8 ms·

Memoirs from the old web: IE's crazy content rating system

194 points by tempodox 3y ago

coderintherye 3y ago
This author has some great stuff, minutiae of internet history I would have never thought to care about all made quite interesting! Another good read: https://www.devever.net/~hl/gatekeeper https://www.devever.net/~hl/gatekeeper
rurban 3y ago
I was intrigued by that censorship organization in the late 90ies as well, and actually subscribed to the mailing list of such a ratings bureau in London. As you expected it was full of Tipper Gore-like figures. Extremely comical and crazy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parents_Music_Resource_Center https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parents_Music_Resource_Cente...
- justsomehnguy 3y ago
  > The hearing was held on September 19, 1985, when representatives from the PMRC, three musicians—Dee Snider, Frank Zappa, John Denver—and Senators Paula Hawkins, Al Gore, and others Yes, yes, two wives of senators are absolutely should not be mentioned. It's not like they were anyway involved in the hearing or what else...
llimos 3y ago
A prime example of how it's better to not have anything than to do it badly. I wonder how many parents mistakenly thought setting this was all that was needed to keep their kids safe online. Possibly persuaded (knowingly or unknowingly) by said kids.
- timawesomeness 3y ago
  The elementary school I attended thought this system (+an additional list of blacklisted sites) without a supervisor password was enough to keep students from accessing non-age-appropriate material on school computers. It sure didn't stop me.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    In that time, all those control systems schools set up were, unintentionally, the most educational part of IT classes :).
krono 3y ago
What has happened before will happen again. What has been done before will be done again. It will start with Mozilla's new AI[1] that will soon be deciding on whether ecommerce offers and reviews are genuine, displaying accusations for the ones it decides shouldn't be taken into consideration by Firefox users. We all know it'll be only be a matter of time before topics such as inclusivity, vulgarity, and at least all of the others IE's Content Advisor covered are added back into the mix. [1]: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/fakespot-joins-mozilla-firefox-shopping-announcement/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/fakespot-joins-mozilla-f...
- aww_dang 3y ago
  If I am reading this correctly, to torpedo one's competition, a malicious actor need only submit glowing reviews in the most insincere tone possible? Reminds me of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WOT_Services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WOT_Services A single point of vulnerability always invites abuse.
  - krono 3y ago
    One aspect that concerns me even more is the profiling and labeling of individuals. I have a friend who is - as he puts it himself - "even beyond the [autism] spectrum". He recently showed me how often he's falsely accused on Reddit and Discord of being a bot or of having used ChatGTP due to the way he writes. It happens so much and in such aggressive tones that I'm surprised he's still bothering to engage with others on the internet at all. Very sad to see. It wouldn't surprise me if this AI would pick up on his strange writing style (hard to describe.. very structured) and decide his reviews or whatever consistently aren't genuine or human and brand them accordingly. He wouldn't even be aware of the fact that his Amazon reviews are being invalidated and pointless to spend any effort on since he doesn't use Firefox himself. There are only two things Mozilla could do to remedy this kind of situation: have their AI also track and profile people with possible mental/neurodevelopmental disorders, or have a system where people themselves can prove to Mozilla that they're human and can't help writing in that manner due to the way their brain is wired. Neither of which I am sure we can all agree on would acceptable in the slightest. This is a really messed up development and it's been making my friend really anxious about what other things will be coming in the future.
user3939382 3y ago
I remember growing up puzzling over some of these corners of the OS I’d didn’t understand. I understood it’s purpose but not how it worked. The ODBC configs in Control Panel was another one. I didn’t know at the time it would be 10-20 years before some of my curiosities were satisfied.
rwmj 3y ago
I remember adding this to a schools website I developed back in the day. And I actually think, odd technical choices aside, it's not a bad idea. PICS is far preferable to governments trying to insert themselves into the internet and ban encryption, or private companies trying to maintain infinite lists of "good" and "bad" stuff. I imagine that the porn sites would be pretty happy to add the content ratings too, since they don't want people who have opted out to visit. You could add a bit of government policing there if you wanted, forcing websites to properly add metadata, and forcing schools to set the filtering up, and that would be fine by me.
- shellac 3y ago
  The university I work at wanted to make a video archive of performance art openly available on the web. Some of this can be 'challenging' (their preferred term) so we wanted to ensure people didn't just stumble into it. On the other hand we didn't want any form of mediated access which is a barrier for potential users, and also a maintenance burden. I remembered PICS and hoped something similar had stepped in since it seemed an ideal solution: we describe our content, users make a choice based on that metadata. However we found nothing. (We ended up adding a ~7 second explanation / warning at the start of every access copy, which is ... ok)
  - netsharc 3y ago
    I suppose this is brainstorming for a problem that's been solved, I wonder if the flags of how much a viewer can see can be user-modified and stored in a cookie, and a few seconds before the video starts the viewer will get a reminder of what their preferences are, and what the video's rating is. If the video is "more challenging" than the user's settings, then of course the video won't play. And if the user hadn't set anything, they can just click "Skip the configuration, show me the video".
- cubefox 3y ago
  The question is: Do you want this to be opt-in or opt-out? If you block all websites which don't offer a rating, then you would probably block way too much, and if you block only websites which are rated adult according the system, then it is unclear why foreign porn websites couldn't simply refuse to rate their sites, creating a competitive advantage.
webwielder2 3y ago
Who says IE had poor standards support?
sp1rit 3y ago
Surprisingly, the system of vendor provided ratings are now used by Freedesktop in their AppStream metadata[0] named OARS[1]. But it's a lot simpler that this custom DSL that IE used for content rating. [0]: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/chap-Metadata.html#tag-content_rating https://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/chap-Met... [1]: https://hughsie.github.io/oars/ https://hughsie.github.io/oars/
- RunningDroid 3y ago
  Note that OARS is at risk of being abandoned¹ because people threatened to get the developer banned from GitHub² for giving app developers the ability to tag their app as having homosexual content (because said content is illegal in some countries.) ¹:https://github.com/hughsie/oars/issues/41#issuecomment-812142468 https://github.com/hughsie/oars/issues/41#issuecomment-81214... ²:https://github.com/hughsie/oars/issues/41#issuecomment-812076058 https://github.com/hughsie/oars/issues/41#issuecomment-81207...
darkwater 3y ago
The most interesting thing for me as an European is looking at the difference in levels between sex and violence according to RSACi. Look at level 1 for instance: on one side we have passionate kisses (with tongue I guess?) and on the other, killing animals already. At Level 2 we are already killing people, while at level 2 clothed sexual touching. Beating someone? Bah, not even contemplated.
- xboxnolifes 3y ago
  Yeah, it seems like here in America, violence doesn't come close to sexual acts unless it has real gore. That being said, the levels don't have to be comparable to each other. Level 2 violence doesn't have to be morally equivalent to level 2 sexual acts. It just needs to be consistent within its own scale. If they were supposed to be morally equivalent, you wouldn't need 4 separate level sliders.
  - kyleyeats 3y ago
    [dead]
  - darkwater 3y ago
    Fair enough, that's a point of view I did not consider. But still, the sex one could perfectly be on a more similar scale by for example putting as Level4 something like "showing forced or violent sex", just as we have death with gore at L4 for violence). And I know we are talking about a '90s rating system but I lived that era and it's something I always thought, even back in the day. For example, 80% of the movies with guns, bullets and blood AND a sex scene never show women breasts or genitalia, not even for a split second.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      > the sex one could perfectly be on a more similar scale by for example putting as Level4 something like "showing forced or violent sex", Oh, that's interesting. I would expect such a scene to rate highly on the violence scale, not the sex scale. Just a different perspective, I suppose.
majke 3y ago
Hermaphrodite Connector????
- dfox 3y ago
  Connector where both of the mating parts are the same. See the linked IBM's data connector for the probably most common historical example (incidentally it is not specific to Token Ring, but part of IBM's structural cabling system and thus a direct competitor to WE/AT&T's modular jacks popularly called RJ-whatever). More contemporary example is Anderson PowerPole, used for various DC power applications.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- theandrewbailey 3y ago
  Won't somebody please think of the children! \s
chrismorgan 3y ago
I’m genuinely delighted by the “here’s a demo, except it’s only served through a protocol unsupported by the browsers you’d want to try it on” thing. It fits in so beautifully. Reminds me of how in 2012 I tried to install IE6 on a Windows 2000 Server machine, to improve my experience over IE5 for the purposes of making a simple HTA GUI for some simple scripting, but even once I could find a copy of the IE6 installer, it no longer worked, presumably because it depended on something on the public internet that was no longer there in some way. So I coped with IE5. (And I think it was 5.0, not even 5.5.) I don’t know exactly when that machine was finally decommissioned, but it was definitely gone by 2020.
- hlandau 3y ago
  I had to find a copy of 'IE6 Full' on archive.org in the process of making this blog post. Most copies of IE6 are web installers. I have to say I'm really quite irritated by Microsoft's habit of deleting old software from their download site, forcing people to get it from potentially untrustworthy third parties. I'm fairly sure there's some downloads on there that are just gone for good. And, ah, wow. I was not expecting someone to mention IE HTAs here. Welcome to the club. ;) Another thing for the blog queue in the future, though frankly the number of IE-specific technologies is so large I should probably break it out into a separate series.
  - chrismorgan 3y ago
    I found a full installer, but it still didn’t work. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Actually it’s coming back to me now, I’m confident it was IE 5.0 that was installed, because once I failed to install IE 6, I tried to install 5.5, and failed at that too. Really enjoying your series, by the way. So far I’ve known at least a little about all of them save GateKeeper (though I have come across it as a general concept), but I’m impressed with the depth you’re delving to each time. I hope you’re enjoying the process plenty too!
    - forgotmypw17 3y ago
      I develop a hyper-compatible Web framework, so I test regularly in 3.0, 4.0, 5, 5.5, and 6. The easiest way I have found to run them is to use VirtualBox with Win95 and WinME VMs. You can make a snapshot of each installed IE version to save space.
SoftTalker 3y ago
> You see, the PICS standard doesn't just define support for one particular ratings scheme (RSACi). Oh, no. Instead, the PICS standard defines an entire DSL for defining custom ratings schemes. Oh there has got to be an XKCD for that....
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  There is one: https://xkcd.com/297/ https://xkcd.com/297/. More seriously though, I'd love to know how the whole thing came about, and what was the Lisp connection/lineage that made the DSL use S-expressions. Also, it seems Microsoft ecosystem has a bunch of such oddities pop up in unexpected places. IIRC, at some point Windows used (or is still using) some Prolog-derivative for declarative networking configuration and troubleshooting?
  - blep_ 3y ago
    If you look at it with enough vagueness, I've seen some form of this at every job I've had: someone has a problem to solve, and has an idea that is fun to implement, unnecessarily flexible, and possibly Turing-complete. It's a way of getting the "I did a cool hack" dopamine hits that we nerds love so much, while still doing our jobs. Depending on how well they did at keeping their actual goal in mind, you might wind up with a very useful embedded scripting engine, or a very bad ad hoc build system for a project that did not need its own build system. (I've seen both.) I would expect there's a large overlap between people who think Lisp and/or Prolog are cool, and people who are prone to doing this sort of thing. Non-trivial knowledge of either of those correlates strongly with being more into programming than the average developer.
  - justsomehnguy 3y ago
    > Windows NT networking installation and configuration is controlled by the file NCPA.CPL, which the user sees as the Networks icon within the Control Panel's main window. The bulk of this DLL is written in C++, but it also contains a simplified Prolog interpreter known as "Small Prolog," written by Henri de Feraudy during the late 1980s and put into the public domain. It is available through the C User's Group (Lawrence, KS). > August 01, 1994 https://www.drdobbs.com/cpp/extending-c-with-prolog/184409294 https://www.drdobbs.com/cpp/extending-c-with-prolog/18440929... http://web.archive.org/web/20040603192757/research.microsoft.com/research/dtg/davidhov/pap.htm http://web.archive.org/web/20040603192757/research.microsoft... http://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/html/faqs/lang/prolog/prg/part1/faq-doc-18.html http://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/html/faqs/lang/prolog/prg/pa... I don't think it survived past NT3.5 with NT4 having the most of the user-space hauled from Win95.
zaps 3y ago
Romance
stevejordan00 3y ago
[flagged]
temporallobe 3y ago
Great read, though even more interesting is this gem buried in the footer about the inappropriate use of XML: https://www.devever.net/~hl/xml https://www.devever.net/~hl/xml

194 points by tempodox 3y ago

This author has some great stuff, minutiae of internet history I would have never thought to care about all made quite interesting! Another good read: https://www.devever.net/~hl/gatekeeper https://www.devever.net/~hl/gatekeeper

rurban 3y ago

I was intrigued by that censorship organization in the late 90ies as well, and actually subscribed to the mailing list of such a ratings bureau in London. As you expected it was full of Tipper Gore-like figures. Extremely comical and crazy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parents_Music_Resource_Center https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parents_Music_Resource_Cente...

justsomehnguy 3y ago
> The hearing was held on September 19, 1985, when representatives from the PMRC, three musicians—Dee Snider, Frank Zappa, John Denver—and Senators Paula Hawkins, Al Gore, and others Yes, yes, two wives of senators are absolutely should not be mentioned. It's not like they were anyway involved in the hearing or what else...

llimos 3y ago

A prime example of how it's better to not have anything than to do it badly. I wonder how many parents mistakenly thought setting this was all that was needed to keep their kids safe online. Possibly persuaded (knowingly or unknowingly) by said kids.

timawesomeness 3y ago
The elementary school I attended thought this system (+an additional list of blacklisted sites) without a supervisor password was enough to keep students from accessing non-age-appropriate material on school computers. It sure didn't stop me.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  In that time, all those control systems schools set up were, unintentionally, the most educational part of IT classes :).

krono 3y ago

What has happened before will happen again. What has been done before will be done again. It will start with Mozilla's new AI[1] that will soon be deciding on whether ecommerce offers and reviews are genuine, displaying accusations for the ones it decides shouldn't be taken into consideration by Firefox users. We all know it'll be only be a matter of time before topics such as inclusivity, vulgarity, and at least all of the others IE's Content Advisor covered are added back into the mix. [1]: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/fakespot-joins-mozilla-firefox-shopping-announcement/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/fakespot-joins-mozilla-f...

aww_dang 3y ago
If I am reading this correctly, to torpedo one's competition, a malicious actor need only submit glowing reviews in the most insincere tone possible? Reminds me of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WOT_Services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WOT_Services A single point of vulnerability always invites abuse.
- krono 3y ago
  One aspect that concerns me even more is the profiling and labeling of individuals. I have a friend who is - as he puts it himself - "even beyond the [autism] spectrum". He recently showed me how often he's falsely accused on Reddit and Discord of being a bot or of having used ChatGTP due to the way he writes. It happens so much and in such aggressive tones that I'm surprised he's still bothering to engage with others on the internet at all. Very sad to see. It wouldn't surprise me if this AI would pick up on his strange writing style (hard to describe.. very structured) and decide his reviews or whatever consistently aren't genuine or human and brand them accordingly. He wouldn't even be aware of the fact that his Amazon reviews are being invalidated and pointless to spend any effort on since he doesn't use Firefox himself. There are only two things Mozilla could do to remedy this kind of situation: have their AI also track and profile people with possible mental/neurodevelopmental disorders, or have a system where people themselves can prove to Mozilla that they're human and can't help writing in that manner due to the way their brain is wired. Neither of which I am sure we can all agree on would acceptable in the slightest. This is a really messed up development and it's been making my friend really anxious about what other things will be coming in the future.

user3939382 3y ago

I remember growing up puzzling over some of these corners of the OS I’d didn’t understand. I understood it’s purpose but not how it worked. The ODBC configs in Control Panel was another one. I didn’t know at the time it would be 10-20 years before some of my curiosities were satisfied.

rwmj 3y ago

I remember adding this to a schools website I developed back in the day. And I actually think, odd technical choices aside, it's not a bad idea. PICS is far preferable to governments trying to insert themselves into the internet and ban encryption, or private companies trying to maintain infinite lists of "good" and "bad" stuff. I imagine that the porn sites would be pretty happy to add the content ratings too, since they don't want people who have opted out to visit. You could add a bit of government policing there if you wanted, forcing websites to properly add metadata, and forcing schools to set the filtering up, and that would be fine by me.

shellac 3y ago
The university I work at wanted to make a video archive of performance art openly available on the web. Some of this can be 'challenging' (their preferred term) so we wanted to ensure people didn't just stumble into it. On the other hand we didn't want any form of mediated access which is a barrier for potential users, and also a maintenance burden. I remembered PICS and hoped something similar had stepped in since it seemed an ideal solution: we describe our content, users make a choice based on that metadata. However we found nothing. (We ended up adding a ~7 second explanation / warning at the start of every access copy, which is ... ok)
- netsharc 3y ago
  I suppose this is brainstorming for a problem that's been solved, I wonder if the flags of how much a viewer can see can be user-modified and stored in a cookie, and a few seconds before the video starts the viewer will get a reminder of what their preferences are, and what the video's rating is. If the video is "more challenging" than the user's settings, then of course the video won't play. And if the user hadn't set anything, they can just click "Skip the configuration, show me the video".
cubefox 3y ago
The question is: Do you want this to be opt-in or opt-out? If you block all websites which don't offer a rating, then you would probably block way too much, and if you block only websites which are rated adult according the system, then it is unclear why foreign porn websites couldn't simply refuse to rate their sites, creating a competitive advantage.

webwielder2 3y ago

Who says IE had poor standards support?

sp1rit 3y ago

Surprisingly, the system of vendor provided ratings are now used by Freedesktop in their AppStream metadata[0] named OARS[1]. But it's a lot simpler that this custom DSL that IE used for content rating. [0]: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/chap-Metadata.html#tag-content_rating https://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/chap-Met... [1]: https://hughsie.github.io/oars/ https://hughsie.github.io/oars/

RunningDroid 3y ago
Note that OARS is at risk of being abandoned¹ because people threatened to get the developer banned from GitHub² for giving app developers the ability to tag their app as having homosexual content (because said content is illegal in some countries.) ¹:https://github.com/hughsie/oars/issues/41#issuecomment-812142468 https://github.com/hughsie/oars/issues/41#issuecomment-81214... ²:https://github.com/hughsie/oars/issues/41#issuecomment-812076058 https://github.com/hughsie/oars/issues/41#issuecomment-81207...

darkwater 3y ago

The most interesting thing for me as an European is looking at the difference in levels between sex and violence according to RSACi. Look at level 1 for instance: on one side we have passionate kisses (with tongue I guess?) and on the other, killing animals already. At Level 2 we are already killing people, while at level 2 clothed sexual touching. Beating someone? Bah, not even contemplated.

xboxnolifes 3y ago
Yeah, it seems like here in America, violence doesn't come close to sexual acts unless it has real gore. That being said, the levels don't have to be comparable to each other. Level 2 violence doesn't have to be morally equivalent to level 2 sexual acts. It just needs to be consistent within its own scale. If they were supposed to be morally equivalent, you wouldn't need 4 separate level sliders.
- kyleyeats 3y ago
  [dead]
- darkwater 3y ago
  Fair enough, that's a point of view I did not consider. But still, the sex one could perfectly be on a more similar scale by for example putting as Level4 something like "showing forced or violent sex", just as we have death with gore at L4 for violence). And I know we are talking about a '90s rating system but I lived that era and it's something I always thought, even back in the day. For example, 80% of the movies with guns, bullets and blood AND a sex scene never show women breasts or genitalia, not even for a split second.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > the sex one could perfectly be on a more similar scale by for example putting as Level4 something like "showing forced or violent sex", Oh, that's interesting. I would expect such a scene to rate highly on the violence scale, not the sex scale. Just a different perspective, I suppose.

majke 3y ago

Hermaphrodite Connector????

dfox 3y ago
Connector where both of the mating parts are the same. See the linked IBM's data connector for the probably most common historical example (incidentally it is not specific to Token Ring, but part of IBM's structural cabling system and thus a direct competitor to WE/AT&T's modular jacks popularly called RJ-whatever). More contemporary example is Anderson PowerPole, used for various DC power applications.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
theandrewbailey 3y ago
Won't somebody please think of the children! \s

chrismorgan 3y ago

I’m genuinely delighted by the “here’s a demo, except it’s only served through a protocol unsupported by the browsers you’d want to try it on” thing. It fits in so beautifully. Reminds me of how in 2012 I tried to install IE6 on a Windows 2000 Server machine, to improve my experience over IE5 for the purposes of making a simple HTA GUI for some simple scripting, but even once I could find a copy of the IE6 installer, it no longer worked, presumably because it depended on something on the public internet that was no longer there in some way. So I coped with IE5. (And I think it was 5.0, not even 5.5.) I don’t know exactly when that machine was finally decommissioned, but it was definitely gone by 2020.

hlandau 3y ago
I had to find a copy of 'IE6 Full' on archive.org in the process of making this blog post. Most copies of IE6 are web installers. I have to say I'm really quite irritated by Microsoft's habit of deleting old software from their download site, forcing people to get it from potentially untrustworthy third parties. I'm fairly sure there's some downloads on there that are just gone for good. And, ah, wow. I was not expecting someone to mention IE HTAs here. Welcome to the club. ;) Another thing for the blog queue in the future, though frankly the number of IE-specific technologies is so large I should probably break it out into a separate series.
- chrismorgan 3y ago
  I found a full installer, but it still didn’t work. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Actually it’s coming back to me now, I’m confident it was IE 5.0 that was installed, because once I failed to install IE 6, I tried to install 5.5, and failed at that too. Really enjoying your series, by the way. So far I’ve known at least a little about all of them save GateKeeper (though I have come across it as a general concept), but I’m impressed with the depth you’re delving to each time. I hope you’re enjoying the process plenty too!
  - forgotmypw17 3y ago
    I develop a hyper-compatible Web framework, so I test regularly in 3.0, 4.0, 5, 5.5, and 6. The easiest way I have found to run them is to use VirtualBox with Win95 and WinME VMs. You can make a snapshot of each installed IE version to save space.

SoftTalker 3y ago

> You see, the PICS standard doesn't just define support for one particular ratings scheme (RSACi). Oh, no. Instead, the PICS standard defines an entire DSL for defining custom ratings schemes. Oh there has got to be an XKCD for that....

TeMPOraL 3y ago
There is one: https://xkcd.com/297/ https://xkcd.com/297/. More seriously though, I'd love to know how the whole thing came about, and what was the Lisp connection/lineage that made the DSL use S-expressions. Also, it seems Microsoft ecosystem has a bunch of such oddities pop up in unexpected places. IIRC, at some point Windows used (or is still using) some Prolog-derivative for declarative networking configuration and troubleshooting?
- blep_ 3y ago
  If you look at it with enough vagueness, I've seen some form of this at every job I've had: someone has a problem to solve, and has an idea that is fun to implement, unnecessarily flexible, and possibly Turing-complete. It's a way of getting the "I did a cool hack" dopamine hits that we nerds love so much, while still doing our jobs. Depending on how well they did at keeping their actual goal in mind, you might wind up with a very useful embedded scripting engine, or a very bad ad hoc build system for a project that did not need its own build system. (I've seen both.) I would expect there's a large overlap between people who think Lisp and/or Prolog are cool, and people who are prone to doing this sort of thing. Non-trivial knowledge of either of those correlates strongly with being more into programming than the average developer.
- justsomehnguy 3y ago
  > Windows NT networking installation and configuration is controlled by the file NCPA.CPL, which the user sees as the Networks icon within the Control Panel's main window. The bulk of this DLL is written in C++, but it also contains a simplified Prolog interpreter known as "Small Prolog," written by Henri de Feraudy during the late 1980s and put into the public domain. It is available through the C User's Group (Lawrence, KS). > August 01, 1994 https://www.drdobbs.com/cpp/extending-c-with-prolog/184409294 https://www.drdobbs.com/cpp/extending-c-with-prolog/18440929... http://web.archive.org/web/20040603192757/research.microsoft.com/research/dtg/davidhov/pap.htm http://web.archive.org/web/20040603192757/research.microsoft... http://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/html/faqs/lang/prolog/prg/part1/faq-doc-18.html http://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/html/faqs/lang/prolog/prg/pa... I don't think it survived past NT3.5 with NT4 having the most of the user-space hauled from Win95.

zaps 3y ago

Romance

stevejordan00 3y ago

[flagged]

temporallobe 3y ago

Great read, though even more interesting is this gem buried in the footer about the inappropriate use of XML: https://www.devever.net/~hl/xml https://www.devever.net/~hl/xml