3 ms·

I'm getting heavy flashbacks to Active Desktop and iirc "Active Channels". Does anyone remember those? Web feeds on/in your desktop. I believe it coincided with

I'm getting heavy flashbacks to Active Desktop and iirc "Active Channels". Does anyone remember those? Web feeds on/in your desktop. I believe it coincided with the release of IE 4 and their big web integration push.

JakeAl 3y ago
Active Desktop and MS DHTML was awesome. Insecure as hell for "consumers", but awesome. VBscript/Wscript on/in the desktop as an application was really useful.
- muyuu 3y ago
  If containers had been a thing, many of the wild MS ideas of the early 2000s wouldn't have been actually crazy.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    They were a thing, on mainframes, micro-computers, and a few selected UNIXes like the (shortly lived) Tru64 and HP-UX. My introduction to containers was HP-UX Vaults.
    - muyuu 3y ago
      they were not a thing that commodity hardware, but most importantly the target user, was really prepared to run at the time same as virtual machines were a thing in the early 70s and client-server in the 80s, but not for the target market despite the industry thought so for some time
      - pjmlp 3y ago
        It depends on the definition of target user/market. For IT professionals definitly yes.
        muyuu 3y ago
        that wasn't remotely the target of Active Desktop
        pjmlp 3y ago
        Indeed that was for Electron like applications, and not at all matter of discussion.
    - red-iron-pine 3y ago
      Aye, BSD jails have been around for a while, and the chroot jail has been a concept since I've been using *nix OS's. But there wouldn't have been the hardware, resources, or depth of support available for the end user in the 2000s. There are still non-technical folks I deal w/ at work that don't get what a VM is...