I am sure there were other things like this kicking around at the time as people have been discussing. I worked on improving the performance of the terraserver

I am sure there were other things like this kicking around at the time as people have been discussing. I worked on improving the performance of the terraserver project a little bit. I was part of the team that designed and wrote sql server 7.0 (a db rewrite from scratch of the purchased sybase, including parser, optimizer, QE, storage engine, but keeping the stored procedure programming language that was from sybase). I believe this was 1998. We all knew it was a pretty impressive combination of maps, jpeg image, software and web browsers. Microsoft definitely had an idea that they didn't want to make the web too great, because that could lessen the importance of windows. As others say, Microsoft didn't know what they had with ajax. I remember this was one of the first, early, high query examples we had, other than tpcc and tpcd. There was a stored procedure call in the application that accidentally lead to basically a lock that was held, blocking everything else. That was a really hard problem to figure out.