Never had cable but I still figure MSNBC is part of this long-abandoned system and wonder why it's still on the air, some kind of zombie?
What the Hell Was the Microsoft Network? (2018)
51–60 of 128 posts
Re: What the Hell Was the Microsoft Network? (2018)
#52Definitely a forgotten program. Another one from that era (that actually survived until Win 10 I just learned) is the "Briefcase". It was basically a primitive file syncing tool for multiple devices.
Never had a clue what that thing did.
Re: What the Hell Was the Microsoft Network? (2018)
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Playing devil's advocate here: For all practical purposes you need an account for macOS, iOS, and Android. What is so different with Windows?
On macOS it asks you to set up once during the first startup, and then doesn’t nag you all the time if you don’t want to. I set up Macs for people without an iCloud and it was not an issue - they didn’t miss it, aside from notes not syncing between devices and other features that need iCloud. On Windows it will keep trying you to sign up all the time. I have just one machine with Windows, I don’t need an MS account,…
My Mac settings app has a permenent "1 notification" red dot, because I haven't logged my Apple ID in, and every so often (about once a month), a notification pops up to remind me to log my Apple ID in.
I'd love to learn how to get rid of those.
Re: What the Hell Was the Microsoft Network? (2018)
#54The article is unfair. "After all, these new directions brought the PC almost up to the same spec that other computers had been enjoying ten years ago." - this is simply not true. Apple, main competitor of PC's, still had years and years ahead to gain preemptive multitasking. Windows NT and even 95 were significantly ahead of competition.
The article refers to Amiga, which came out in 1985 with a multi tasking OS (Workbench). That was a popular computer, at least in Europe. It was not as popular as IBM PCs, but it did show that it was possible at a reasonable price.
Although the Amiga Workbench has pre-emptive multi-tasking it not only has but encourages use of a backdoor to switch off the pre-emption. As a result you don't gain as much as you might hope over systems with co-operative multi-tasking like Windows 3.x - Apps A, B and C may be getting along just fine, but if App D is selfish enough they're all screwed anyway. Together with lack of memory protection (for hardware cost reasons initially) this means Amigans don't end up making as much use of the multi tasking as you'd think - if I run A, B, C and D but then the system crashes, who do I blame?
That backdoor is still there and causing problems in 2022. You can buy a 64-bit multi-core "modern" Amiga but it is still running an OS with a stop-the-world backdoor to switch off pre-emption, and so it only ends up using a single core in 32-bit mode. Or you could put Linux on it.
Re: What the Hell Was the Microsoft Network? (2018)
#55MSN had an amazing Quake 2 and just general multiplayer games service for a while, I want to say it was called Games.com or something like that. The one day, poof it was gone.
zone.com? I would play Warcraft 2 multiplayer on there. Warcraft 2 had no natural Internet-based multiplayer, zone.com made it easy.
Wasn’t Zone also used for Xwing vs Tie Fighter?
Fun times
Re: What the Hell Was the Microsoft Network? (2018)
#56Knoware (pun intended, probably), my first Internet provider, back in 1993, had a 9600 baud connection to the Internet, shared by all his customers. When I phoned the guy (late, as he worked at night and slept during the day) to get a login, his first question was: do you have a Mac? There was no TCP/IP stack for Windows back then (Trumpet Winsock only came out in 1994, and was not a Microsoft product). He had heard…
While Microsoft may well not have understood it (as a corporate entity, or indeed key decision makers at the firm) it was a done deal long before 1995.
I date it to late 1991/ early 1992 when JIPS stops being a pilot service.
Background, by 1990 there are two popular global networking technologies, the Internet Protocol suite of Unix adjacent technologies born in the US, and the X.25 suite of technologies popular in Europe and standardised by the ITU (ie mostly the world's phone companies). In the UK, naturally influenced by both as an English-speaking country right on the coast of Europe, in 1990 they have JANET, the Joint Academic NETwork, providing X.25 service to various universities across the country, much as the early Internet joins US universities.
In 1991 JANET announces JIPS, the JANET IP Service, as an experimental "pilot" project. Universities can choose to have this American protocol to try out as well as their existing X.25 service. JANET tries very hard to sell TCP/IP as merely an interesting experiment that you could use where X.25 doesn't have a good way to achieve something. Campuses rapidly ignore that, installing a Unix with a TCP/IP stack is something the enthusiastic Unix nerds in your Computer Science or Electronics departments will seize on, and despite an insistence that they should not use the Internet's email, because X.25 has email, too bad they're going to start doing SMTP. By the end of the year this "pilot" project is driving JANET adoption, it's no longer experimental, new "customers" see X.25 as an afterthought, their Unix nerds want IP and they want it ASAP -- JANET begins transitioning to just an IP network, the X.25 services will eventually be terminated.
That's game over, on a level playing field, X.25 v TCP/IP is a win for TCP/IP and the third Network will be the Internet. X.25 goes in the scrap pile with mechanical television and Boustrophedon. Things that might have taken over the world, and if they had we might think them normal - but in the end they did not.
Re: What the Hell Was the Microsoft Network? (2018)
#57The article is unfair. "After all, these new directions brought the PC almost up to the same spec that other computers had been enjoying ten years ago." - this is simply not true. Apple, main competitor of PC's, still had years and years ahead to gain preemptive multitasking. Windows NT and even 95 were significantly ahead of competition.
The article refers to Amiga, which came out in 1985 with a multi tasking OS (Workbench). That was a popular computer, at least in Europe. It was not as popular as IBM PCs, but it did show that it was possible at a reasonable price.
I didn't realize it was preemptive from the early ages.
Re: What the Hell Was the Microsoft Network? (2018)
#58It was... proprietary. The common "walled garden".
Everybody thought they could make a walled garden people would like better than the open internet. IBM had SNA, DEC had DECnet, Compuserve, WELL, ... None lamented.
Re: What the Hell Was the Microsoft Network? (2018)
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's our Personal Computer, not Microsoft's. But since discovering the peaceful i3WM on Debian the need to boot into the telemetry riddled spyware called Windows has been minimized. Need TPM? Use ProxMox and run Win11 without the 'required' hardware in an isolated network.
I always roll my eyes when people sneer at the "forced" hardware upgrade Windows 11 requires. Even when I patiently explain to them what it's for The entire point of the mandated minimum requirements was hardware that had silicon level mitigation support for Meltdown and Spectre type attacks. Something that impacted both AMD and Intel CPU's and still has new variants popping up (we're on what, Spectre v4 by now?) The…
and I always roll my eyes when knowledgeable people pretend that Meltdown/Spectre/etc are a grave concern for consumer machines.
I roll my eyes even further back when knowledgeable people pretend to not understand that the endgame for TPM/Pluton/etc is DRM, censorship and privacy violations.
Re: What the Hell Was the Microsoft Network? (2018)
#60> And so The Microsoft Network wasn't a program you loaded like CompuServe. It was part of the OS, with folder icons that looked just like real folders. 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. Microsoft <3 Plan 9?
I believe it was "shell extensions". There's still a few of these lying around. You can even add your own ones: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/shell/nse-imp...
It's not so easy to add to the filesystem, but you can make things show up in Explorer that you can click on.