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What Was the Microsoft Network?
- hfdgiutdryg 8y agoInteresting piece up until the COM rant tangent. COM was brilliant. It was complex because what it did was complex. It provided a binary contact for unrelated software packages to communicate. It was an absolute breeze to work with in VB, something I didn't appreciate in my C++ snob days. The problem with COM wasn't COM, it was the dominant 'serious' programming language of the day.
- diebir 8y ago"You see, back in 1994 Facebook hadn't yet invented the Internet, so if you wanted to go online and let your computer transfer viruses to and from other computers, you had to use one of the many private networks." Wrong, the Internet was well and alive and anybody who had a clue was looking at it. Microsoft, with its typical arrogance thought they could build their own and supersede the Internet. It was a monumental failure and Microsoft Network became a joke and embarrassment. This view is not even from the US, but from the outside, a place where the whole country's internet connection went via a single link.
- ssimpson 8y agoall i remember about the microsoft network, is that it would kill my compuserve setup by putting a new winsock.dll file in place. it was the only file that windows 95 would detect as "corrupt" when i reinstalled the compuserve one. https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs201/projects/corporate-monopolies/dangers_msn.html https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs201/projects/corpo...
- ericras 8y agoMicrosoft Network was the first online service my family subscribed to in fall 1995. I recall our problem being that you had to dial in to different phone numbers for the walled garden and for the web. And we only had local phone numbers for the walled garden. So while the UI was pretty sweet, there wasn't much there and I recall being angry that I couldn't use Internet Explorer and access espnet.sportszone.com without dialing long distance. When we switched to AOL in 96 they had far more stuff and it was easier to get on the web.
- sandworm101 8y agoFrom a friend who once worked on it: whole thing ran on a single rack. Redundant power supplies, but a single common plug.
- djsumdog 8y agoI remember watching a video about Sierra OnLine's network (later The Imagination Network which was sold to AT&T) where when they needed to expand, they just added another computer full of modems.
- runciblespoon 8y ago“This is what makes the whole COM system really really stupid. It's like they don't want you to be able to work with it. They want to make it hard for you to access and share data, because code that were to do something wreckless like call fopen is code that could run on anyone's operating system, not just theirs.” Well doh ! Bill Gates 1987: “OS/2 is the platform for the nineties” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmiwiUeEn4k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmiwiUeEn4k
- djsumdog 8y ago> You see, back in 1994 Facebook hadn't yet invented the Internet Made me laugh. We are in such a different era. If we look at our tools from back then, we would find them savage, and our past self looking at us would see tech that is indistinguishable from magic .. although predictable .. and bloated .. and filled with ads. ... Not much has really changed has it?
- setr 8y ago>If we look at our tools from back then, we would find them savage I don’t know how true that is... you have tools today with the UX of then (vim, web 1.0 websites) and they’re both functional, useful, and not really that different from their modern equivalent. Software-wise, its hard to say that much has changed. The main difference is uaage between early web and modern is web-apps (not significantly different from desktop apps) and the amount of sheer content to be found. Perhaps the centralized usage of social media too, but their usage is probably unsurprising (more surprising is how much personal info people feel fine giving away) Hardware has become radicaly different, but somewhat in an expected way: everything got more dense. The only major shift in thinking there might be touchscreens, and google/gps available anytime anywhere, but neither are particularly surprising. After GUIs became a major thing, I would argue most of our UX went stagnant. You could pull out a 1994 pc today and have no issue using it, and someone from 1994 would likeky have little trouble with windows 10, or even an iphone (after getting past the touchscreen). Things got faster and smaller, but not different. Certainly not the difference of something actually “savage” (like a stone tied to a stick) to something truly “modern” (like a powerdrill), that would require a totally different mindset to use
- smacktoward 8y agoVim doesn't have a 1990s UX; it has a 1970s UX. "Modal interface where you do everything from the keyboard" was old UX before MSN was born.
- asveikau 8y agogvim, however, looks pretty 1990s in its use of GUI elements surrounding the editor part. I wondered if that is what they meant.
- peterwwillis 8y agoI've always liked the everything-is-an-object paradigm. This makes me realize how close we are to a universal standard for them. Imagine an executable zip file with a few default files that define things like metadata, or actual data. Then imagine another zip file that can inherit this first zip file as defaults, and override them. Imagine the second one can be included in the first. Now imagine that changes to any of these files creates a new zip with just the deltas. And finally, an API wraps the zip files so that when you operate on the last one, it transparently maps the previous changes, copy-on-write style. I think this should be an operating system extension, but the great part is, you can implement it all as libraries and ship it to any OS. You then have all the features of zip (archive, compression, encryption, etc), the simplicity of simple key-value data objects in JSON, a copy-on-write mechanism, and since it's both an executable and an archive, it can provide all its own dependencies. This would effectively solve the need for Docker, and not impose the problems of statically compiled single-platform binaries, because everything is in a ZIP file, so you can provide all dependencies (including for multiple platforms), version them, and write changes to new versioned objects. And self-extracting ZIP files already exist. Tie this to HTTP so you can pull objects from a remote store and you've mostly solved application deployment.
- nemothekid 8y agoThis sounds exactly like Docker, just replace "zip" with "tar"
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- pjc50 8y agoSounds rather like an executable git archive - but the security properties sound like a total nightmare. I believe the Amiga had some sort of "unversal extension mechanism" too, but it predates internet security being critical.
- bitwize 8y agoThe Amiga had datatypes, which allowed an application program to install a reader and writer for its peculiar file format, OS wide. So say you had Photoshop for the Amiga. Not sure if that was a thing, but bear with. It would install a datatype for .psd files that would allow you to view such files in your favorite image viewer, or even a web browser. The only other OS to offer this feature was BeOS.
- nkg 8y agoFor those who missed it: "Microsoft promotional video, where Chandler and Rachel from Friends learn how to look at cat pictures on The Microsoft Network" https://youtu.be/5DqJwmzG6Fk?t=1133 https://youtu.be/5DqJwmzG6Fk?t=1133 XD
- isostatic 8y ago"Look Matty, I'm computing!" I've never seen this video so far in. Made me realise how terrible hierarchal things are, especially with a mouse. Click, Click, Click, Click, Click, Click. Give me "locate", or Mac's spotlight, any day of the week.
- hfdgiutdryg 8y agoHierarchies are great if you get to manage them and stay on top of it. The Windows Start Menu search is frustrating, since you're at the mercy of an algorithm. The other day I hit the Windows key, typed the first few letters of an application I regularly used, hit the enter key, and it launched the "Uninstall X" item. It just decided to sort that one higher on that day. Shrug
- jimbobimbo 8y agoGood article, but the critique of the shell is misplaced. Shell provides a universal and extensible way to browse anything that makes sense to browse as a file system, without resorting to drivers. Yes, there's overhead that comes with that, but it allows to plug new things into Explorer, without waiting for Microsoft to do anything about it. Also, FWIW, GetOpenFileName [1] turns the spaghetti from the article into just few lines of code. [1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/api/commdlg/nf-commdlg-getopenfilenamew https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/api/commdlg...
- quietbritishjim 8y agoGetOpenFileName is mentioned in the article as being the deprecated API that opens the old common dialog boxes. The first sentence in the documentation you linked to says to use the new COM API instead.
- userbinator 8y agoYes, and upon clicking to the new COM API page, you are presented with the 11-deep nested if() "Basic Usage" monstrosity whose screenshot is also in the article. I bet a lot of programmers just said "lol no. 'deprecated' my arse." and stayed with GetOpenFileName, as I did. MS isn't going to break countless apps by removing it.
- repolfx 8y agoNah, the Chicago shell was a rubbish implementation of a common (for the time) concept. I tried to use it and extend it back in the 90s. What a disaster. Firstly, it used binary paths with a complex and opaque structure. In fact there was no way to build a parser for such paths because each component was effectively a serialised object provided by each shell extension. Now, I'm partial to binary structures myself. But as the article notes, this meant you couldn't do basic things like access it from a command line, or copy and paste a path into a text document (like, say, a SCRIPT!). And of course no existing software that used normal file APIs could understand such paths because they were all built on the expectation that paths are strings. So basically your shell extension was browseable by nothing except Explorer. In theory you could write COM objects that would embed into Explorer and make your custom shell folders browseable. But there was virtually no documentation on how to do this, and it was extremely easy to completely screw up your entire Windows install this way because isolation in Windows 9x wasn't that great. I managed to hose my Explorer on more than one occasion trying to make this work. Even if you got it working, what that let you do is replace the entire file viewer screen. But what if you wanted to express your plugin as a set of more files and folders? Oh, well then you needed to do even more work to re-use the standard shell views. You didn't get it by default. And of course, again, no useful examples or docs of any sort ... all in a pre-StackOverflow era. Only very few companies ever made this work.
- nailer 8y agoMSN and the internet are cool, but I think CDROM is going to triumph in a big way, provided people can afford a DX2-66. I mean have you played Myst?
- goatlover 8y agoLaserDisc is the future. Have you ever watched Jurassic Park on it?
- WorldMaker 8y agoThey have those LaserDisc games at the Arcade like Mad Dog McCree and Dragon's Lair. I bet we'll all LaserDiscs connected to our computers one day.
- agumonkey 8y agosimilarly, win98 shell was html + js :)
- isostatic 8y agoActive Desktop came with IE4, worked just as badly on Win95. As a concept it wasn't terrible, but with machines of the day it was massively unstable and a resource hog, and almost every home user was on dialup, which meant that there was no access unless you were actively using the internet.
- tptacek 8y agoI wanted to find something debunking the notion that userids at CompuServe were based on the PDP-10s that ran the service, because it seemed improbable that anyone was running a major online service on PDP-10s by the time the Microsoft Chicago betas were circulating, but, nope: that's real. http://www.inwap.com/pdp10/compuserve.txt http://www.inwap.com/pdp10/compuserve.txt
- jgtrosh 8y agoI think I read on HN recently that McDonald's restaurants' accounting ran on PDPs (10?) until the 90s. Can't find any info online to back that up though.
- bena 8y agoWouldn't surprise me. Code that works has a tendency to stick around longer than people think. There's a lot of institutional knowledge built into that codebase. It would be like firing an employee of 20 years who works for nothing and hiring someone for millions of dollars.
- Qworg 8y agoThis is the most succinct description of this phenomenon I've ever seen. As technologists, we often wonder why new, better tech doesn't dominate. If something suffices, why change?
- gaius 8y agoBecause generally the new tech isn’t better. It’s just newer.
- jl6 8y agoInertia is vast for the core systems that power large organizations. But these legacy systems do eventually yield as new requirements render change non-negotiable. Those ancient, messy, arcane, yet somehow supremely reliable systems tend to become frozen reflections of the organization they serve. It does eventually make sense to replace them when the organization has changed sufficiently that the reflection is no longer accurate. New regulations, new products, new markets, new acquisitions, divestment, outsourcing... these are the real drivers of change that move an organization’s technology forward - not the new tech itself.
- pjc50 8y agoAh, COM. It's an extreme case of inventing a technology before the support infrastructure is ready for it, like a car with no refining. In the case of COM and OLE, building an inter-application object system without a viable object oriented programming language to do it in. So developers had to build machinery by hand in C in each COM hosting application.
- mikestew 8y agoBefore going to Microsoft, I had used COM and OLE via VB, FoxPro, and probably a few other higher-level abstractions. Then I went to Microsoft and worked on OLE DB, using C. O...M...G. CreateObject() suddenly turned into (what seemed like) a 1000 lines of almost-boilerplate. That ADO AddRecord() that was so easy in classic VB? Ugh, if only you knew what was behind that. COM was a clever idea to solve a hard problem, but if one had to work under the covers it was some sausage you were definitely better off not knowing the ingredients of. I mean, COM mostly worked and wasn't bad once you got the hang of it, just like pig snout in your sausage isn't bad for you. It's just kind of unappealing at first.
- pjmlp 8y agoThey finally learned with UWP. Microsoft WinDev always seemed a bit strange versus everyone else. Borland had very nice high level frameworks (still do as Codegear but alas), and then DevTools also had them as VB and later .NET. But WinDev had always to make everything low level, and if it wasn't for them we would have had AFX instead of MFC.
- thought_alarm 8y agoBackward compatibility is easier if the OS APIs are as terse and featureless as possible. Higher-level frameworks (VB, .NET, VCL, etc.) can then be distributed independent of OS releases with multiple versions installed simultaneously.
- pjmlp 8y ago
- rayiner 8y agoGod I miss this: http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/the-microsoft-network/msn1_02.jpg#right#thumb http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/the-microsoft-network/msn1_.... So clear! So easy to read! So obvious what things you can click and what things you can't. Compared to this Windows Modern crap where it's not clear what's a button and what's a label, and every app (or part thereof) has its own idea about where things go.
- acemarke 8y agoThe actual 3D shading and such looks dated by now, but I certainly agree with you in principle. I actually kinda liked WinXP's shiny happy colored interface, especially the Win32 Common Controls v6 appearance, and Win7 looked pretty good.
- Wistar 8y agoAs someone once remarked "On XP everything looks as though it should go MOO! when you click on it."
- TuringTest 8y agoThat's a lie! There were lots of "Quack" and "Meow" as well.
- mattkevan 8y agoWas astonished when I saw XP’s searching screen for the first time. Seriously? An animation of a cute puppy on an OS for business? How old did they think their users were anyway?
- TuringTest 8y agoYou'd have had to live through the nineties to understand it. That was cool at the time; 90% of web pages had animated images like that (the other 10% had animated "under construction" gifs; and 100% had visible visitor counters and a link to a guestbook, before "web 2.0" comment threads was a thing). By the way, the puppy and the cop Clippy were remnants of the failed experiment "Microsoft Bob", which attempted to create user-friendly environment by imitating a whole house, instead of just a "desktop with windows". Those were wild times, full of possibilities, when (almost) no one had much idea of how personal computers ought to be used.
- tomc1985 8y agoWas not expecting this to turn into a COM rant
- jkaplowitz 8y agoYou weren't sure what focus was going to win, but in the end, COM1.
- gct 8y agoMFW people don't realize where MSNBC came from
- nbevans 8y agoThe COM side rant is still relevant today. All of the UWP framework for "modern Windows Store apps" is built on top of COM. It's like a time warp. The JavaScript and .NET SDKs for UWP apps are just wrappers around what is really a COM API. Often you are dealing with low level `COMException` exceptions (in .NET land) for things that the .NET SDK hasn't got a contingency for.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- RyJones 8y agoActual title: "What The Hell Was The Microsoft Network?" https://twitter.com/grumpygiant/status/1034847962797494272 https://twitter.com/grumpygiant/status/1034847962797494272
- bubblethink 8y agoHackers can't deal with words like Hell. Should have been Heck. In a couple of decades, on a wholly new interconnected network, we'll see an article titled, "What the Hell Was a Hacker?"
- city41 8y agoI think it’s less about being a “bad” word and more about not injecting a bit of bias in before the reader even gets to the article. HN is big on “sterile” titles. I believe this falls under “gratuitous adjectives” in the guidelines.
- WalterGR 8y agocity41 is correct. I offer a search for “fuck,” which disproved your assertion: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page...
- djhworld 8y agoVery interesting article, didn't even know this existed. My first "proper" computer that my parents bought was running Windows 98, so will have missed this, but I remember using Windows 95 at school. We also missed the whole walled garden thing (I'm from the UK, I think AOL tried to break into the market here but not sure if it succeeded) and made our first forays onto the internet using dialup via an ISP. Interesting to see what a few years before my first time on the web was like. The "everything is an object" thing sort of reminds me of Plan9 with a bit of BeOS too.
- DaiPlusPlus 8y agoI'm from the UK too: we had a Dell XPS Dimension back in 1996, it came with the OSR-1 release which still had the original shell-based MSN client, so we signed up for the free 30-day trial included in the box so we could get on the Internet as well as to check-out the MSN stuff. I have memories of clicking around the original Explorer-shell based Internet Gaming Zone (zone.com would launch later) - then the free trial expired and we switched to CompuServ and Netscape. Only AOL was able to eke out a market in the UK - often the exclusive content they had was too American-centric to be of interest to Europeans, though I remember CompuServ was popular in academia. When we were in CompuServ we only used it to get on the Internet - so after subscription-free ISPs like FreeServe and LibertySurf were launched we instantly ditched CompuServe.
- athenot 8y agoThe conclusion of the article is spot-on. Our current large platforms are only marginally better than the walled-gardens of online systems in the 1990's.
- TuringTest 8y agoI hear in the next Windows build they're actually going to replace Control Panel with a copy of Eliza that's been hooked up to a magic 8-ball I thought Cortana was already up and running since Windows 10?
- chungy 8y ago> It was a kind of version of the Web where you could browse online data the same way you browsed your file system. This is what made it cool. That sounds like Gopher.
- gaius 8y agoIn those days you could mount \\ftp.microsoft.com as m: and browse it as a file share, unencrypted SMB over the public internet !
- alternize 8y agoI had the chance to be part of a beta tester group for The Microsoft Network in my country for roughly two years. while the network's content itself wasn't that attractive, it could also be used to access other internet services, similar as AOL provided. beta testers were provided access through a toll-free number. exciting times for teenage me, after years of fights due to BBS-inflated monthly family phone bills.
- sundvor 8y agoAlthough in a bit of a haze by now, I have such fond memories of the MSN. In my early twenties, I had gotten a beta CD of Win95 from dad who ran an IT shop. I stumbled upon the MSN, which had an access point in Norway, and before I knew it I was on the Frog Pond chatting away with really cool people - probably quite a few from Microsoft. Can only remember one name of the group: Pam! Win95 was also a giant step up from 3.1 and this being a year or two before I got on the Internet it was indeed very exciting stuff. I had left my Amiga a couple of years before, and finally the PC was getting similar level good! I somehow started receiving interim builds by FedEx as well, I must have been providing some feedback that was useful to them. Back then, at my age, that felt like a huge deal, like I was really part of an insider group. :-)
- aj7 8y ago“Microsoft had already released all this fancy new tech with NT 3.1.” Are you serious? Did you ever see Finder 4.3 on a MacII? Finder 6?
- jmull 8y agoCOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM shaking fist into the air
- incompatible 8y agoI was actually quite paranoid in those days that Microsoft was trying to take over computing in its entirety. We were looking at a future where every computer would run Windows and only be able to connect to a network owned by Microsoft. All the protocols and document formats would be proprietary. But was it really paranoia if it's actually what Microsoft was trying to achieve? I was quite surprised when they were defeated by the Internet, and they had to scramble to buy a web browser. That lead to the "Best viewed with Internet Explorer" days, but that's another story.
- myrandomcomment 8y agoOkay I really enjoyed this. Well written and entertaining. I was at the time on the other end of this, with OS/2 where everything really was an object you could do stuff with. Need a printer, open templates and drag off a printer one, fill in some info. I really liked the WPS in OS/2. Some of the stuff you cannot do even today. Moved on to Solaris and IRIX (I know, I was doing that internet thing at an ISP) and then NeXTStep. Hey Apple I want the damn NeXT shelf back! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelf_(computing) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelf_(computing)
- kerng 8y agoActive Desktop - not sure what Windows version that shipped with, but the long term strategies and ideas were kinda cool - oh, nostalgia. I believe Microsoft soon after shipping 95 and threatened by Netscape realized that the Internet is the future, and the browser the OS. The rest is an antitrust lawsuit settled more then a decade later.
- gattilorenz 8y agoShipped with 98,although you could add it to windows 95 by installing IE5. This also gave 95 the quick start bar with "show desktop" next to Start, if I remember correctly.