and try and make it um,
Speaker 1: you know, try and beat their record in a way.
Speaker 1: But if the the demand isn't there, then, like you said,
Speaker 1: Moore's law could become obsolete before we hit that fundamental
Speaker 1: limit from the laws of physics that had gone through
Speaker 1: the same exponential growth that More's law predicted for um
Speaker 1: silicon um, you would be able to do a hundred
Speaker 1: miles on one tenth of a millilita of fuel and
Speaker 1: that would cost you twenty five cents in a car
Speaker 1: that costs five cents. And uh, in order to get
Speaker 1: back to the world that where this is, this is
Speaker 1: being you know, this is a relevant thing. UH, going
Speaker 1: back to the early nineties. This is these are the
Speaker 1: days where early nineties I was in high school about
Speaker 1: to go into college. UM and early to mid nineties
Speaker 1: that's my high school college years. Uh. In the those
Speaker 1: early nineties, you started seeing lots of different programmers build
Speaker 1: their own web browsers. A lot of them were within cerns,
Speaker 1: some of them were in colleges and universities, and we
Speaker 1: started to see more people get access to it because
Speaker 1: it was very clear that this was going to be
Speaker 1: a useful tool to navigate information. We move on to
Speaker 1: February and that's when Mark and Reason and Eric Bana
Speaker 1: of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University
Speaker 1: of Illinois at Urbana champaign A eight and C. S A,
Speaker 1: our mutual friend Tom Merritt I believe, went to the
Speaker 1: University of Illinois UH and C. S A. They decided
Speaker 1: to introduce a browser themselves. That was the Mosaic Browser.
Speaker 1: It was on Unix. It was also for the the
Speaker 1: X Windows platform UM and UH there there colleague Alex
Speaker 1: Todec created a version that could run on Macintosh computer.
Speaker 1: So this was a browser that could run on cross platforms.
Speaker 1: Although uh, the appearance of web information vary depending upon
Speaker 1: what platform you were using, So it wasn't a m
Speaker 1: a smooth experience across all platforms. It wasn't something that
Speaker 1: was It wasn't like you were going to get the
Speaker 1: exact same experience on one machine as on another, but
Speaker 1: you could get to the information. UH and I had
Speaker 1: a lot of features that said, apart from the earlier
Speaker 1: web browsers, like things that we take for granted now,
Speaker 1: like bookmarks, you know that would being able to to
Speaker 1: mark a specific web page is something of interest so
Speaker 1: that you can easily navigate to it in the future.
Speaker 1: It was really important also things like icons and pictures
Speaker 1: as opposed to just text, which made it more attractive
Speaker 1: to look at um and it was free to use.
Speaker 1: And it's important to mention this beforehand because it turns
Speaker 1: out a lot of the the stuff they worked on
Speaker 1: would later find its way into other future web browsers.
Speaker 1: By ninety nine, market Drissa would partner with Jeff clark
Speaker 1: and who was the founder of Silicon Graphics. They created
Speaker 1: Mosaic Communications. It was later renamed to Netscape Communications, and
Speaker 1: they started to develop a web browser for the consumer market.
Speaker 1: So that's gonna sound really familiar to anyone who was,
Speaker 1: you know, using computers around the time of the first
Speaker 1: browser Wars. Netscape should definitely ring a bell. Uh. This
Speaker 1: is around the time that that Windows is basically about
Speaker 1: to go gold and and go on sales, So we're
Speaker 1: 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 you almost everything? So you are
Speaker 1: you are clearly a Mac owner. I am a Mac owner.
Speaker 1: I I love Safari because I use almost no add
Speaker 1: ons at all, because I just want speed and fast
Speaker 1: and I needed to think everything, and so far he's
Speaker 1: always work really well for me. That makes sense. I
Speaker 1: I detest Safari with a passion that burns brighter than
Speaker 1: the thousand explaining funds. But it's mostly because I don't
Speaker 1: use a Mac. If I did use a Mac, then, like,
Speaker 1: if you're in the Apple infrastructure, it's amazing. If you're
Speaker 1: all in, it's phenomenal. If you're only kind of sort
Speaker 1: of in, it gets really irritating really quickly. But then
Speaker 1: I'm all in on the Google infrastructure, so I use Chrome. Yes,
Speaker 1: that's the difference, you see, because the browser is the
Speaker 1: thing you use the most, I would imagine, and so
Speaker 1: if your phone is the thing that you carry and
Speaker 1: use the most in the day, then it stands to
Speaker 1: reason that you're going to want to use a browser
Speaker 1: that worked best on a phone, right, and that's kind
Speaker 1: of peeking ahead to some of the issues with Internet explore.
Speaker 1: Uh So, so we get the n c s A
Speaker 1: licensing the commercial rights to Mosaic to a company that
Speaker 1: was called at the time, spy Glass. The company no
Speaker 1: longer exists, so that should tell you how things turn
Speaker 1: out in the future. Spy Glass ended up licensing that
Speaker 1: same technology to other companies, including Microsoft, So the Mosaic
Speaker 1: code ends up making its way to Microsoft um and
Speaker 1: that was really important to Microsoft because, as Nate was saying,
Speaker 1: they were preparing Windows for launch and they really wanted
Speaker 1: to have a component in there that would be a
Speaker 1: web browser, and they had decided that it made more
Speaker 1: sense to license that technology from someone else rather than
Speaker 1: trying to develop it in house. So that's what led
Speaker 1: them to spy Glass and licensing the Mosaic code. We'll
Speaker 1: be back with more of this classic episode of tech
Speaker 1: stuff after this quick break October, before and Escape would
Speaker 1: release a beta version of their project, which was codenamed
Speaker 1: Mozilla that will become important later to It was designated
Speaker 1: zero point nine six b uh. I decided early on
Speaker 1: that when I we started looking at the actual builds
Speaker 1: of Internet Explorer. We're gonna look at whole numbers only,
Speaker 1: because otherwise the path leads to madness. You mean you
Speaker 1: how going to consider Chrome Version twenty six point nine
Speaker 1: point six point three six four was a seminal release.
Speaker 1: I mean it was beautiful, really, I mean that the
Speaker 1: fact that it improves so much upon the press accessor
Speaker 1: that came out earlier that same day is phenomenal. But no,
Speaker 1: I'm going to skip it. Um. Yeah, So we move
Speaker 1: on to to August. That is the day Microsoft released
Speaker 1: the Windows operating system. Uh man, I still remember the
Speaker 1: commercials for Windows they had. They had this little band,
Speaker 1: the Rolling Stones, that had a song called start Me
Speaker 1: Up that was played during the Windows nine commercials. Because
Speaker 1: that was also the introduction of the start button on Windows.
Speaker 1: Uh the little button that wouldn't quit or people wouldn't
Speaker 1: let the little button quit. And they introduced a web
Speaker 1: browser which they named Internet Explorer. Made a lot of sense,
Speaker 1: it was it was, in fact, a way to navigate
Speaker 1: through the Internet, specifically the World Wide Web. But this
Speaker 1: is this is the point I just interject here because
Speaker 1: this is the thing that I've always hated about Internet
Speaker 1: Explorer is that it's a web browser, right, why is
Speaker 1: it not cold Web Explorer. I think uh, I think
Speaker 1: they were afraid they might have, you know, some sort
Speaker 1: 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 technology that Internet Explorer
Speaker 1: runs on Internet Explorer. The agreement with Spyglass was that
Speaker 1: Microsoft would pay a quarterly fee to spy Glass. All right,
Speaker 1: that's cool, and they also agreed to share royalties for
Speaker 1: Internet Explorer. But Microsoft also decided to bundle Internet Explorer
Speaker 1: with Windows, so Internet Explore itself wasn't on sale and
Speaker 1: 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 spy Glass. Yeah. Pretty sneaky. Um.
Speaker 1: That would end up biting them a little bit later,
Speaker 1: but at any rate, 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. We're 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 at
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 at 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 cats scan, where 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 if you think from you on social media,
Speaker 1: there's a there's a probably at chance it's going to
Speaker 1: fall into one of those two categories. Yeah. So there's
Speaker 1: still quite a few other things, but they don't they don't.
Speaker 1: They 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 are thorn in the sides of early web browsers
Speaker 1: and web users was that the limitations meant people had
Speaker 1: to find creative ways around those limitations to create rich
Speaker 1: user experiences. I don't think did they ever use that
Speaker 1: term in the UK, the rich user experience experience? Yes,
Speaker 1: I mean we we probably heard it quite a bit.
Speaker 1: I don't remember it particularly, but I imagine it was
Speaker 1: there amongst all the other ones like zip drives and right,
Speaker 1: all right, Uh, the rich user experience. That was something
Speaker 1: where the idea was that you wanted to create a
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'd be
Speaker 1: no way to stop them. Uh do you remember those? Yes,
Speaker 1: I do remember those, Yes, middies, My goodness, middies. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: So just the days of my sp ace where you
Speaker 1: would go to someone's MySpace page. I mean this, this
Speaker 1: that goes beyond what we're talking about here. But even then,
Speaker 1: oh the not not. I'm not sad to see those
Speaker 1: days go. However, what it meant was that people had
Speaker 1: to create software that would be a plug in, an
Speaker 1: enhancement to a web browser to allow users to access
Speaker 1: certain types of content, largely streaming content, whether it was
Speaker 1: audio or video. So if you had a web browser
Speaker 1: in those days, you had to often enhance it with
Speaker 1: these plug ins, which made the browsers clung here slower.
Speaker 1: They they required more memory in those days. Also, memory
Speaker 1: was not as um plentiful as it is today computer memory,
Speaker 1: So your whole computer would start to run more slowly
Speaker 1: if you tried to access anything that had any kind
Speaker 1: of you know, video or flash animation. Flash is another example.
Speaker 1: Some plug ins that you had to have in order
Speaker 1: to get more out of the web pages. We would
Speaker 1: not see advances to HTML for a while. That would
Speaker 1: address is the whole point of HTML five is to
Speaker 1: take away the need for all these different plug ins
Speaker 1: that often can become security vulnerabilities. UM. The idea being
Speaker 1: that this way we can support those those different functions
Speaker 1: natively within HTML and not have to have a Swiss
Speaker 1: Army knife style web browser where you've added all these
Speaker 1: extra features. UM. Anyway, the first version of Internet Explorer
Speaker 1: was a thousand bare bones as you can get, and
Speaker 1: the second one came out November twenty second nine. So
Speaker 1: if you remember I said the first one came out August,
Speaker 1: I E two comes out November twenty that that's an
Speaker 1: incredibly narrow window for an entire version upgrade. You know,
Speaker 1: it's uh fast does not really go into it. This
Speaker 1: one was for when ninety five and Windows NT three
Speaker 1: point five and Windows INT four point oh. So that
Speaker 1: means within three months you get a full version upgrade.
Speaker 1: But that was actually kind of typical in the early
Speaker 1: days because the browsers were being We're getting more and
Speaker 1: more advanced very quickly. Everyone was really interested in this.
Speaker 1: This was the days when the media was starting to
Speaker 1: take notice of the World Wide Web and it was
Speaker 1: going beyond just uh, the the governments and colleges and
Speaker 1: research facilities. So with that focus, you wanted to really
Speaker 1: get your browser too, to be uh, you know, a
Speaker 1: destination people wanted to go to. The people needed this technology.
Speaker 1: There was another feature that they thought people needed an
Speaker 1: Internet to explore it too. I remember what's delicious cookies?
Speaker 1: Oh you know what? Those are important? Um, they have
Speaker 1: been misused and that is unfortunate. They can cause huge problems.
Speaker 1: They are definitely lee one of those things you've got
Speaker 1: to worry about if you are concerned about Internet privacy. However,
Speaker 1: that being said, it's also nice to be able to
Speaker 1: navigate to a website. You're in the middle of doing
Speaker 1: something you have to shut down and leave. When you
Speaker 1: navigate to that same website on that same machine, you
Speaker 1: can pick up right where you left off. That's thanks
Speaker 1: to cookies. So cookies are just really short, short bits
Speaker 1: of data, really just a short, short range of bits
Speaker 1: if you want to get down to it, and the
Speaker 1: act as kind of identifier and a placeholder so that
Speaker 1: when you start a session with a web page the website,
Speaker 1: the web server can keep track of who you are
Speaker 1: and what you are doing, so that if you do
Speaker 1: leave for some reason and come back, you can pick
Speaker 1: up where you left off. So in retail, for example,
Speaker 1: if I put something in my shopping cart but I
Speaker 1: haven't completed the transaction and I leave the website, the
Speaker 1: next time I go back to that website, I might
Speaker 1: still have that item in the shopping cart, because the
Speaker 1: cookies tell the server, hey, it's that same dude who
Speaker 1: just can't commit to purchasing this squeaky twy for his
Speaker 1: dog to be a great example for me UM. So
Speaker 1: cookies definitely had their place, but obviously have been They've
Speaker 1: got a lot of there's a lot of bad rap
Speaker 1: about cookies too, because of things like the idea of
Speaker 1: tracking um web browsing activity and and sharing things that
Speaker 1: you might have thought were private otherwise. But they come
Speaker 1: from a good place, they do, and they are useful.
Speaker 1: Let's be honest, they are very useful. The web would
Speaker 1: not be what the web is now in a bad way.
Speaker 1: I think we're it not for cookies. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: 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 a fine
Speaker 1: by and tuned to you, so that you have the
Speaker 1: experience 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: them along until August thirteen, nineteen. So they went almost
Speaker 1: a full year, unthinkable without coming out 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
Speaker 1: mind it was still a pretty small piece of the
Speaker 1: overall population. Pie. There weren't that many people online on
Speaker 1: the web in n UM there were, There were lots,
Speaker 1: but if you compared to the number of people who weren't,
Speaker 1: it was a tiny number. Uh. That being said, there
Speaker 1: were things like like um Netscape and Mosaic and other
Speaker 1: browsers that were already They already had a good share
Speaker 1: of the market, so I was just starting to pick up.
Speaker 1: By the end of ninety seven, it accounted for about
Speaker 1: a third of the browser market, just under round. And
Speaker 1: that gets us into the browser wars, which are like
Speaker 1: Star Wars but more boring. Um. But in my notes,
Speaker 1: I wrote, many Buffon's died to bring us this information.
Speaker 1: I'm so out of Uh, my depth to even understand
Speaker 1: why that is funny. Special guy who hasn't even seen
Speaker 1: old stal Wars films. Yeah, it hurts me to hear that.
Speaker 1: But then again, my former, my, my original co host,
Speaker 1: Chris Palette, I don't think even to this day has
Speaker 1: seen the movie Jaws. So he's he killed a small
Speaker 1: piece of me that day when he revealed that information.
Speaker 1: But that, of course is a quote. We've got more
Speaker 1: to say in this classic episode of tech stuff after
Speaker 1: these quick messages. Uh. Internet Explorer three was also the
Speaker 1: first browser that did not use the Spyglass source code.
Speaker 1: There were elements of Spyglass technology in there, so that
Speaker 1: was still listed in the about page on Internet Internet Explorer.
Speaker 1: They kind of had a you know, a licensed little
Speaker 1: bit about how some of the technology was licensed from them,
Speaker 1: but they had moved away from Spyglass to start working
Speaker 1: on a different source code to underlie Internet Explorer. And
Speaker 1: it was the first one to introduce internet mail to
Speaker 1: Internet Explorer and News one point zero and the Windows
Speaker 1: address Book. Neither of those things would matter for very long,
Speaker 1: but they were included in the Internet Explorer three. Uh.
Speaker 1: And they added in the support for lots of the
Speaker 1: plug ins that Netscape could use, and that goes back
Speaker 1: to what I was talking about earlier. It increased the
Speaker 1: ability for Internet Explorer to access certain features that otherwise
Speaker 1: would just be unplayable. Get a little red X saying
Speaker 1: this doesn't work here, Um I remember it, well, yeah
Speaker 1: this also. By the way, one of the reasons why
Speaker 1: I love the development of HTML five and the conversion
Speaker 1: to HTML Live is that I also remember the days
Speaker 1: of those plug ins, leading to lots of opportunities for
Speaker 1: hackers to create fake uh alert messages saying hey, I
Speaker 1: know you want to see this, but you can't unless
Speaker 1: you first download the plug in or up update your
Speaker 1: plug in so that you can watch it. But in fact,
Speaker 1: instead of it actually being a plug in, it was
Speaker 1: a virus that you were agreeing to download and installed
Speaker 1: to your machine. So you get one of those messages saying, oh,
Speaker 1: you want to watch this, but you need to update
Speaker 1: to the latest version of real Player for example. Uh.
Speaker 1: And it wasn't actually a real Player update or or
Speaker 1: installed file. It was an install file for some malware
Speaker 1: that ran that was rampant at a certain point in
Speaker 1: the history of the Internet. So the the slow migration
Speaker 1: away from the plug in days is something that I've
Speaker 1: been waiting for for a long time because I get
Speaker 1: tired of answering those questions. Um. I E three also
Speaker 1: and for cascading style sheets. Now this again very technical
Speaker 1: part of it, but it's basically an easy way to
Speaker 1: define the style the appearance of a web page. One
Speaker 1: of the things that was a big challenge in the
Speaker 1: early days of web browsers was making sure that the
Speaker 1: web page was going to show up the way the
Speaker 1: web designer intended it. Um, Nate, did you ever have
Speaker 1: to build a website without the use of a whizzywig
Speaker 1: editor or something where you had to do it in
Speaker 1: like a text editor? Um I told myself to do it. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: I do. I do that in text and my my
Speaker 1: girlfriend Kate actually still does. She She she can type
Speaker 1: responsive web stuff out in by hand. It's quite impressive.
Speaker 1: That is impressive. The first web pages I ever built,
Speaker 1: which I am not going to share, so don't even
Speaker 1: bother looking for them, because they're awful. If they do
Speaker 1: still exist somewhere out there, I am embarrassed by their presence.
Speaker 1: But at any rate, I also did that the old
Speaker 1: school way, where you had a text editor, you typed
Speaker 1: in all the markup language and the actual content of
Speaker 1: the web page. Then you would have to save it,
Speaker 1: then open up a browser and navigate to the the
Speaker 1: proper address of that page, which probably wasn't even published
Speaker 1: online yet, it was just native on your computer, look
Speaker 1: to see if it was actually showing up properly in
Speaker 1: the web browser you were using, and then if anything wasn't,
Speaker 1: you had to quit out, go back into your text editor,
Speaker 1: change things there, and do it all over again. The
Speaker 1: bad thing in the early days is that even if
Speaker 1: you've got it to work properly on whichever web browser
Speaker 1: you were using, there was no guarantee that someone else's
Speaker 1: web browser, a different web browser, was going to show
Speaker 1: it in that same way. So you might take entire
Speaker 1: you know, hours to painstakingly create and craft a web page,
Speaker 1: and if anyone was using a different web browser, they
Speaker 1: might get a totally different experience anyway, so that you
Speaker 1: don't know how easy you've got it with you a
Speaker 1: dynamic websites and your responsive designs. You know, back in
Speaker 1: those days, we were working out how to write out
Speaker 1: tables in text editors, or there was this one piece
Speaker 1: of software that I remember getting for free at some point,
Speaker 1: and it used d HTML and it was actually it
Speaker 1: was whizzy Wig, but it was it was like dragon
Speaker 1: drop and all the positions were sort of relative, so
Speaker 1: you could have objects anywhere and it was brilliant. Right
Speaker 1: for those of you who don't remember, don't know what
Speaker 1: that acronym stands for, it's what you see is what
Speaker 1: you get. The idea being that you have an editor
Speaker 1: that lets you edit within like you you were actually
Speaker 1: seeing what the web page looks like as you're building it,
Speaker 1: so you don't have to do the swap between code
Speaker 1: and the appearance of the page. It's all there like
Speaker 1: you might be able. Most of them have an HTML
Speaker 1: editor components, so you can switch it to HTML and
Speaker 1: just see the markup language and type in that way
Speaker 1: if you want to. But a lot of them have
Speaker 1: it where they are a different template that are built out.
Speaker 1: Their entire business is based on that, and some of
Speaker 1: them do it incredibly well. I use them, in fact,
Speaker 1: when I'm building web pages these days, because while I
Speaker 1: remember doing HTML coding, uh, that was also when there
Speaker 1: were very few tags, So I don't think I could
Speaker 1: do it today because it would look like a website
Speaker 1: from if I were to build one today, Uh, that way,
Speaker 1: and and while that would be comedic, it would not
Speaker 1: be very useful. Um, Internet Explorer three us also when
Speaker 1: we got a very important development with I E. That
Speaker 1: is the logo of the lower case, so that you
Speaker 1: get that icon the lower case that represents Internet Explorer.
Speaker 1: I don't know what our world would be like if
Speaker 1: they had gone with something else the web. Maybe you
Speaker 1: know it's madness, Nate's mad. Yes, that's that. That would
Speaker 1: have led to great strife in the world. Uh and
Speaker 1: I days after I E three came out, security experts
Speaker 1: discovered a backdoor vulnerability that they called the Princeton word
Speaker 1: macro virus loophole, so it had a very catchy name.
Speaker 1: Backdoor vulnerabilities are seriously bad news no matter what software
Speaker 1: you're talking about. That's the sort of vulnerability that gives
Speaker 1: an attacker access to your machine at whatever level you
Speaker 1: are logged in at. So, if for example, you had
Speaker 1: your Windows machine, you are logged in as an admin
Speaker 1: on that machine. Let's say that's the level of access
Speaker 1: you have, and if this is your personal computer, then yes,
Speaker 1: that's the access you have. This backdoor would give people
Speaker 1: that access, which is bad news. I mean, they could
Speaker 1: make your computer do whatever they wanted to at that point,
Speaker 1: install software that you didn't intend to have installed, or
Speaker 1: direct your computer to attack other other computers. Mostly I
Speaker 1: would just I would just mostly open people's CD draws,
Speaker 1: um for things out, leave messages on the screen, you know,
Speaker 1: fire up the Simpsons dust game, that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: I do know, I do know. I have seen that happen.
Speaker 1: I remember seeing someone who had UM allowed that and
Speaker 1: their c D drawer the little the little drive door
Speaker 1: would open and close over and over and there, like
Speaker 1: I don't know what's happening, except what's happened is you've
Speaker 1: downloaded something you shouldn't have that has handed over control
Speaker 1: to your computers. So we're gonna start in safe mode
Speaker 1: and we'll begin from there and see if we can
Speaker 1: fix this. Yeah. And and it's still buns like buddy
Speaker 1: while we're at it. Yeah yeah. Man. Well, in all,
Speaker 1: Internet Explorer would account for about a third of the
Speaker 1: browlser market, like I was talking about. That's where they
Speaker 1: really started to get traction. And in ninete, the n
Speaker 1: c s A stops supporting the development of Mosaic, so
Speaker 1: the the web browser that really started all this off.
Speaker 1: Uh in a real way, had finally kind of run
Speaker 1: out of steam on the development side, 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: and 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 was also
Speaker 1: when Spyglass threatened Microsoft with a contractual audit because of
Speaker 1: that quarterly fee royalty arrangement we talked about earlier. The
Speaker 1: fact that they were getting this quarterly fee but not
Speaker 1: really any royalties had kind of upset Spyglass because they said, well,
Speaker 1: when we agreed to this, the implication was that Internet
Speaker 1: Explorer or whatever the web browser was going to be
Speaker 1: called it that time, was going to be a separate product.
Speaker 1: It was gonna be something sold by Microsoft instead of
Speaker 1: bundled with Windows UM and ended up prompting Microsoft to
Speaker 1: settle with spy Glass. I think the sum I see
Speaker 1: most frequently is eight million dollars, which it's not a
Speaker 1: small amount of money, but when you compare it to
Speaker 1: some of the huge deals going on seemingly casually in
Speaker 1: the world of tech, and especially the world of the Internet,
Speaker 1: it's a pittance tiny mountain. And for Microsoft, yeah, oh yes,
Speaker 1: especially for Microsoft, eight million dollars it's probably what they
Speaker 1: have in between the cushions of their executive lounge couch.
Speaker 1: You just sort through there and kind of spare eight
Speaker 1: or nine million dollars, I'm sure, um, which I think,
Speaker 1: if you convert into English currency, is approximately fifteen pounds.
Speaker 1: I'm not entirely sure. I'm not good with that sort
Speaker 1: of thing, but I know it's like the exchange rates
Speaker 1: old messed up at the moment. All I know is
Speaker 1: that whenever I visit London, I'm always looking for deals
Speaker 1: because I realized I don't know. I honestly don't know
Speaker 1: how much money I'm spending right now. Um. Internet Explorer
Speaker 1: four comes out in that is U marketed with the
Speaker 1: slogan the Web the way you want it, uh, which
Speaker 1: I guess is true if you don't want it to
Speaker 1: be particularly good. Um. It also handled rich text files
Speaker 1: and plain text email in their internet mail and news program,
Speaker 1: which was now Outlook express For. It's called Outlook express for,
Speaker 1: but it really was the first Outlook Express. This is
Speaker 1: where we run into Microsoft's habit of numbering things in
Speaker 1: a way that probably makes sense to someone in Microsoft
Speaker 1: and no sense to anyone else. Like, I don't know
Speaker 1: why is Windows ten Windows ten when it could have
Speaker 1: been Windows nine, Apart from the fact that calling it
Speaker 1: Windows nine could have caused some confusion with people who
Speaker 1: are running legacy systems that still rely on Windows. I
Speaker 1: can in an era in an area, Jonathan, my friend,
Speaker 1: where we have the iPhone five S and the Galaxy
Speaker 1: S five. I think we are in an era where
Speaker 1: we need to have Windows ten and OS ten. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: all right, I'm fine with that, I guess I honestly,
Speaker 1: at this point we could just say, all right, letters
Speaker 1: and numbers make no difference in the world of the Internet,
Speaker 1: so just just just go with it. Um, so we
Speaker 1: don't have HTML email support and an Outlook express for,
Speaker 1: they could just do rich text files and plain text emails,
Speaker 1: so you didn't get any of the incredibly fun stuff
Speaker 1: like people sending you pictures in the middle of their emails.
Speaker 1: H And what if you're detecting some lackluster enthusiasm in
Speaker 1: my voice, it's because as those jokes only go so
Speaker 1: far with me. So please don't send me emails with
Speaker 1: lots of pictures and them. But first of all, my
Speaker 1: my outlook immediately blocks them unless I tell it to
Speaker 1: allow the photos. But you're just wasting bandwidth. Really, um,
Speaker 1: I'm not a huge fan of those but but obviously
Speaker 1: it makes it look better than it would if it
Speaker 1: were just a rich text file U. And they integrated
Speaker 1: real Player as a streaming media player within Internet Explorer
Speaker 1: for um, do you remember those days, Nate, where yes
Speaker 1: I do. I do, the beautiful days of real Player
Speaker 1: paying inside Internet Explorer. Yes, those those wonderful days. I
Speaker 1: love those days. I'll tell you every interesting Real Player fact.
Speaker 1: Real Player used to be brilliant, right real What real
Speaker 1: did was fantastic. It actually made video stream properly back
Speaker 1: in the day. While the player itself might have been
Speaker 1: a clunky mess, the compression they used was genuinely some
Speaker 1: of the most innovative online technology in my opinion. Um.
Speaker 1: The problem is that everything else about it was awful
Speaker 1: and bundled is a plug in also made a clunky experience,
Speaker 1: so it just it just always felt like a poor
Speaker 1: piece of technology. But actually what it did was fantastic. Yeah.
Speaker 1: There was a time where I mean I just remember
Speaker 1: so this this held true for very way too long,
Speaker 1: where there were competing plugins and in order to for
Speaker 1: you to be able to watch video online, it meant
Speaker 1: that you had to have three or four plugins on
Speaker 1: your browser. Because one site would use one format, another
Speaker 1: site would use someone be flash based, someone be uh,
Speaker 1: you know, a real player base. You would have all
Speaker 1: these different competing formats, and you didn't have a lot
Speaker 1: of options of like a one player fits all kind
Speaker 1: of solutions. So it ended up meaning that you had
Speaker 1: to add all these different plugins if you wanted to
Speaker 1: be 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. If I
Speaker 1: really do we really are we really still there? Um?
Speaker 1: Can we get beyond that and just have everyone say, Okay,
Speaker 1: I wanted to be the person to or the entity
Speaker 1: to define what the standard was, but at some point
Speaker 1: I have to admit my approach is not what has
Speaker 1: been considered standard, and I'm going to get on board
Speaker 1: with what everyone else is doing. It wasn't like that
Speaker 1: for a very long time. In fact, you could argue
Speaker 1: it's still not like that with certain types of media.
Speaker 1: But it just made it. It made it no fun really,
Speaker 1: like you would go to a side that, oh, I
Speaker 1: have to add another place in, which again added that vulnerability.
Speaker 1: If 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 in 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 the 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 e 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 a rich user
Speaker 1: experience we were talking about earlier. That was an important element,
Speaker 1: and by bumbling 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. It 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: R and D areas things like that. But if you're
Speaker 1: talking about the average person, they owned a piece. See,
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 yeah and it was here too.
Speaker 1: The A Well, some of my first web experiences were
Speaker 1: uh were A O L. The World, garden, YEP, happy,
Speaker 1: happy times, simple. Yeah. Isn't it great when you an
Speaker 1: entity that decides what is and isn't the web for you?
Speaker 1: That makes that makes life so much easier. Stay tuned
Speaker 1: for the exciting conclusion of this text of classic episode
Speaker 1: right after we take this break. So this is where
Speaker 1: we get into where micros off runs into some trouble
Speaker 1: because of this policy of lumping Internet Explorer in with
Speaker 1: its operating system. Uh, the United States government brought a
Speaker 1: lawsuit against Microsoft Corporation. In fact, the Department of Justice
Speaker 1: was looking at an antitrust suit saying that the company
Speaker 1: had practiced predatory strategies to push other companies out of
Speaker 1: the web browser market and the operating system market, as
Speaker 1: it turns out, saying that because they had packaged Internet
Speaker 1: Explorer with the operating system, and because the operating system
Speaker 1: was really the only game in town for the most part,
Speaker 1: for operating systems had the majority market share. If you
Speaker 1: were buying a PC more often than not it was
Speaker 1: going to have Windows preloaded on it. They were essentially saying,
Speaker 1: you have stacked the deck against any competing company and
Speaker 1: you're pushing them out, and that's not fair. It's that's
Speaker 1: why we're bringing this ant trust suit against you. This
Speaker 1: was big news and it wasn't the only place where
Speaker 1: Microsoft was having issues that it was also having problems
Speaker 1: in Europe. There were European antitrust suits brought against Microsoft.
Speaker 1: They were actually looking at more interesting things in a way.
Speaker 1: They were looking at how there were also allegations that
Speaker 1: the operating system had been designed so that it worked
Speaker 1: really well with the Internet Explorer and didn't work so
Speaker 1: well with any other browser, almost as if Microsoft had
Speaker 1: taken pains to create an operating system that would on
Speaker 1: purpose decrease the use and utility of competing web browsers.
Speaker 1: And that was a huge red flag. Um, So you
Speaker 1: had these these massive antitrust lawsuits going up against Microsoft
Speaker 1: that wouldn't be resolved for years. I mean, we all
Speaker 1: know these lawsuits can last ages. Uh, And in fact,
Speaker 1: it wouldn't pan out in the US until two thousand one,
Speaker 1: and there would be this enormous settlement, And originally the
Speaker 1: ruling told Microsoft that the Department Justice said, Hey, you're
Speaker 1: gonna have to split your company into two companies. You're
Speaker 1: gonna have to have one that is building the operating
Speaker 1: system business and one that's building the software that exists
Speaker 1: on top of the operating system. But they're gonna have
Speaker 1: to operate as two separate entities because if you package
Speaker 1: them all together, you have an unfair advantage over anyone
Speaker 1: 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 this point was
Speaker 1: actually available on the Mac. This was one of the
Speaker 1: last ones actually that was available in the mic I
Speaker 1: E five I think was the very last one they made. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you could actually you could actually use Internet Explorer
Speaker 1: on the Macintosh at this time. Yeah. To be fair, though,
Speaker 1: the Mac was not not what it is today in
Speaker 1: those things this was. This is that These are also
Speaker 1: the days where Steve Jobs had been forced out of
Speaker 1: Apple for a while and was just starting to come
Speaker 1: back to redefine what the Mac was. This is almost
Speaker 1: almost exactly the time he came back, and this is
Speaker 1: just before the iMac was released, if not almost depending
Speaker 1: on the particular part of the history where we're on,
Speaker 1: almost month wise at the moment, this is this is
Speaker 1: when that happened. Yeah, so we've got this this lawsuit
Speaker 1: going on. It hasn't starts. I was the the dominant
Speaker 1: web browser, which was not helping Microsoft's case and that lawsuit.
Speaker 1: It was essentially being pointed at a c if if
Speaker 1: people are complaining about how this browser matches up against
Speaker 1: other browsers, how can you argue that the customer satisfaction
Speaker 1: or the desire for this particular web browsers what's driving
Speaker 1: the dominance in the market. It's clearly because it's tied
Speaker 1: so intricately with the operating system. That would be the
Speaker 1: kind of argument that the Department of Justice would level
Speaker 1: against Microsoft. But it was I mean, this was I
Speaker 1: at this point was just so key to Microsoft. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it had like a thousand people working on it at
Speaker 1: that point, just on the browser, from from the six
Speaker 1: people of I E one to the one thousand and
Speaker 1: a hundred million dollars being being invested every quarter into
Speaker 1: or actually every year at this point into Internet Explorer.
Speaker 1: This is then the I E five days because that
Speaker 1: came out in March. Um they had had a couple
Speaker 1: of preview versions come out. Bute was when they officially
Speaker 1: launched it. Uh, this was the one that would come
Speaker 1: with Windows second edition as well as Windows two thousand
Speaker 1: and the dot com boom. I mean, this is a
Speaker 1: thousand people working on Internet Explorer, a hundred million dollars
Speaker 1: a year. This is this is the these are the
Speaker 1: months just before the dot com bubble burst. And it's
Speaker 1: also the this is one where if you were a user,
Speaker 1: you probably wouldn't have noticed a huge difference in the
Speaker 1: interface between four and five, but a lot of the
Speaker 1: stuff that was going on behind the scenes right the
Speaker 1: back end of the browser had been upgraded, which prompted
Speaker 1: Paul four ought to write that I E five point
Speaker 1: 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, were
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 peak of 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 is 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 turn
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 at to Microsoft. It no longer existed as
Speaker 1: a entity of its own at that point. That was
Speaker 1: the story of Internet Explorer Part one. We will continue
Speaker 1: the story next week in the next classic episode. If
Speaker 1: you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future
Speaker 1: episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out on Twitter. The
Speaker 1: handle for the show is text Stuff hs W and
Speaker 1: I'll talk to you again really soon, YEA. Text Stuff
Speaker 1: is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from
Speaker 1: I Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.