Okay, this is Thursday, December the 19th.
2024, this is the monthly
St. Louis LUG meeting, the Linux user group meeting. It's part of SLUG, St. Louis Linux Unix Users Group.
Once again, this is the monthly meeting for the lug.
There are three other meetings that are generally attended by people during the month. Check the calendar and find them.
Which ones interest you?
Our speaker tonight is going to be Scott Graneman.
Scott's a frequent speaker with our group. He's author of a number of books in O'Reilly books
And tonight he's going to be talking to us about the history of computing in the 1990s, basically 90 to 99.
And so that's the agenda for tonight.
But first, this is our short opportunity to have announcements.
and uh
also a brief question and answer for those who can't till
after the main speaker.
So by way of announcements, first off, I'm Gary Meyer. I'm our MC and also the president of SLUC.
You're in the Batcave tonight is Lee Lamert.
Omnichek Corporation. He's our treasurer.
He's been talking here before we started the recording.
And also Stan Reichert has been talking here beforehand. He's our executive vice president.
And those two guys are the guys who get all the work done.
That having been said by another announcement.
I apologize. We kind of got out the abstract and the title rather late here.
Scott's actually been putting this talk together for some time.
But it wasn't until we had until we had
previous speaker who was originally scheduled for tonight who canceled out that I had to call him and say, Scott.
now would be a good time. But he was already uh
in preparation.
We're very grateful that he could come tonight.
But that doesn't excuse the fact that we didn't get out a whole lot of early warning about tonight, or not warning
early information about tonight.
I apologize to our speaker and I apologize to all the people who didn't know about tonight.
But this gives me a chance to give an announcement. Yes, anybody who'd like to help out doing publicity for these meetings.
putting it out on the webpage, putting it out discuss, putting it out social
Anytime you want to step up
I mean, you don't have to come to other meetings
uh you know just uh
Every once or twice a month kind of tune in and find out what needs to be publicized.
So anyway, that having been said.
Any other announcements for tonight?
Wait.
I'm going to try to we're going to try to
run take two on the bach upgrade
And think about maybe doing it over the holidays since we're not doing it tonight.
If anybody would like to
participate. We haven't figured out the format yet or exact timing but
We may do it on zoom
Or maybe do it hybrid if we've got people who want to come over here
So jump on the system in list.
and put in your two cents.
keep abreast of the situation.
You know.
put in the additional plug with what's going on with that. For those of you who may not have
caught any wind of it recently.
Or…
Our primary server for SLU is running Debian 10.
And Debbie and 12 is already out and it's high time that we caught up and upgraded.
However, there's the mailing list software.
which is not compatible about upgrading and changing availability software.
There may be a few other odds and ends here, but this is one of those things that hey
It's not your machine. So yeah, you don't have to feel bad about breaking it or whatever, but it's one of those great opportunities
of learning how to do an upgrade, which may be useful at work because there's stuff on this machine that
you personally don't use personally
may not be familiar with. So it's just like a work thing where, yeah, you got to
find out how it all strings together and why it's important and what needs to be checked out.
And also, it may be
For those of you who sometime had to upgrade your Debian machine at home or some other version of Linux
this is a good chance to kind of see how other people do it. So it makes it kind of nice because there's more than one person doing it.
kind of learn something from the other people.
uh yeah if you get a chance, you might want to volunteer and help out with this group.
I think that's sad.
or just be in the audience we don't mind. Or just be in the audience. You can learn that way too.
Well, Stan, uh.
Anything that you have to announce?
There's no more meetings this year.
Contrary to what was posted erroneously a couple of times, the new Linux
meeting with last week.
Gary.
I think I'm probably the one who screwed that up. This is why we need somebody to do a better job on
Yeah, honestly, we just need more Indians to kind of help with anything
you know and uh
Fortunately, Phil's here, so he can correct me when I say the wrong thing.
And when he's not available, Ed Holland usually shows up and corrects me.
Which I greatly appreciate because we all make human errors.
And…
Gosh, I've made a lot of them lately.
And Scott's just showed up. Thank you, Scott. Glad you're here.
Any announcements from anybody else?
Oh, at the end of the year?
It's on our calendar. There's a public uh
Something public radio
Session.
People are invited to…
to participate in and the details are on our calendar. And the calendar, by the way, is available at slug.org slash calendar.
No.
And Sean, do you want to mention your work on the
replacement calendar or website when we get that going.
Let's see.
No, there's no progress. And I actually didn't even get it updated
Yeah.
before this meeting, so we got the information so late that I didn't get a chance to so
Yeah.
Nothing new on that front this time.
Yeah, we did discover that Google
did a couple of other weird and wonderful things. It's kind of messed up their calendar.
So that's something we're going to have to work out, that there's nothing
I guess we can…
I guess we'll be able to live with it eventually or work it out.
But that's the only reason we haven't switched over, I think, is because Google messed with us.
They really did.
They're almost as bad sometimes as meetup.com.
Which I detest.
And I ain't work.
Let's see. That reminds me of a couple of announcements. I think I
copied them in to discuss.
Google has announced that inactive
Gmail accounts and active Google accounts will be
solemnly put to death
sometime in early 2025. So they didn't specify, at least as far as I know, I haven't heard they've specified a particular date
or if we just need to watch out if it's going to happen in January, maybe as late as February, but
The word is we've been warned
uh and there are
ways of checking your old accounts.
and uh so actually it's pretty simple.
you know you've
Assuming you've got a Gmail window open
Just log into all of them.
Right here.
you know log into all your Gmail on one window and that way you can keep them all alive
One of the things I posted to discuss about this mentions that
People sometimes have very old accounts that they just figure, oh yeah, someday I'm going to go back and
I've saved stuff by putting it in this old account that I never go into.
So people have forgotten. That's not a good idea. Not a good idea. People have forgotten.
account names and passwords. And I think one of the things I put in email gave some clues as to how you might be able to check into that.
Oh.
Let's see. Seemed like there was something else.
of a warning nature that somebody was
telling us maybe dying at the end of the year, early of the year.
Anyway, I can't remember it.
Anybody else have anything by way of
either announcements or as i said uh before we get into the main talk if somebody has to leave early and just wants to get in a quick q a
type situation, ask now.
I have a four-letter word if anybody
messes with it. I'd like to chat later.
IPv6.
Okay, that'll be interesting.
Okay. After our main speaker.
maybe have a little chatting about IPv6 then.
We could use some more volunteers for presentations in the future
I mean, it's kind of rough on
Scott, it's a…
hear from Gary, you know, the day right before the meeting you know
It's not because Gary hadn't tried to find six other people.
And sometimes it's successful two or three times in a row until they have some kind of a business emergency show up.
on their schedule.
No.
Lee's been, shall we say, politely reminding me about a couple of things I've
mentioned doing, but life has gotten busy.
Yeah. And I've kind of been working on one I want to do jointly with you, Grant.
If I get a spare minute, I'll
be putting my notes together and send them to you.
Or…
And it's one that you mentioned.
with um
not that you were volunteering, but it seemed like a good idea.
Since I know very little about it, I'm going to be tapping you for more information.
But that could be months down the road.
Really? Yeah.
Fair enough.
Oh my.
I have a memory of a gnat. I had a thought that
five minutes ago, I'm trying to recover it and I'm not having any luck on it. It was another thing to talk about.
Anyway.
I do have a question for Scott about the presentation.
Is the data he's going to be talking about Y2K compliant?
Now, I remember a history lesson.
Oh.
Good point. Gee, you just stole like 99% of Scott's presentation today.
I'm sorry, Scott. I didn't mean to.
Jeez.
Scott, your mic's off. We can't hear you.
They look like, I know.
You didn't want to hear me cursing at you, so you know.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay.
That's my job.
I will. I will.
ask, I don't know if he's here or not. I don't see jeff
Yeah, I don't shoot a jeff. Is that Jeff Jacks?
There's Jackson.
Jeff Jackson, was that you who posted about
The question about the brave
the brave update put it in.
Yes, that was Jeff. Yes, it was Jeff.
Yeah.
What was the question?
Don't discussed about…
He was wondering about the version numbers.
snaps was showing something
I don't…
I just briefly read it. I didn't memorize the numbers.
there was a question about uh was this question was
why didn't this update or something like that
See you.
Oh, yeah. Yeah. He had a different version and it didn't did not update i think like expected
I don't use Snap.
It's computers.
I don't either.
I don't know.
I'll tell you what, I'll look it up.
during the main talk and maybe Jeff will be able to
turn on his mic or whatever
ask it after the May talk.
Or give us the details.
Okay, with that.
I think I'll turn it over to our main speaker this evening.
Scott Graneman, as I say, is a former officer, the vice president of this organization
And a long time member.
We always enjoy his talks. He always comes with a lot of good information.
And Scott.
is also an adjunct professor
at Webster University, Washington University.
and uh
obviously has a
been busy with a lot of students this semester from what I can gather.
By person.
Okay, okay. Scott's also a principal at…
Web Sanity, thank you.
Bye.
So he's been working with that company for years now and
So for all of your web creation and maintenance needs, talk to Scott.
Well, there you go.
So with that, I'm going to turn it over. We're going to go back to the 90s. Yeah. All right.
bring back to the 90s.
And by the way, I teach at St. Charles Community College.
I haven't taught at Welshu for a couple of years. Part of that's because I haven't
They've changed our focus on how they want to do stuff.
They decided they don't want to do straight discussion courses anymore. It has to be totally practical
And so, which is fine. I think that's cool.
a lot of the classes I was teaching were discussion classes about technology and media and that didn't fit in with their direction so
Okay. The way it goes.
So, um.
Gary actually gave me
Oh.
Less than 24 hours on this one. So fortunately, I already had
the start of the 90s presentation, but it's not done.
It's not complete. There are things I'm going to be leaving out.
So feel free to bring them up.
I'm going to look at you when you do and go, yup, I forgot I didn't have time to put that in. I have an older version of this.
that um
just it's much older and I don't like the way it's formatted or some of the content.
I've been copying over stuff.
and fixing it as I could, as well as adding new cool stuff.
But if you, again, if you're like, hey, you forgot such and such.
I'm either going to say, yeah, it's in the old presentation or I know I just didn't get a chance to add it. But do feel free to add stuff if you could wait.
Maybe till the end of a year to do it. So don't interrupt me constantly throughout the year.
And if you have questions, if you could just hold them till the end, that'd be great because
There are people in here that have a lot of background and a lot of history with this stuff in the 90s.
Well, it's over 30 years ago and it's not that far back.
Hmm.
And so it's easy for us to go, I remember when. And if we all do that, we're going to be here till midnight.
So, um.
make a note to bring it up. And if you have something you want to bring up.
that is a good memory, maybe only do one or two, not eight or nine because
I could sit here with 20 or 30 myself
And again, we'll never get out of here.
If we do that.
You've got to be doing year by year.
I'm going to go year by year just like the other two.
Great.
Yep. So the first one was 1968.
to 79. And then we did 80 to 89.
And today we're doing 90 to 99.
So this is going to definitely be some good highlights for everybody.
Some highlights and some lowlights, of course. We have a few lowlights.
We're going to be talking a bit more about Microsoft, unfortunately, because they do a couple of important things in the 90s.
a few. Apple does a few, of course.
Linux.
starts out in the early 90s. So that's going to get mentioned all throughout too, because it's kind of important
We wouldn't be here otherwise, obviously.
So let's go ahead and get started and jump in.
with the history of computing. We're going to start in 1990. That February, Photoshop 1.0 comes out only for the Macintosh.
At the time, it was very quickly seen as an important program, as an unbelievably useful program.
However, what I've been telling my students
We've been talking about AI a lot the last couple of years, and you guys have heard me talk about AI several times too.
And especially at Webster, less so at St. Charles, but lots more at Webster because of the kinds of students I'm dealing with.
They're really concerned about generative AI
Because so many of them want to go into creative professions. They want to be illustrators. They want to be animators. They want to be filmmakers. They want to do audio production.
I don't know if I mentioned illustration and graphic design. And they're really worried about generative AI. And we've had a lot of really good discussions about that.
And one of the things I always point out to them is
that AI is a tool.
It's a tool that can be used for good or bad.
Just like any tool.
And I always point them out to point out to them, they're way, way too young. They're all in their 20s, most of them, or late teens.
they're way too young to remember Photoshop. But when Photoshop came out, people freaked out.
Because number one, this isn't what real photographers do. Real photographers develop in the dark room and
and do whatever they want to do.
And or this is going to cause massive amounts of misinformation because now people can manipulate photographs
And lies are going to get promulgated. And, you know, who knows what's going to happen. This is going to lead to the collapse of society.
And so I point out to them
that people freaked out
then people began to realize, oh, this is a tool
Now, as I point out to all of them.
Almost every student I have at St. Charles and Webster has taken a class
all on some sort of Adobe
used for creativity, especially Photoshop. Now, by the way, I speak as a person that does, I do not like Adobe, the company. I think they're greedy.
I think they nickel and dime people. I think they're a great combination of really interesting technical advances and really awful UI and UX.
So I'm not a fan of Adobe.
That said, many of my students are taught to use Photoshop.
And even if you're not using Photoshop, you're using a different program for image manipulation.
And the fact is society seems to be doing okay with that.
So the same thing I've told them I believe is going to happen with AI in the same way now if you are
in any sort of in any sort of
image-based or image touching
creative field, you're going to need to learn some sort of image manipulation program like Photoshop
the same thing is going to be true for AI.
So if you're going to be a filmmaker or an audio or graphic design or whatever.
you are going to have to learn to use the tool of
generative AI and large language models, just as people you learn to use
Photoshop and Relative tools. Now, out of the box, Photoshop One supported plugins
filters, color separation, and virtual memory. So, you know, you could put that, that was a big advance. But the thing I want you to notice is
Right under the name Adobe Photoshop version 1.0.7, you see four names.
That's how many developers created this program for developers
created this and actually Adobe bought it
The first versions were purchased by Adobe, but for developers, that's it.
That may, Windows 3.0 was released for $150. Thankfully, I never had to use this thing.
The big innovation here was that it now supported more than 640 kilobytes of RAM.
Yay. But it also finally included the famous program manager, file manager, and
print manager. So if any of you had to use Windows 3 back in the day, here in 1990, we saw the program file and print managers, vestiges of which we still have today.
in Windows. The other thing that it included was a better graphical user interface.
In fact, here you can see it supported 16 color graphics. Oh, my God.
Now, the thing I always pointed out to my students is if you look at what the Mac had at this point versus this.
It's pathetic. The Macintosh UI was so far ahead of the Windows UI at this point
that this is better, but I still would argue it wasn't good.
But it was better.
That May, Tim Berners-Lee, who is working at CERN, which is the largest particle physics laboratory in Europe.
had this idea in 1989 we talked about for this thing he wanted to call the World Wide Web.
with no spaces. And you'll remember that he submitted the proposal in 89 to his boss
Because he had this idea that he had this idea
If we created this World Wide Web.
It would make it easy for scientists to exchange documents because, and I know many of you remember this.
Back in the 80s and then even into the 90s
you didn't know what operating system somebody was going to have. It wasn't like now where it's, you know, for desktops, Windows and Mac.
Back then, there was a large variety of operating systems for computers.
There was also a large variety of software for word processing and other basic tasks.
And the problem was that as a scientist, I might see you at a conference and you request a copy of my paper. They had email.
They were connected to the nascent internet. But the problem was I might send you the paper and you literally could not open it or read it.
Because you didn't have the software or the operating system that I had used.
And Berners-Lee's idea was to create a platform and software that would remove that problem.
So that anybody could post their document
on the web and then anybody with a web browser could view it.
That was his idea.
You'll remember that in 1989, he submitted the proposal to his boss
And the boss, and I showed you the screenshot of this, the boss wrote at the top, vague but exciting.
And told him to wait.
And so in may
He resubmits the proposal. He's tweaked it and worked on it.
And that September, because things move slowly, that September, Mike Sindhal, his boss.
authorize the purchase of a next cube, which you'll remember was the company started by Steve Jobs when he got booted out of Apple.
Authorize the purchase of a next cube for him to use in developing his, quote.
hypertext Project.
The name was still up in the air. So there is the next cube that um
To give you an idea. And in fact, that is
Oh, you want to run the mic?
That is the original next cube used to develop the web.
That is the actual device that the web was developed on. And what's awesome is
Oh, that's okay. I was supposed to zoom in on that. If you zoom in on that label, it says.
Do not unplug.
server or do not power down. That's what it says. This is a server. Do not power down
Because if he had, you know, if the janitor or somebody turned it off, the whole web disappeared.
So there you go.
That July, Microsoft becomes the first software company to reach $1 billion in sales. Now, of course.
hardware companies had, but this was the first software company. And again, that was the vision of Bill Gates and Steve Allen from the beginning.
They wanted, they realized that you could make money off of the software.
not necessarily the hardware and that was the
genius, perhaps, of Gates and Allen to realize that. And it paid out for them.
Because you'll remember they started in the mid-70s with the MITS Altair providing BASIC.
And then in the 80s, they lied and said they had an operating system when they didn't and bought it. And that became DOS.
And then there's the windows.
So they're pure software at this point.
And here we go, $1 billion in sales.
That July, they had decided to partner up
with ibm.
to create a new version
new operating system that was going to be the successor to DOS
and the successor to Windows.
And, you know.
I unfortunately left this slide out of this later where
partnership dissolves because Microsoft's like, bye, see ya. But at this point in time, Microsoft is definitely like, oh yeah, IBM, we are totally behind OS2, this joint partnership.
And yeah, we're behind it. Windows.
we're going to drop windows and go with OS2. Trust us.
And in fact, Steve Ballmer at a conference said, OS2 is, I want everybody here in this audience to think of OS2 as Windows Plus.
Sure, we're releasing Windows now, but once OS 2 comes out, we're going to be behind that 100% and we're going to allow people to transition from Windows
to Windows plus
OS2. And again, this fiction went on for years and Microsoft strung IBM along
for years before finally later on in the 90s going, nah, we're kidding. We're done. You can have it. Because of course, by that point, Windows had won.
So it didn't matter.
And in fact, that September, oh my god i was i'm sorry, I was behind a little bit. I did have the slide in here. My apologies.
So in July, Balmer says it's Windows Plus, we're behind it. But by September, they're like, yeah, we're done.
Bye. You have it. We're going.
Then October, IMDB, the Internet Movie Database, which to this day is one of the most widely
used websites owned by Amazon, by the way, was first posted not on the web because the web didn't exist yet, but on Usenet.
And so the very early beginnings of IMDB appear now in 1990.
Well, that November, you can see the date right here, November 12th, 1990.
Berners-Lee has a new approved proposal for now called World Wide Web.
no spaces proposal for a hypertext
project and he submits this to his boss and it gets approved.
Now, the thing I want you to notice is how he's describing it.
Hypertext is a way to link and access information of various kinds
as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will.
Potentially, Hypertext provides a single user interface to many large classes of stored information
such as reports, notes, databases, computer documentation, and online systems help. That was his vision. Well, I want you to notice very document centric.
This was years and years before people even had the remote idea of putting
an application, a program online. This was purely going to be focused
on documentation, documents, maybe talking to a database a little
But in a very, very crude, simplistic way.
Then December, he works on it and codes it.
and uh
spends a bunch of time working on not just the browser, but the server as well.
And he invents HTML during this time.
as well. And as a result of his work 34 years ago.
The web has been described as the largest repository of information and knowledge that's ever existed, which it is.
And thanks to this one guy, and well, he had some help from a few others, but he spearheaded the whole thing.
But thanks to his vision and his work and his stubbornness, we now have the World Wide Web.
that we all use every day
for vast amounts of information and work.
And they also, as I mentioned, that's the first web browser, also called World Wide Web, although at that time it was also an editor.
And so you were able not just to browse, but to edit
web pages as well. That was part of his vision that kind of got dropped off.
And didn't really get followed through. Now you'll notice an image in the background. At that time, you could only look at images
Separately.
not as part of the page.
This is a little later screenshot, which is why you see that. And by the way, those of you who know the next interface, you'll see the doc
On the top right there on the right side of the screen and the menus up in the top left.
That same time that Berners
is working on World Wide Web, the graphical web browser. He also writes what he called the CERN line mode browser
for the command line. And this was the world's first text-only web browser. Now.
I know on every at least every Linux box I've ever dealt with, on every Unix box I've ever dealt with.
You can still have links, L-Y-N-X or L-I-N-K-S, and there's others.
W3M is another one, I believe.
But there are still command line interface based web browsers out today that can be very useful.
If you need speed and don't need all the extras of the GUI,
That's a huge advantage. It can also be very useful for downloading stuff, I've found.
So they're still out there, but here was the first one made by Tim Berners-Lee.
And that December 20th
of 1990, he publishes the very first website. Now, it's available at CERN only.
But this is it. This is the world's first website.
you'll notice it's about
the World Wide Web. So the first web page is about the web
And how it works, where you can get software, who's doing it, what's going on.
And there are still replicas of this on the internet that you can find if you want to check it out. It's kind of interesting.
Also in 1990,
Mike Goblin comes up with Godwin's law, which is still in effect today.
As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
And yeah, still happens today. Now, of course, this was originally
He came up with this for us net
But it's still true today for almost any discussion. Eventually, the longer things go on, somebody's going to get compared to a Nazi or Hitler.
Although I read an interview with Goblin a few years ago where he's like, I won't mention who he was talking about, missed if you can figure it out. But he said, you know, when it comes to some people
Talking of comparing them to Nazis or Hitler actually is completely valid.
So it's not always invalid. Sometimes, unfortunately, it's very much valid.
1991, that June?
Richard Stallman.
And others come up with the general, the GNU General Public License 2.0
which is released. Now, this is still used today by the Linux kernel
And by rsync.
and by many other major software packages right now.
So this, you know, it came out in 91, but it's still a big deal. And of course.
Most of you know that the key things about the GPL2 are you have the right
to study the software, to get a copy of the software, to modify the software. And in fact, if you look at the second paragraph of the preamble.
That's the key paragraph.
When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price.
Although you can charge. Our GPLs are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software
and charge for it if you wish.
that you can receive source code or get it if you want it.
that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs.
And that you know you can do these things.
This has been tremendously useful. It's a great license in many, many ways. We've had debates.
I know Craig Buchek.
has come to some of my classes in the past and talked about the fact that if you use GPL software and you make it public, you must release it under the same license.
And so Craig has brought up the point
is that freedom is that freedom
If you must use this license if you use software under this license.
I still think, yes, it does, but it is an interesting philosophical question.
Interestingly.
Blotted companies are scared to death of the GPL.
In particular, the GPL3.
Because the GPL3, which we'll talk about much further down the road, not in the 90s.
The GPL3.
Companies were getting away with some shady stuff with the GPL too.
TiVo famously said, oh yeah, we use open source code.
And we're happy to make the code available. The only thing is it only works on TiVo.
It only works with our specific hardware, but sure, we'll make the software available.
And as a result of TiVoization.
Stallman, and I can't remember the lawyer that helped write it. I actually saw him speak at a conference once.
um they
change GPL3 to make that much more difficult so companies couldn't do that.
Well, as a result of GPL3, there are companies today that don't touch
software under that license and only use GPL2. And I'll give you a great example.
that's going to maybe shock some of you, maybe not.
on uh on max on max
The default shell for the last several years has been Z shell, but bash is still included.
Well, why did they do that? Well, one of the reasons is the license.
Because, excuse me.
If you look at the bash version.
that comes on a Mac today.
Today, it's version three.
The current version is version 5.omething.
Apple refused to update the version of bash
on the Mac because it switched over to gpl3 so they've kept
the GPL2 version on the Mac, but moved to Zhell because it doesn't use gpl3 and the lawyers don't freak out about that. Now, of course, it's still possible.
to install bash 5, that's what I do. But the point is that GPL has had a long history
a freaking out companies.
We'll talk more about that later.
That June Photoshop 2 was released now requiring a whopping four megabytes of RAM.
Scott?
Yes.
I'm sorry. So I didn't understand the gpl3
Why did Apple want to avoid it?
Because they think, as do many other companies.
that it forces them to release stuff
where they don't want to do it and they can get away with
not having to do that with GPL2.
Oh, so…
Because GPL3 tightened a bunch of exceptions and things like that.
Because Eben Moglin, that's the attorney, and Stallman and many others
were upset because companies were getting around the spirit. They were following the law of the DPL2.
But they were violating the spirit
And so GPL3 really tightened things down to make that much more difficult. So for instance, you can't
tie your GPL software to specific hardware anymore.
that's not allowed. And so there were other things. And so Apple's like, well, the lawyers were like, well, we can't touch that
And so that's why a lot of the
open source command line packages on a Mac are stuck
at version two, I'm sorry, using stuck using GPL2.
Now, again, there are ways to upgrade your command line software on a Mac using Homebrew or Mac ports or other tools.
that do install the GNU versions of these. So on my Mac, I use version 5 and I use the latest versions.
of rsync and other tools that you would run on Linux
today. But if I didn't go and install them, I would be stuck using older versions
frozen in time because that's when they
stopped using GPL2 and moved to GPL3.
Got you. Okay.
Yep. It's something, you know.
One of the reasons I love Max.
is the software, but I love the fact it's Unix underneath.
But if you didn't know that, you'd be like, God, why doesn't my bash do…
Stuff I'm expecting to be able to do.
Well, it's because the version of bash you have is antiquated.
So Photoshop 2 supported paths, CMYK. Well, once that happened, the printing industry now
adopted it because the printing industry has always been always used the color
color profiles of CMYK.
and rasterization with EPS. So this was kind of a big release. Okay.
This is not
The government suit against Microsoft that occurred later in the 90s. We're going to definitely cover that.
This is much, much, much earlier at the beginning of the decade
That July, the FTC filed a complaint against Microsoft for monopolistic practices this early.
Why? This is one of the sleaziest things Microsoft ever did.
Microsoft was forcing all PC manufacturers
to pay a license.
For Dawson Windows, for every computer those manufacturers sold
Regardless if the computer actually had DOS or Windows on it.
Because remember, at this time, there were still competitors to DOS.
There were still competitors to Windows. Well, Microsoft knew, though, that DOS was dominant, Windows was
coming along, 3.0 definitely helped.
make it more popular. But they knew that other that manufacturers were selling pcs
with other versions of DOS and other operating systems. Well, they went to them and said, oh, listen.
You have to pay us a license for DOS and Windows for every computer you sell.
And they said, well, I'm not putting DOS or Windows on these computers. And Microsoft said.
That's too bad. You still have to pay us a license fee for those computers.
That is so blatantly illegal to me.
Right then and there, that company should have been sued
out of existence. That is so
unbelievably unbelievably
just awful
crappy, greedy
behavior by Microsoft that nobody should forget that they did this garbage.
This is absolutely beyond the pale because, of course, they knew
that the manufacturer said, well, I'm paying for Dawson windows anyway. I might as well just load them on there.
And they did this to help destroy their competition. Again, a blatantly
monopolistic practice. And of course, what happened was they got a slap on the wrist and were like, don't do that. Okay, we won't do that.
And of course, by that point, again, it was too late.
So, you know, it didn't really ultimately do much.
Because by the time they got to it, the damage had already been done.
Well, that August, a college student
named Linus Torvalds.
Goes on Usenet.
and invites anybody who wants to to help him develop his new operating system, Linux.
Now, of course, those of you that know your Linux history know that he did not want to call it Linux.
In fact, Linus, this is so bad.
Thank God he didn't do this.
Linus wanted to call his operating system Freaks. Freaks.
F-R-E-E-A-X. Freaks.
Because it was a free Unix.
And my God, that's a horrible name.
And he actually had a friend of his upload it
And that friend was like, that's a stupid name. And he decided to use linux
Because of Linus, Linus, Unix, Linux. Thank God he did because
Freaks is horrifically bad. But this is the birth of Linux
That August 9th.
Tim Berners-Lee.
makes the web.
the web server and the next step graphical browser and the line mode browser
Available to download on the Unix group Alt Hypertext.
And there is the original posting right there.
Where he describes what the idea is, explains it, and then offers
a link links to people so they can download the software and try it out themselves.
Which was very, very cool.
And people immediately compared it to HyperCard. Now, I don't have any slides in here. Again, I ran out of time because I didn't realize I was going to be doing this.
HyperCard was an invention at Apple.
In the 80s.
that enabled people, basically it was a stack of cards. It was software that you could create cards and those cards could contain any sort of information.
And you could create links on those cards to jump to other cards. And these actually became very, very popular. It was extremely innovative.
You could include videos, sounds.
images text
on these cards in a hypercard stack
And so you had the multimedia, you had the linking. It was extremely innovative.
At the time, unfortunately.
Steve Gobs decided to kill it when he got back to Apple, which we'll talk about.
a little bit later. I'm actually going to show you what it looked like i
I have some…
interesting screenshots of it to give you guys an idea.
And so I'm going to try to make this a little bigger so you can see it. I apologize if it's a little distorted.
So that's the welcome screen.
for hypercard. And again, it says you use documents called stacks
You can use a stack to keep track of appointments, one to manage expenses, one to learn a new language, one to record and play sounds.
And there is another example of what it would look like.
Let me see if I can…
make that a little bigger for you guys. There we go.
Let me zoom in on that.
There you go.
So there's one where you could dial phone numbers
Using a modem, QuickTime, mail merge.
make a graph.
and so on. And so there you see 1987
is when it started. Here's another example.
I've got PDFs that are user's guides.
And so you can see you
what they look like. And I remember playing with these. They were extremely cool and they were very, very popular. Well, again.
When the web came out, it was very similar to HyperCard in many ways.
Berners-Lee knew about HyperCard.
And people compared it to it.
That September, the first version of the Linux kernel is released, 0.01.
And, you know, if you know how big operating systems are today, it was shockingly only 64 kilobytes
of code. That was it.
That December 12th.
The very first web server in North America
is set up. And basically, a gentleman from the Stanford University Linear Accelerator Center, in other words
physics had gone to Switzerland to visit CERN and Tim Berners-Lee gave him a demo of this new web thing
And he immediately thought it was so cool and got copies of the software.
brought it back and set up a web server at Stanford at the physics Linear Accelerator Center. And this was the first web server out in North America. And in fact, it became very famous
Because one of the early things they did was they linked it up to a database where they had all these papers
And reports and things like that that people could search for and then load and view.
1992.
The web is starting to slowly, slowly, slowly
get out of the physics world
And that March, a man named Lei Yuan Wei released viola
The first popular web browser. Now, by popular i mean
Of the few hundreds or maybe thousand people that are using the web at this point.
Biola is the most popular.
So that doesn't mean it's now everybody in the world's using it because most people still hadn't heard of this.
They weren't aware about it. They weren't able to look at it or the stuff on there probably wouldn't have been interesting to them.
But this was the first popular quote unquote web browser. And that's what it looked like.
Now, Pei Yuan Wei pay said
HyperCard was very compelling back then, you know, graphically, this hyperlink thing.
I got a hypercard manual and looked at it and just basically took the concepts and implemented them.
So again, here's another example where a hypercard from Apple is influencing the development of the early web.
You know, and it's just kind of, well, it's kind of good and kind of bad that Apple wasn't really aware of this at the time.
Apple could have, you know, if they'd had a little more vision
And a little more broader ideas could have basically maybe invented something like the web.
By taking HyperCard and making it networkable over the internet, but it didn't happen.
That April, the first quote unquote good version of Windows was released, Windows 3.1.
This was the one that made Windows really, really popular.
This supported TrueType fonts, so we finally had somewhat decent fonts. WYSIWYG, what you see is what you get printing.
So what you saw on the screen was what you were going to get when you printed it onto paper.
object linking and embedding for developers. And if you look at this, yes, it does look
better than what we've seen before in terms of windows.
It was very popular, as I said, and it sold 3 million copies in two months. And this began
the idea that it always takes Microsoft three versions to make something good.
The first version is not going to be great. The second version is a little better, but still not good. The third version is where it finally gets decent.
Then July.
A team of students and staff at the University of Kansas
announced links
The oldest browser still in use and developed. I have used that actually within the last year.
Again, it should be on almost every Unix box. If it's not.
It's easy to install.
There are other more newer versions of links
The one, again, that's kind of the more modern-ish version is Lynx, L-I-N-K-S.
But Lynx is still out there, still developed, still used.
does the job.
Then November, Photoshop 2.5 is released now for Mac.
DOS and Windows. And for those of you alive in 92, can you imagine it required 10 megabytes?
of storage space.
I remember in 1990, late 89 rather, when I started graduate school, I bought a Mac plus
And the woman at the store at Wash U was like, you know.
you're probably going to need some external storage to store additional stuff.
And I'm like, oh boy, okay, what are you thinking? Like, what do I need? And she goes, well, we have
External hard drives
And the one I would recommend for you is 20 megabytes.
And that'll probably be all you need for
like a long, long, long time. And so for years
I had a 20 megabyte external drive that was a ridiculous amount of money, hundreds and hundreds of dollars.
plugged into my mac plus
And so the idea that software you were using would require 10 megabytes, that'd be half of my external drive.
And $500 was just, you know, would be mind-blowing to me.
New features included 16-bit channel support and palettes.
And we still have palace today all over the place and software. And Photoshop was one of those that really pushed it.
That December of 1992,
Mark Andreessen.
was back then, before he became a bald, egg-headed edgelord
Not a fan of his.
was back then a computer science undergrad in Urbana-Champaign at the University of Illinois.
And he was working at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.
He was a computer science
major.
And he saw Viola and thought, you know what?
I think I can make a better one.
So he and his buddy, Eric Bina.
decided to make their own web browser
For Unix.
called Mosaic.
And so they begin working on Mosaic, this web browser that's going to be better
than viola. One of the things it's going to do is it's going to support more operating systems.
Well, that December, the very first Linux distributions released for 50 bucks, it draws them.
Named for the Norse serpent that circles the earth that Thor will kill at the end of
time at Ragnarok, the Norse end of the world.
And so there you go. That's the cover of notice on cd
$50, pretty large amount of money for 1992. But that's the very first distribution of Linux out there.
Now, at that same time.
Bell Labs was trying to develop a successor to Unix.
And they developed Plan 9.
Plan 9 was supposed to be the successor to Unix and they released Plan 9 in 1992.
And the idea was this is a better Unix. We've taken the last, you know, Unix came out in 69. So we've taken the last 20 years of everything we've learned
Now, of course, Richie and Thompson weren't involved in this at all, to my knowledge. I don't think they were.
I could be wrong. But they said, we're going to make the right eunuchs, the right operating system.
And the problem was it never took off because Unix was good enough.
And in fact, they finally said, okay, 2015, here's the final release. We're done.
And so I think there are still people out there that work on it.
But it's not a going really concern at all.
Unix, as I said, I always like to tell my students, Unix is one of the few times in history where it was done right the first time.
And, you know, it did everything good enough.
And so Plan 9 was a solution in search of a problem.
Does anybody know anybody?
why it was called Plan 9.
Anybody?
Because there is a reason it was called that. It's kind of cool.
Anybody? Okay.
The reason they called it plan nine
Because it was named for the best, worst movie ever made, Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space.
It is widely regarded as, if not the worst, among the worst movies ever made.
If you ever saw the movie Ed Wood by Ed by…
by Tim Burton. It's about him.
The movie Ed Wood's great.
But you really should see plan nine from outer space.
It's so bad, it's great.
It's just hilariously bad.
Bela Lugosi was in it because Ed Wood was best friends with Bela Lugosi, who was at the end of his life.
Bela Lugosi only appears in the movie for a few minutes, and the problem was then he died.
But they didn't want to get rid of his character. So Ed Wood asked his
I think…
his…
The people that fix your back
the uh
Chiropractor.
chiropractor he is either his dentist or his chiropractor to fill in for Bela Lugosi. But that's why for the entire rest of the movie.
Whenever Bela Lugosi's character appears, he has a cape
over his face because it's a completely different guy.
So it's stuff like that. Or they're in a cemetery and there are a cardboard tombstones that people are accidentally kicking over, but they kept filming it.
It's things like that.
I highly recommend it. It's great. Watch it with friends.
1993.
Andreessen's and Bina's software is released.
NCSA Mosaic
This, again, for 93, is what started to make the web popular.
And it introduced lots and lots and lots of still common features that we still see in browsers.
So for instance, you can see the back and forward buttons. You can see the reload button. You can see the home button.
Notice there's an address bar going across there. Now, interestingly, you could not type in there.
That was merely displaying the URL. You could not yet
type in there. That was until years later
If you wanted to go somewhere, you would click on the open button and another window would appear where you could type the URL in and hit enter.
So that URL bar is not editable. It just displays.
One of the other things that it added was
images. It's one of the first browsers. It's the first browser to include the image tag.
So that was invented by them as well.
And in fact, if you go to Champaign-Urbana, there's a nice plaque
to commemorate Mosaic the first
web browser and it's release.
Kind of cool. That march
Red Hat was incorporated.
the first company that's really going to make a lot of money from
Linux and open source. Now, back then they were still called ACC Corporation.
They changed their name later to Red Hat. I thought you guys would be entertained. That is the original Red Hat logo.
That was the red hat.
By the way.
That April.
Probably the most important
One of the most important things we're going to talk about tonight occurred.
And that was the Tim Berners-Lee convinced CERN
to release the web, both the idea and the code.
into the public domain.
Berners-Lee said, if we want this to take off.
We can't try to keep it proprietary and we can't try to charge for it. Now, some of you are old enough to remember Gopher.
Gopher was a very… Thank you.
I can't, okay.
Thanks. Gopher was a very widely used
protocol software prior to the web.
And the idea was that you would see folders. It would look like kind of like um
a list view on a computer and you would see folders and you could go into those folders and there might be more folders and more documents.
And eventually you could get to the resource you were looking for.
This was created, and I mentioned this, I believe, last time
At the University of Minnesota, where they're the Gophers.
And the problem was it got very popular and then the University of Minnesota said, well, we're going to start charging for this.
And they started trying to charge people
to create and use Gopher servers and Gopher repositories and go for software.
And it died almost immediately. People dropped it.
Because the web
was there that was not going to charge you. In fact, it was released into the public domain.
That is why, to this is why this
If you want to make a website, you don't have to pay anybody a license fee. If you want to make your own web browser.
You don't have to pay anybody a license fee. If you want to make your own web server, you don't have to pay anybody a license fee. And as a result.
of Tim Berners-Lee's foresight.
That's why we have the web like we do today.
Because if CERN had tried to charge money for it, it would have died in the cradle like Gopher and other software ideas that people decided to charge for.
So that's why I said this is one of the most important things
ever in the history of the internet and technology.
And in fact, they released a statement. CERN relinquishes all intellectual property rights to this code.
both source and binary permission is given to anyone to use, duplicate, modify, and distribute it.
about as public domain as you can get.
Then June.
Things weren't going great at Apple.
And the former CEO, which had been responsible for getting
jobs kicked out.
Oh my God, I'm blanking on his name.
That's embarrassing. Give me one sec.
I'll tell you his name.
It's right in front of my face.
uh…
John Scully, thank you.
John Scully left Apple.
Because things were not going as well.
And Michael Spindler was made CEO of Apple.
And this turned out to be an utter disaster.
Michael Spindler was an amazing boss at Apple Europe.
He ran the German division.
And this, he was excellent at it. In fact, his nickname was the diesel because he just worked so hard
And got such good results.
Those of you might have, some of you might have heard of the Peter principle
This was popularized during the 70s.
And it was developed by a guy named Lawrence J. Peter. And the Peter principle is within an organization.
people get promoted until they reach their level of incompetence.
So somebody might make an excellent manager
And they might make an excellent mid-level manager.
But then when they get promoted to vice president, they've reached their level of incompetence and they fall on their face.
So Michael Spindler was excellent.
running Apple Germany and Apple Europe.
When he became CEO of Apple, it was his level of incompetence
And Apple started really going downhill.
Just a disaster.
And so, for instance.
One of the things he apparently
was infamous for that people didn't realize until later was he got very nervous public speaking.
And he would get very tense and freak out.
And I have read articles about him where the secretary would walk into his office to say, oh, by the way, it's time for you to go do this talk or whatever.
And she would walk in and be like, where the hell's the boss?
he was just here and he was under the desk.
he was so freaked out and nervous.
So yeah, not necessarily the best choice.
Then August, the Debian distribution of Linux was founded
by a guy named Ian and named for his girlfriend Debbie and himself, although they didn't stick together didn't last.
And it's still obviously one of the absolute most important distributions
Today, still going on.
That August, this was kind of the idea of john scully
the previous head of apple
He had this vision for the Newton and the Newton was called the Newton Message Pad 100.
And this was the first PDA, personal digital assistant
And so the whole idea was you would carry this pocket computer around
And you would be able to have all your information on it stored. You might be able to connect to a network with it and transfer information to other people's Newton.
It supported a stylus for handwriting
And, you know, this sounds kind of ahead of its time.
And it really was. I mean, in many ways
It was a pretty amazing little device. I know Don.
still has newtons and was a big Newton devotee
I never had one.
But they were
Interesting. Very ahead of its time.
240 by 336 resolution.
2.8 by four inches LCD screen. They actually had a PCMCIA slot so you could put
other cards into it to do transfers and other things you can do with PCMCIA cards.
Back then, 9,600 kilobits per second data transfer.
And it came with Iran Newton O.
and was bundled with many apps. This might look somewhat familiar to people today.
You can see the iPhone obviously isn't copying this, but many of the ideas
we see in the iPhone and Android.
from this. The problem was it never sold well.
It only sold 80,000 units total. It was one of the first things that Jobs killed.
When he came back to Apple in the late 90s.
And one of the reasons is the handwriting recognition was subpar. It was, again, ahead of its time.
And this is a famous
Dunesbury cartoon
about it about the newton and here we have Mike Dunesbury writing on the newton
And he writes, I am writing a test sentence. And it comes back with, Siam fighting atomic sentry.
And so he does it again. I am writing a test sentence.
Ian is writing a taste sensation.
I am writing a test sentence.
And then it puts, I am writing a test sentence. And then he wrote, catching on and it says egg freckles.
And so this was actually a joke in apple
And egg freckles became an Easter egg in later versions of the Newton.
1994.
Two guys, college students at stanford
David Philo and jerry yang
create a website
called Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web to Organize Their Bookmarks.
That was the whole idea. These guys had a lot of bookmarks for this growing web thing.
And so they made a website
organized and then put it on the public web and people started going there.
They discovered him. We're like, wow, this has a lot of good links on it.
And so they began making it bigger and bigger and they hired people. By the way, many of the people they hired early on were librarians because librarians are trained.
to categorize things. And they eventually named it yahoo
And so that's where Yahoo started.
Now, back in early 94, Microsoft is working on what's going to become Windows 95.
But they are not planning to include a web browser.
Inside Microsoft, they thought the web was both a nerdy thing and a fad.
It wasn't going to catch on and they did not see the point.
at all. Instead, they were looking at in other directions, which we'll talk about in just a little bit.
Will that mark, Linux kernel 1.0 is released.
So here we finally have Linux growing up
And getting bigger. I know some of you probably started using Linux about this time. I started in around 95, I believe, with the guidance.
of a friend. So this is when it starts really
getting more and more popular and usable.
That marked one of the oddest things Apple ever did
I'm sorry, one of the most important things Apple ever did occurred
And that was the Motorola
CPU that the original Mac in 1984 had used
had gotten completely out of date by this point.
Completely out of date.
And Apple had realized that.
And they decided to partner up with IBM and Motorola
to create a new cpu
that would compete with Intel and others
that would be better. And they called it the power
PC CPU.
And really, the biggest usage in computers that it ever got was at Apple.
Apple was the major company that used the PowerPC.
And this was the beginning of the PowerPC era
at Apple. So from 84 to 95
94 for 10 years, Apple used the Motorola and then starting in 94, they switched
to the PowerPC. Now, of course, they would stick with that
Until the mid-2000s, about another 10 or so years.
When they would switch to the Intel CPU for a while.
Now, what was interesting was
They actually wrote software to make it easier for people to switch
from the old CPU to the new CPU to help the process along.
And the first computer Apple released was the Power Mac 6100.
That was the first computer to put a PowerPC CPU in it.
And you'll notice one thing.
Remember, jobs have been gone almost 10 years by this point.
And if you notice, Apple's design when it came to hardware was not there.
This was a boring beige.
pizza box design computer that looked a lot like many, many, many other computers you bought at the time.
There was not a lot to distinguish this
looks wise, aesthetics wise from other computers.
Well, Mark Andreessen graduates from college in 1983.
decides to move to California
And meets Jim Clark.
Who had founded SGI. And if he was a tech entrepreneur and done pretty well for himself
And he meets Jim Clark. And Jim Clark's interested in talking to him because Andreason had helped develop Mosaic.
And Clark thought this web was going to be a big deal.
And so he goes to Marc Andreessen and says.
Let's found a company.
to make and sell web browsers and web related servers and software.
And Andreessen says, sounds good to me.
So they decide to form a company and they call it. And I'm like, what were you guys smoking when you thought this was a good idea? They decided to call it
Mosaic Communications Corporation.
Hello, that's
the name of the browser you did
that's still owned by the University of Illinois and CSA like okay
Though that was the name, that's what they went with.
Well, the first Usenet spam appeared in April.
Two lawyers, Cantor and Siegel, spammed all of Usenet.
Because the government was going to be having an amnesty
for green cards, green card lottery
I'm sorry, green card lottery, not an amnesty.
And these guys, these a-holes, decided to basically spam all of Usenet
advertising their services to help people that wanted to participate in the green card lottery.
So thanks, guys. Really appreciate it.
That may…
The University of Illinois goes, okay, we have this
browser called mosaic.
It seems to be popular.
But we're a university.
We don't want to have to deal with trying to commercialize this.
So they chose a small company called Spyglass Incorporated
They made them the sole licensee to develop and market commercial versions of Mosaic.
So remember that.
That June, Apple released the very first consumer digital camera, the Quick Take 100. It worked with Macs and windows
$750.
Got you eight pictures.
640 by 480 resolution, no focus, no zoom, no preview.
at all, you took the photos, hope for the best, plug it into your computer, get the A photos off it, then you go off and take the next date, how far we have come.
That June 20th.
Apple decided to get into the online
ISP business.
And at the time, the one that was really popular and only going to grow more and more popular, and everybody remembers this if you're that age.
was AOL. AOL was starting to get big and it was going to get really big by the time the decade was over.
And…
AOL was interesting because you really didn't use AOL to access the internet and the web.
AOL was a closed environment.
So when you logged into AOL,
You were in AOL world.
It wasn't until later that they made it possible for you to access the internet from within AOL.
Okay. It might have been a little earlier. They might have done that a little earlier with the internet.
But not much earlier.
And so Apple was like, we should do this too, but only make it available for Apple users.
And they decided to call it e-world.
And they basically licensed
Technology from AOL to make their own Apple AOL called eWorld. And you can see it here.
And it had, you would pay by them by the hour
by the month and then by the hour. And you could do email, access news, software, message boards. You could access the web.
And it was all very graphical with a very similar style. And so this is literally what it would have looked like when you connected to e-world.
This is what it looked like. It was very friendly, very based around a spatial idea.
And the idea was that it was $8.95 a month, and you're going to love this, which got you two
Count them. Two free nighttime or weekend hours.
That's it. Then you paid five bucks an hour after that
You paid $8 an hour between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. on weekdays.
And it was only available on the Macintosh
And email was also available on the Newton.
So nowadays, of course.
you pay a price and you get as much as you want.
But for those of you that got on the internet back in the dial-up days, yeah, this was often what you paid.
That $8 an hour during working hours has been eye-watering.
And I remember trying out eWorld, but I didn't want to pay all that money. So I got on for a few hours and then I'd get off.
And I really was careful about when I used it.
Now, the problem was it was never marketed well by Apple. They did a terrible job.
And by September, a year later.
It only had 115,000 subscribers. AOL, on the other hand, had three and a half million.
And so eventually what happened was that apple decided
that eWorld was gone. And on March 31st of 1996, after less than two years.
Apple killed eWorld, and that was the last thing you ever saw by eWorld no longer available.
And what's funny is I got on eWorld and then like
two months after I started using it, Apple killed it. So, oh, well.
Well, Microsoft now thinks, you know.
maybe we should have a browser.
You know, it seems to be getting slightly more popular.
We probably should get a web browser, but we don't have time to build one ourselves from scratch.
I think we should go to this spyglass thing and license Mosaic.
That'll help us get it ready in time for us in time
the future version of Windows coming up.
And so they go to Spyglass.
And they set up a deal.
And they say, okay.
$100,000.
That'll get a spyglass mosaic that we can use with Windows. That's the initial offer.
Hold on to that for a second.
Well, that summer of 94,
Three years after introducing the web, Tim Berners-Lee leaves CERN and founds
The World Wide Web Consortium.
At MIT, which is still around today and very much a going concern. I've been to that website a million times.
That's what the website looked in December of 1996.
And the idea was the web is only going to get bigger and more important
We need to create a standards body for the web. We need to codify HTML.
And, you know, new technologies we develop.
And we need to be able to give recommendations to browsers as to what they should do.
and how they should act.
That September, Photoshop 3 is released
$569. Woo!
In 1994, that's a lot of money now.
That was a lot of money in 1994.
Now it required 16 megabytes of RAM and 25 megabytes of disk space.
And this was the first release to be on CD and the final release on floppy disk.
And this introduced layers. So for the first time now, you could layer things on top of each other and pallets with tabs so you could switch between the tabs
on the pallets, again, a UI feature that many, many, many, many, many, many other software packages have adopted.
Well, that October.
The first version of Netscape beta
is released. Now, remember, the company is still called mosaic.
The browser is named Netscape.
And so they released Netscape 0.9.
On October 13th, 1994, and within four months, it has 75%
of the browser market. Now, again, this is not a large group of people.
But at the time, of those people, three quarters of them, 75%, are using this browser that had only been released four months earlier. That's how much better
It was.
The problem was the problem was
NCSA complained like
What were you guys expecting and said, you guys can't use mosaic
for a browser company, we own the trademark to Mosaic for browsers.
So no, you can't do that. You got to change the name. And I just don't, again, it astonishes me that
And Greeson and company ever thought that was a good idea.
And so they decided to rename their company Netscape Communications Corporation.
So Netscape Communications Corporation, when version 9.3 comes out, that's when they've now changed the name.
And that December.
Netscape Navigator 1.0 was released. Now the browser
was actually called Navigator, but everybody called it Netscape. I don't recall anybody ever saying.
navigator back in the day at all. You just called it Netscape.
And it was easily
easily the most advanced browser at the time. It was $99.
Unless it was nonprofit or education, then it was free. Now, here's the deal.
It was $99 on the honor system.
I don't know. I mean, I'm sure there are companies that paid for it
But nobody I knew paid for it.
I never paid for it uh so
Nowadays, of course, the idea of paying for a browser is pretty wacky.
But back then, of course, you charge for it. You charge for software. You charge for a browser. It's 99 bucks, but free for nonprofits and education.
And eventually, one of the things that made Netscape popular was that they released it for Windows.
Macs, Linux, OS 2, Solaris, BSD,
Irix, AIX, and HPUX.
So basically, Windows, Mac, and every version of Unix out there.
Including Linux. So that helped make it so popular.
Now, you might notice.
that this says Mozilla.
Right. And Mozilla, as it says here, was the mascot of Netscape.
And I love this. He eventually went away because he was scared of pinstripe suits.
So, Mo, what's this Mozilla thing like
He was everywhere.
Welcome to Netscape. And there was mozilla.
Well, why did they call it Mozilla? Why was he a green lizard? Because…
they were kind of pissed off at NCSA and mosaic
unreasonably so. And they said, well, our new browser, Netscape Navigator, is going to be a mosaic killer.
Not a Godzilla, but a Mozilla.
And so that's why they decided to call it Mozilla and it's still around today because
Firefox is overseen by the Mozilla organization.
So that's where it comes from all the way back 30 years ago in 1994.
Well, that December.
Microsoft finally goes, okay, look.
We need to license this browser thing. Let's get down to brass tacks.
And so they go, okay, fine.
$2 million. We will pay you $2 million to license Spyglass mosaic
In Windows 95.
We are going to pay you a quarterly fee.
And we know you're going to like this spy glass.
we're going to pay you a percent
of any money we receive from selling i
Okay, so…
Sounds great, right? Spyglass is going. We are going to make…
a ridiculous amount of money because when windows comes out and they're going to charge people for ie
like Netscape does. Oh my gosh, we're going to be rolling in the dough. And in fact, they later licensed the browser for the Macintosh.
For Windows 3.1 and in fact, for any future use
So that brought the total it paid up to
$13.1 million. That's what Microsoft paid
13.1 million for licensing
Plus, that yummy percent
of revenue Microsoft receives from selling IE.
Okay, 1995, big year.
Early in 1995,
Apple made a big boo-boo.
Apple, Michael Spindler.
decides and others within Apple decides that it would be a good idea because max market share is so low.
Apple's market share was in the single digits.
And they decided, you know, if we, and Bill Gates, by the way, had sent Apple a letter saying, I think you ought to license
Mac OS like we do with Windows.
that would be really beneficial for you, demonstrating that Bill Gates did not understand Apple's business model.
Unfortunately, obviously, Michael Spindler and other people at Apple didn't understand Apple's business model.
Because they just started, that'd be a good idea.
And they said, any company that wants to license Mac OS 7 from us
We will do so and they are allowed to make clones of the Mac
running macOS 7.
And this seemed like a really dandy idea.
You know, at the time, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It works for Microsoft.
Surely it'll work for it.
And that may power computing
ships the very first mac clone.
In the first year, it shipped 100,000 units and made 250 million bucks.
And in fact, they were the first company to sell a million dollars of products on the internet.
And the thing that was so, now notice they were beige boxes like everybody else.
But what was nice about them was
They were cheaper than Apple.
And in fact, that's what happened with every single clone. They all
undercut Apple on price
Because they use cheaper parts.
And because they wanted to undercut Apple.
And that was the thing that Apple, people at Apple had not understood.
Apple made money from selling hardware.
And unfortunately, the people running Apple for the last 30 years have understood this.
that Apple makes money selling hardware.
The software is there to make the hardware attractive.
No, it's changed a little bit.
25% of Apple's income now is services.
But the lion's share of their income to this day is hardware. 50% of Apple's income is the iPhone, for instance.
So they did not understand their own business model.
And the problem was, yeah, a lot of companies licensed mac os
But Apple started losing money because people weren't buying Macs.
They were buying power computing and other devices in fact
I bought a power computing.
Mac at the time. My Mac Plus was years out of date at this point.
And artists started. It was time for a new computer. And I was going to get a power computing
Power Mac because they were a lot cheaper, but I could still use mac os so that's what I did.
Early 95, since they've licensed it, this is allowed by their license.
Microsoft decides to rename Spyglass to Internet Explorer.
Why? Well, we've already got a file explorer and a printer explorer. Now we're going to have Internet Explorer.
And in fact, for years
afterward. This is version six
of Internet Explorer dating back to 2004 they still
referenced NCSA mosaic.
It was until IE7.
Then Microsoft finally rewrote the browser entirely from scratch and got rid of any vestiges
of the original mosaic code.
Well, that may…
Bill Gates writes a memo called The Internet Tidal Wave.
Because Bill realized where the world was going and how important the internet
was going to be.
And he wrote this memo and this was from on high to everyone at Microsoft
saying we need to shift the company's focus.
Quote, now I assign the internet the highest level of importance.
In this memo, I want to make clear that our focus on the internet is crucial to every part of our business.
The internet is the most important single development to come along since the IBM PC was introduced in 1981.
It is even more important than the arrival of the graphical user interface.
That's how big a deal this was. And now Microsoft's orders throughout the entire company
were internet, internet, internet.
And in fact, those of you who follow the news today now have seen this exact same thing happen, but with AI at Microsoft.
So now, Satya Nadal.
has redirected Microsoft toward AI, AI, AI, AI, and now they're working AI.
everywhere, even where it isn't appropriate. And of course, also ads because they have to fully enshidify Windows as quickly as possible.
Well, June.
Microsoft, then they had done this before with earlier versions of Windows. They had the base version of Windows, and then they had the plus pack.
And that was additional software you would buy that had additional features, additional software.
And so at this point.
In 1995, two months before Windows 95 is coming out.
They were still planning to include IE separately.
It was not going to be bundled with bundled
Windows itself. You are going to have to buy the cleverly named Microsoft Plus
companion for Windows 95.
Well, late June, though?
Microsoft sees Netscape as starting to get really big.
Mark Andreessen is mouthing off about Microsoft.
He famously said, Windows is going to eventually become
a poorly debugged set of device drivers. That's a direct quote, because he said everything's going to move to the web. Now he was about
15 years too early, 20 years too early, but he had the right idea. But when Microsoft saw that he was pointing out, look, eventually everybody's going to go to the web.
operating systems aren't going to matter.
And I love it. He literally said Windows is going to become a poorly debugged set of device drivers.
And that did not go over well. And they began to see Netscape as a threat.
And as a result.
Bill Gates decides, you know what?
we're going to include IE with Windows.
And it's going to be free.
And of course, that's great for people buying windows
But do you guys remember Spyglass? Remember their deal?
Like, oh, we're going to get a percentage of every copy of IE they sell. Well, the contract never said anything about what if they give it away for free.
Because that never occurred to anybody. Like, why would they give something like that away for free? You sell browsers. You don't give them away for free.
Well, yep. And so because they gave it away for freely, they only made $400,000 in licensing fees. That's it.
That's all they made. And so they eventually sued two years later and Microsoft settled for $8 million.
Well, this is one of the other sleaziest, nastiest, worst things Microsoft ever did.
And the God knows they've done plenty.
Because they realized they realized
Netscape was a threat.
Now, at this time, and I'm talking to a bunch of nerds, so I bet most of you never felt this way or if you did, it was so long ago you forgot.
But go back in time to 1995.
Okay?
Even people are like, I want to get on this web. I want to get on this internet.
First of all, remember.
Most people, everybody on the internet was using painfully slow modems.
So downloading things took forever. And of course, you'd get disconnected and you'd have to restart. It was just a pain.
But the other thing is, remember, back in 95, people did not widely know how to use computers as well as they do today.
Most people did not know how to install software.
At all. They were scared of doing it. They did not know how to find software.
They did not know how to download it.
And so the whole idea of going out and searching and finding this and downloading it and installing it, oh my God.
That was way too much for most people.
But Netscape was big.
And so Dell and Gateway 2000 and IBM
and all the and compact and all the other computer makers
We're making it easy for their customers
by including netscape
with windows because the license they have with Microsoft said, of course you can include third party software.
Of course you can do that.
And so consequently, when people turned on.
There would be a Netscape icon right there on the desktop.
And in the start menu, because they had pre-installed Netscape and that made it easy
and friendly for people to use Netscape.
Well, Microsoft was like, oh, no.
Oh, no, no, we're not having that.
That's not going to happen anymore.
Now, remember, the license agreement said, of course, you can put whatever you want on the desktop and you can install whatever you want.
out of the box, of course. But Microsoft said, nope.
And if you guys remember Empire Strikes Back.
Remember when Lando Calrissian says to Darth Vader
that that's not the deal we agreed on. And Darth Vader says, I have changed the deal. Pray that I do not change it any further.
That's exactly what Microsoft did to Dell and IBM and Gateway and so on because Microsoft went to those companies and said, guess what?
new changes to the license. Number one.
IE is going to be in the desktop in the start menu and you are not allowed to remove it. You cannot touch it.
Number two, you cannot include Netscape anymore. People can download it if they want.
Now, some of them had actually given people a choice. Do you want to install this or this? And Microsoft's like, nope, can't do that anymore either.
When people get a copy of Windows pre-installed, and that's primarily the way people bought Windows still.
they're going to have IE on the desktop in the start menu. NetSafe's not going to appear at all.
If they want Netscape, they can go download it. We don't prevent people from downloading anything they want.
And they said, and here's the deal. If you don't agree to that, Dell and IBM and Gateway, we're going to revoke your Windows license. What are you going to do then?
Because then you're going to go out of business.
So you either do what we say
Or we revoke your license.
And Gateway in particular, and this came out at trial, complained.
This is ridiculous. We have an agreement with you. Our customers want Netscape.
We don't agree to this. And Microsoft said, well, too bad you have to. Oh, by the way, your license fee, remember how it was $50 a copy? Now it's 60.
Do you want to bitch more?
Go ahead. Complain more.
And as a result, their license fee went up.
If they complain. That is not me making stuff up. That is in the official trial record.
that that's what they did.
Then July, Amazon.com launches from Jeff Bezos's two bedroom house.
And this is what it looked like. That was the very first
website for amazon.com.
And John Wainwright was the first customer.
He bought the first book.
fluid concepts and creative analogies, computer models are the fundamental mechanisms of thought by Douglas Hofstad.
That gives you an idea of who the nerd audience was back at that time.
Now, why did he choose books?
Bezos was a super smart guy.
Why did he choose books?
He said the web was growing at about 23
100% a year.
I made a list of 20 different products you might sell online.
I pick books because books are very unusual in one respect.
And that is that there are more items in the book category than there are items in any other category by far.
There are millions of different books active and in print.
I was looking for something that you could only do on the web.
And having a bookstore with universal selection is only possible
on the web. When we launched, we launched with over a million titles.
And of course, we are where we are today.
That August, Netscape goes public.
And this began the dot-com boom of the late 1990s. And boy, do I remember that.
The stock opened at $28.
It shot all the way up to $74.75, although it closed lower.
By the end of 1995,
Netscape was trading at $174 a share.
share. And at this time, they have between 80 and 90% market share, the most they would ever have.
Well, August 24th.
Windows 95 comes out.
Long lines, great anticipation, excitement.
This was a big deal.
$210, that's around $430 nowadays. It's a lot of money, but this was again.
a really big deal.
In fact, that picture became famous. That is one of the first Windows 95 shoppers in Australia.
Where it opened first, leaving the store at midnight, stores all across the world opened at midnight.
Because the lines were so big so people could buy a new version of Windows. Can you imagine that today?
people getting that excited about a new version of Windows. Most people now cower in fear at the idea of a new version of Windows.
Microsoft spent $200 million on marketing.
In fact, they paid the Emperor State Building so it was lit to match the colors of the Windows logo. This was the first time that had ever happened.
where they did corporate colors.
Microsoft paid
for a pain, I urge you to look this up.
Please look it up. It's a painfully bad 30 minute video they called a cyber sitcom.
that featured Jennifer Aniston and Matthew Perry from Friends.
showing off the new features of Windows 95. I'm going to show you a brief excerpt of it.
It is unbelievably horrific. It manages to be stupid.
and racist and awful
At the same time. So here is a brief excerpt
this horrific 30-minute cyber sitcom. And I hope to God, you know, Matthew Perry's dead, but I hope Jennifer Aniston still regrets this because it was bad.
So here we go.
Ah, the scratching post. Pull the plug. Is there anybody in charge here? Oh, boy, an entire gallery of cats owners photos. Do they have an audio tour with this?
Let's look at buttons.
Oh, now you've lost any chance you might have ever had.
Hey, the pinky duck wagon is coming. Your food's here. You're saved. I don't think I'm really hungry anymore.
20 minutes ago, we were ready to throw you a telethon. Now you're not hungry?
Hey, yeah, it's Jeff Lee. Listen, pal, Steven Seagal fan club is down the hall.
I'm getting Southern California.
I guess you are here.
or some Windows 95 interface therapy.
No, no, I don't think my HMO covers that. Hey, listen to the man. He's got a Zen spin on Windows 95.
look at our menu.
Fathom A always compliments column B.
protein on the right, carbs on the left.
Elements stay the same.
But the combinations of choices are indeed in.
creativity is challenged wow well it's kind of like an interactive fortune cookie, wouldn't you say? Yes, I would.
Uncle.
I hope you did not enjoy that.
And… Sorry.
swallow.
painful.
So bad.
you're going to see what you're going to see a statement from Steve Dobbs at the end of 1995 that covers this and many other things.
They also…
Yeah, but did you see that jump that guy did? He was like a jump spin, man, for like no reason. Did you see it?
Microsoft also paid the Stones $3 million
To use Start Me Up.
as part of their advertising campaign because of the start menu.
Here you go.
This is supposed to be audio.
And you know here?
mute for me.
Maybe you should start it up.
Not hearing anything?
No, thankfully.
Don't hear it.
Correct.
we don't hear anything.
Okay. I don't know why that is.
for some reason music
Zoom doesn't like to do
doesn't like
E or M.
Music.
on the normal desktop, there's a separate setting for share audio from
you're when you're playing something.
And where's that?
I have no idea on the Mac, sorry.
Where is it on Windows?
I mean, but…
As I recall, it's when you very first start
sharing your screen down in the right hand corner, there's an additional option box that you select.
Hell, I just got out of the…
So it has to be from the very beginning that you turn that on, I think.
Hold on a sec.
that particular bit of sound may also have some interesting licensing with it and drm
No, I don't think that's it. So I see…
I see audio settings.
Well, you'd have to stop sharing and start sharing again, right?
Stan, is that what you're saying?
Okay, I'll stop sharing and reshare. That's easy.
Okay, so there's a share.
at the bottom.
I'm going to click it.
And share sound.
Yep. There's where it is.
There it is.
Thanks, guys.
Oh, for God's sakes, hold on.
I think that's the way to do it.
I think you're absolutely right.
Yes.
Hey, Scott, can I share something while you're doing that?
Yeah.
Because I had to leave in a couple minutes. When you mentioned about amazon
And those books were coming from Ingram Micro. I put it in the chat, but those books were coming from Ingram Micro.
which was the wholesaler of books.
And a lot of people don't know that.
Okay, would you say that again? Because you cut out.
Due to my fault.
Okay, so when you're talking about amazon
And the books
Yeah.
The books were coming from a company called Ingram Micro
Sure.
which was a wholesaler
Uh-huh.
being that I did deal with them and I knew the books were available. So that's how that started. That's where the books were coming from.
Cool.
Yeah, I've heard of Ingram Micro, definitely.
All right, let's try this again.
Let's see. Tell me if you hear this.
Good.
Yes.
Hear that?
There you go.
Hampton.
Yep, stop me!
Now, two things about that.
Number one, you might have noticed
About 15 seconds for them to cut it.
That's because that part of the song, Mick Jagger says, you make a grown man cry.
You make a grown man cry. So they cut that part out.
And then my favorite one of those little start whatever is start doing.
like start doing what?
I think that's really bizarre.
But, okay, guys.
This may cause some of you to claw your eyes out in disgust.
So…
Bill Gates, future CEO of Steve Ballmer.
and other Microsoft executives at the rollout party they had on Microsoft campus.
They decided to show off their skillful dance moves
So I think this is hilariously awful as well. Please enjoy.
Please notice Bill Gates has
No rhythm whatsoever.
Neither does Baldwin.
He looks extremely uncomfortable.
I love how basically they're like, okay, we're going to play the music and everybody just dance
with you know awful.
Hold on.
The New York Times called it the splashiest, most frenzied, most expensive introduction of a computer product.
in the industry's history.
They sold a million copies were shipped in four days
7 million in five weeks, 40 million within a year. That's what a big deal.
this thing was. It led to a huge explosion of sales of computers
And new upgrades like Intel Pentium processors, bigger hard drives, CD-ROMs, Sound Blaster audio cards.
Now, the official requirements were
A 386, but 486 was recommended.
Four megabyte of RAM, but eight megabyte was recommended.
And 50 to 55 megabytes of hard disk space
You could install it with a CD-ROM or 13 floppy disks later up to 26
$4. So yeah, I remember doing that. Somebody paid me to install Windows with floppies and you just sat there
putting one floppy in after another. It was painful.
They did introduce a bunch of important hardware features.
So it was a 32-bit operating system.
So that was better.
could use more RAM faster, finally a bump up from 16-bit.
However, I remember in 1996, I bought two megabytes of RAM and that was $300.
that RAM didn't cost. And plug and play
The idea was you could just plug in peripherals. You don't have to go into the complexity of before with Windows 3 and mess around.
Now you just plug it in and it's going to work. The problem was it often didn't work and people started calling it plug and pray.
Because you never knew if it was going to work or not.
It had built-in internet connectivity via a modem.
Before this, people had to install their own networking software.
Which could be expensive, tedious, and error prone.
To compete with AOL, they developed, just like Apple had tried with eWorld.
Microsoft developed the Microsoft network
And that was going to be like their version of AOL.
That icon was on the desktop. It was dial up only.
You got to access email, chat, news groups, and the early days of the World Wide Web.
Here were the prices.
50 bucks a year got you three hours a month.
a month plus $2.50 for every additional hour.
Or if you paid 20 bucks a month, you got 20 hours a month with $2 an hour.
Or you could pay monthly five bucks a month for three hours and 250.
So there are the three price points you had it available.
Now, it also introduced a bunch of innovative software
Number one, preemptive multitasking. So one program wouldn't take down the entire computer if it crashed.
That took Apple a number of years to add.
Support for long file names.
So remember, DOS, you had 8.3. Now you could go up to 250 characters
And a much better UI.
So, for instance, you now had the network neighborhood where so you could access other computers on a land.
You had file syncing.
with my briefcase.
You had, of course, the very famous start menu with the fly-out menus.
Of course, one thing everybody always pointed out was you, of course, went to the start menu to go to shutdown.
the taskbar along the bottom so you can see what programs were running
and open programs as well.
The start menu.
to get the programs and files more easily.
Notepad, which is still around.
As well as Windows Explorer with my computer and the various windows you had available to you.
And finally, the recycle bin.
Just like Microsoft, just like Apple's trash
I love how they called the recycle bin because it wasn't like you could easily recycle it. I mean, I guess you could pull it out of the recycle bin and put it back.
But now, here's the cool thing. If you guys want to relive some nostalgia.
You can actually go to that web page right there and you can download Windows 95
for your PC or Mac and you open it and it actually opens Windows 95 in its own window.
So I've used it for screenshots and stuff like that.
It's a very interesting step back in time.
There it is. Just download it. I'm sorry, it also runs on Linux. So it's an electron app.
that lets you run Windows 95 on Mac, Linux, and Windows. So check it out. It's kind of fun.
Well, it also shipped with Internet Explorer 1.0 as part of the Microsoft Plus Pack.
If you were upgrading if you were upgrading
Or if you bought a brand new PC, it came with
your copy of Windows is pre-installed.
So there's IE1.
Now, also released at the same time
Say, do you have that…
Yeah, it's in the notes, but there it is. There it is right there. Take a screenshot.
that GitHub URL in the uh and can you put that in chat? Yeah, I take a note. There it is right there.
Okay.
But it is in the notes for the presentation.
You got it?
Do you guys get it?
He's been muted.
I'm muted.
He has been muted.
You are not muted. Somebody has copied it to the chat.
Oh, okay.
All right, cool.
And this is my little quiz for you guys, see who really knows our Microsoft office
That August, they also released Office 95, which contained, and I've given you the icons on the bottom to help.
What's the first app it contained?
Word.
Microsoft Word, then what?
Excel.
Very good. Then what?
PowerPoint.
PowerPoint. And then Lee should know the next one I know, of course. I know many of you also do.
Access.
Right. Access. What's the next one?
Bob.
That's the hard one, but the last one's the hardest.
schedule and then schedule and schedule
It's…
That's right. It's Schedule Plus.
finder.
And what's the last one?
Flipboard.
the clipper should help.
Anybody?
clipboard.
that part?
Oh, binder.
Binder. Binder was used to bind the different documents together.
Yep, very good. And there's word.
Word, Office 95. Word 7. Actually, all of them had the version number of seven.
That's September 3rd, Pierre Omadillar.
A young programmer founds eBay but called it Auction Web.
As a hobby to make a few extra bucks.
Now, the first item
And this is AuctionWeb. That's what it looked like.
The first item ever sold
was a broken laser pointer
For $14.83. That was the very first thing ever sold. Now, Pierre was a little concerned that the winner didn't realize. So he actually contacted the winner. He reaches out to the guy.
And says to him, you are aware that it's broken.
Right. And the guy said, and this is absolutely 100% true, the guy says back.
I'm a collector of broken laser pointers.
And at that moment, Pierre Omidyar went.
I am going to be so goddamn rich.
If somebody is buying broken laser pointers.
I am going to make so much money.
Well, AuctionWeb made $1,000 in the first month, which already was more than it cost to host and run the website.
The next month, he made $2,500. They currently, as of last year.
had $10 billion in revenue.
Okay, now we're going to talk about something I was, hold on one sec so I can beat my dog.
Finn?
Never mind.
So late 1995, a young woman
19 years old, named Lina Trivedi.
is a college student studying sociology at DePaul University.
be on the couch waiting for you. Okay.
Studying sociology at DePaul University in Chicago
And she was also the 12th employee at tie incorporated
incorporated maker of Beanie Babies.
Now, why is that important?
Because…
She came up with the idea to put a birthday and poem
on the hang tag of every Beanie Baby. That was her initial idea.
Also, at the time, remember, she's a DePaul University student
She provided every, DePaul at that time provided every student
with an internet account and a 14 floor kilobit per second modem.
Lena brought her modem into work and showed Ty Warner
The…
website, sorry, she showed him the internet
and suggested that suggested
she create a website for the company.
And he thought that was a really good idea. He approved of the idea.
So the problem was…
A guy named Philip Giacolone, I don't know, I'm probably getting that wrong.
had registered tie.com already for his son.
And for his name for his son, but for his tech consulting business.
And he didn't want to sell the domain.
So Thai Incorporated.
The Beanie Baby maker had to pay him $150,000 for the domain, which was an enormous amount then, as well as now.
Yeah.
Keep that in mind. Well, that November 27th
IE2 is released.
East for when all windows 95 and NT3.1 users
So they are iterating on IE.
That December 7th.
He'd already released his memo.
Now he gives his Pearl Harbor speech. Bill Gates gives the Pearl Harbor speech
In which he promises to build the web into Microsoft's
products. Give me one sec.
The internet, he said, is the primary driver of all new work we are doing throughout the product line.
We are hardcore about the internet.
And then he said, and if you know Microsoft, this was a bit ominous.
Anything that a significant number of internet publishers are using, we will support
and extend. In other words, the idea being that Microsoft is going to take
What other people have done.
And they are going to extend it. And of course, support
Microsoft stuff, Microsoft extensions.
Gates also announced for sure now to everybody to make it positively certain that Internet Explorer will be free.
And this began, that was obviously a complete shot over the bow for Netscape.
Because the browser war now began. This was the first browser war.
We've had others. And that was the idea who is going to eventually win?
Okay, so to show you what I'm talking about.
With that, let's look at the next few years, all the different versions of
browsers. So Netscape one comes out in December of 94.
Very soon after in 95, I'm sorry, Netscape 1 comes out December of 94.
95, we have Netscape 2 and IE1 and 2. Then in 96, we have version 3 of both. Then in 97, we have version four of both.
Then in 99, we have version 5.
And we're starting to slow down a little bit.
And you can see that when we have six.
And so there was all this activity early on where they were adding new features and copying from each other and adding on.
And it got pretty hairy. Well, the end result
was
that…
that IE1.
So due to
Microsoft, and again, this is not my opinion. This is the
statement by the lawyers, the judge ruled this
The Microsoft illegally leveraged its monopoly
to defeat Netscape and defeat them in the marketplace and destroy the company.
So eventually this shows market share for the browsers. And so you can see that at one point.
Netscape has around 80%.
But by mid-98,
IE is already ahead until by 2004, Microsoft's IE had around 95% market share and Netscape had zero.
Now, this is a chart I've made from 94 to 2006.
showing the various market shares of the web browser. And again.
Mosaic is blue. Well, you can see what happened to Mosaic. It just died.
Then we get Netscape Classic. That's the green
The gray is Internet Explorer.
And so you can see that what happened was, is that Microsoft basically completely destroyed
the market share of all the other browsers until we get to 2000 ticks 2007,
When, of course, thanks to the iPhone and Android, things began to change.
By the end of 1995
Around 24 million people in the US and Canada were averaging around five hours per week on the internet.
And I love this. This to me sums up a lot of what Microsoft was doing.
In 1995.
Robert X cringely interviewed Steve jobs
And in the documentary, I hope you guys have seen this. If you haven't, you really should watch it, called Triumph of the Nerds.
There were about 10 minutes of footage used. Well, in 2012, after Jobs's death.
cringely rediscovered the entire 70-minute interview, and it's now available for free to watch on YouTube.
And I recommend you watch it. It's really great. Well, this is a particularly relevant portion
of that talk.
that Jobs said during the interview that i think really
has a lot to do with 1995, but other years as well.
The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste.
They have absolutely no taste. And what that means is.
I don't mean that in a small way. I mean that in a big way.
In the sense that…
They…
They don't think of original ideas.
And they don't bring much culture into their product.
And you say, well, why is that important? Well, you know, proportionally spaced fonts come from
typesetting and beautiful books. That's where one gets the idea.
If it weren't for the Mac, they would never have that in their
And so I guess…
I am saddened not by Microsoft's success. I have no problem with their success.
they've earned their success.
For the most part. I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third-rate
Yes.
Yep, there you go.
Pretty brutal, but accurate.
Yeah. 1996.
Scott?
What's that?
Could you go back to your chart like three slides back, four slides back?
That one?
Yeah, that one. Okay. And you said the gray is the gray
Internet Explorer for Windows.
Okay, but it's…
labeled as trident in the mosaic in the
At the top.
Yeah, what do you…
Yes, Trident is the rendering engine used by Internet Explorer.
Ah, okay. Okay.
All right. Thank you.
All right.
1996.
That January, Motorola introduces the StarTech
This was the quote unquote first stylish cell phone
Had a second battery you could put in. Vibrate mode, and the clamshell design
that so many other phones went on to imitate during the rest of the 90s into the 2000s.
Also, in 96, that January, the Palm Pilots introduced.
by US robotics, a competitor to the Newton. And in fact, this one sold a lot better. They did a lot better job in terms of the handwriting.
One of the mistakes, as I'm going to talk about, as you're going to see in a sec, was that the Newton would try to recognize anybody's handwriting
And the Palm Pilot said, no, that's not what we're going to do now
I have one. It was tiny, 160 by 160 screen
They shipped 350,000 during the first year compared to the Newton's 80,000
over its entire lifespan.
Now, it used a writing system called graffiti. You used a stylus
And you had to use this system to write in the text. And that was a big difference.
from apples because with apples, again, they were trying to recognize anybody's handwriting and the technology just was not there yet.
Whereas with graffiti, because you had to do it a very specific way, it did a much, much, much better job of recognizing
your handwriting.
That February 2nd, Michael Spindler's out.
Apple has been losing money right and left.
So they hire a guy named Gil Emilio, who'd been at National Semiconductor, and he was known as a turnaround
executive. So he was going to help take Apple and turn it around so it was going in the right direction. And unfortunately.
He was another very bad boy
for Apple to make.
And he did not, as you will see, succeed in turning the company around.
And in fact, he was the last CEO before Steve Jobs came back.
And Steve Jobs with Bill Gates about 10 years later, were being interviewed.
And they had this to say about poor old Gil Emilio.
Gil was a nice guy, but he had a saying. He said…
Apple is like a ship.
with a hole in the bottom, leaking water.
And my job is to get the ship
pointed in the right direction.
Uh-huh.
Yeah. So that's Gilamelia.
That July 4th hotmail launches. Why was it called Hotmail? Because HTML.
Two whopping megabytes of free storage.
One of the very first webmail services
And it was good to be a person that founded Hotmail because about a year later, Microsoft purchased it for $400 million.
That August, you'll remember that at the end of 95
Ty Warner had given
Lena the permission to go ahead and make a website
That August, Thai.com goes live. And what was interesting to me was this is a site about Beanie Babies.
That was the very first business to consumer website designed to sell to consumers directly.
And this is at a time when only 1.4% of Americans are using the internet.
That's it.
Now, this is what the website actually looks like. And this is so 1996.
Flashing text, animated GIFs, horrible typography, Comic Sans.
colors everywhere.
There you go. Pretty bad.
Now, below the poem on every Beanie Baby's hang tag, they started printing
view or visit our webpage along with their URL.
And they were one of the very first companies to promote the website
on their products.
In fact, sales soared. And as you guys remember, if you were around in the 90s, Beanie Babies became a huge fad. They were in fact the very first one fueled by the internet. And this amazed me. I had no idea.
More than 60% of American households owned at least one Beanie Baby.
back in the day, which again, astonishes me and at the height
A Beanie Baby mania.
10% of all eBay sales were related to Beanie Babies.
And I thought you would enjoy this picture.
This is from 1999, but it's still relevant. Francis Mountain Left sorts out Beanie Babies with her ex-husband, Harold, in a Las Vegas courtroom.
The couple was unable to split the collection by themselves, so they spread it on the courtroom floor and divided it up under the judge's supervision.
Maple the bear was the first to go.
And in fact, that October, so that gives you an idea about Beanie Babies, that October, KDE is announced.
Then October, KDE was announced as a project.
Many of you still use KDE to this day.
And in fact, I didn't want to give Katie a bad rap by showing that picture. So I jumped ahead and showed you a picture of KDE11 as well.
That November, Adobe releases Photoshop 4 for $900.
Wow. Lots of features. Macros, grids and guides, transform tools, layer effects.
And this is the first time taking a cue from Microsoft Office, perhaps.
that Adobe united all their other products together with common commands, common shortcuts, common palettes.
and so on. And interestingly, they also now supported web file formats like PNGs.
Progressive JPEGs and PDFs.
Craigslist at this time moved from email to the web.
and kept the same look.
And that December, Apple had been in horrible, horrible, horrible shape.
They had been in such bad shape, they could not develop their own successor
operating system. Mac OS by this point was
incredibly out of date.
just incredibly out of date.
And they had not been able to develop their own. They tried partnering with IBM, that failed.
They tried several different
projects inside the company. Those failed.
And finally, it came down to three possibilities.
The first possibility, and thank God they did not do this, they were thinking about licensing NT from Microsoft. Thank God that did not happen.
The second possibility, there was an operating system called BOS, B-E-O-S.
that a former executive at Apple had created
And they were thinking about buying that
He wanted too much money.
And he wasn't quite sure.
They weren't quite sure about it. They just didn't have a good feeling.
Well, Steve Jobs, however, had next step.
Which was the operating system that they had developed for their next computers.
And he went and he went
to they reached out to him and for the first time in over 10 years, Steve Dobbs went to the Ample campus
met with Gil Emilio.
and charmed him.
And Gil Amelia was like, this is the exact thing we need to do. We need to purchase.
Next, in fact, they purchased the entire company.
For $430 million.
From Steve Jobs. And that brought Steve Jobs back to Apple as an advisor.
Gilamigelio was still running the show.
But now Jobs was going to be an advisor to the company.
Okay, 1997.
That January?
Gil Emilio announces Apple sales are down 30% from the year before, and that had already been way, way, way down.
And in fact, this was the cover of Businessweek, the fall of an American Icon.
That's pretty bad. But Wired magazine
have one of the most famous covers ever.
Pray. That's how bad things have gotten. And in fact, under Gil Emilio's
Rain, Apple lost 1.6 billion
So you can see why they wanted to get him gone.
out of there. And so lo and behold, that's in fact what happened.
I'll get to that in a moment. The first modern social network site launched that year, Six Degrees. You could create a profile, list your friends, send messages.
Look at friends list of friends, but there were no photos
Why? Because nobody had digital cameras really at that point in time.
There were three and a half million users within two years.
It was bought in December. I love this so bad. It was bought in December 99 for 125 million.
But it was shut down in 2000.
It was way, way, way too ahead of its time.
Now, however, it did receive a patent
For social networking concepts that later social networking sites had to deal with. So again, this is an example
And you guys have heard me talk about this past years about the crappy patent system
And how problematic and how overbroad patents get awarded to people.
And it was a networking database containing a plurality of records for different individuals
In which individuals are connected to one another in the database by defined relationships.
Is that really patentable?
The idea that you have a database with people that are connected to other people because they say they're their friend.
or wife or husband or whatever, that was patented.
That March, 411 launches Rocket Mail, one of the other first webmail services
Yahoo bought it for $95 million. So it launches in March.
By October, six months later.
$95 million sale.
which created Yahoo Mail, which in an effort to do one better than Hotmail, gave you three megabytes of storage, not two.
I'm going to skip this because of time. April 21st, the first version of WinApp, an MP3 player for Windows, was released by Justin Frankel.
It was immediately popular. This is when MP3 started to get popular and big.
Because you have the internet. Now you could rip
your CDs to mp3s and this internet thing was starting to let people trade MP3s over it.
And it got to the point where there were 60 million users of Winamp
By 2001 within four years.
And one of the things it was famous for, of course, was the introduction that there where it said llama whipping intro, that was put in by default with every copy.
So the very first thing you heard
It really whips the llama's ass.
It really whips the llama's ass. That was the first thing everybody heard when they started it up.
That July, Gil Emilio's out.
And Steve Jobs is in, except Steve Jobs said, I'm not going to be the CEO.
I'm the interim CEO. We are looking for somebody else.
to take over. It's not going to be me. I've got Pixar to run. I've got other stuff.
I'm not going to be the CEO.
Okay. That August.
Macworld in Boston.
occurred. And to the shock
and booze of the audience, Bill Gates appeared on a gigantic screen
To show Microsoft support for Apple.
And Bill Gates announced that Microsoft was purchasing $150 million of non-voting Apple stock
And he promised to release Office for Mac.
For the next five years. Of course, they still release it. It's still going on.
In return, Apple said, we're going to settle any patent disputes we have with Windows.
over windows and we're going to cross license patents back and forth with Microsoft.
And we are going to make Internet Explorer the default browser on the Mac for five years.
And he said, and this is a direct quote.
to the audience explaining where he was coming from
If we want to move forward and see Apple healthy and prospering again, we have to let go of a few things.
We have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose.
I think if we want Microsoft Office on the Mac, we better treat the company that puts it out with a little bit of gratitude.
We'd like their software. So the era of setting this up as a competition between Apple and Microsoft is over as far as I'm concerned.
That August, the Gnome Project, the GNOME Project started.
by Miguel de Casa.
to provide another desktop environment instead of KDE.
That September, AuctionWeb obtains its name to eBay, and that's the first logo.
Which is awful. And the funny thing is, I always wondered why they call it eBay. And I discovered it when I was preparing this.
Pierre Omadior had a consulting company called Echo Bay Tech Group
Well, the problem, he wanted originally to have echobay.com
But the problem was echoBay.com was already taken by a gold mining company. So he decided to shorten it to eBay.com.
And that's why eBay to this day is called eBay. And that was the official logo for the first two years, which is horrible.
Well, that October.
Microsoft gets sued.
for antitrust. And this is for bundling Internet Explorer with windows
And for some of the other behavior that we've talked about a little bit, as well as a lot more than Microsoft have been engaging in that was monopolistic.
and hurting other companies.
98, almost done.
The Diamond Rio, the very first portable MP3 player appears.
three and a half inches by two and a half inches by a little over half an inch thick. It only had 32 megabytes of storage, which meant you could store about a half hour of music.
At 128 kilobits per sec, which at the time they said was CD quality, which it is not. It is horrible.
And this thing cost $200
The January, the affair between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky appears on the Drudge Report.
And this was the first major news story to break online.
And then one of the other biggest, most important things happened
That January 23rd, Netscape decided to open source its browser code. They were like, we can't compete with Microsoft.
They're killing us. We need to invite developers from all over the world to work together with us.
to work on a new and better browser.
And so that's what they did. They opened it up. And this was the first time this was the largest company that had ever taken a proprietary software product and released it as open source.
And in fact, that February, the term open source had been coined.
Because free software was confusing, especially to business people, because the idea was they heard free software and thought, oh, it's free. It can't be any good.
So open source became another one of those terms. Obviously, it's still with us today.
Well, that march, they finally released the code for Netscape.
under an open source license.
And developers around the world begin looking at it.
That June, Microsoft released Windows 98. Now keep in mind, they are being sued by the government
For tying, remember monopoly, you can't tie products
When you're a monopoly, you can't force consumers to use other products that are tied to the product they own.
They released Windows 95. Now it supports DVDs. It supports USB, but…
They completely integrate Internet Explorer into the operating system while they are being sued by the government, they went ahead and did this.
So now the help system used Internet Explorer.
The file system in places used Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer was now baked in everywhere to the point where, and this is one of the stupidest things they ever did, something called Active Desktop.
Where you could put a web page as the background on your desktop, giving you garbage like this.
Awful.
That August 15th.
One of the most important computers ever made, the iMac G3 starts shipping.
With Mac OS 8.1.
This had a PowerPC G3 processor in it, a four gigabyte hard drive.
a tray loading CD-ROM, an included modem, an infrared port, and
two USB ports.
Well, this was really different from other PCs at the time.
because of the hardware
but also because of the design.
Apple really did something very different than everybody else.
They decided to go with a clear plastic bondy blue case.
And this was a really innovative, different aesthetic look from every single other computer
at the time. And eventually they released many models
of the iMac G3 over the next several years. And here are some of them.
Okay, so several different models.
Now, what made this really interesting was this was the first legacy free PC. Steve Jobs
had overseen this computer. And he said, I want to have a break with the past.
No serial port, no Apple desktop bus, no floppy, which freaked people out.
People lost their shit back then because
the fact that there was not a floppy included.
But this was the first PC to include USB ports.
Which were very, very new. In fact, I didn't know this
The USB standard wasn't even finalized until after the iMac was released.
And it was so new, there were no third party peripherals for USB because that town knew this thing was.
So this really was a very modern computer. No floppy USB instead. And it really led to USB being more widely adopted.
Because since they did it and it proved to be popular.
Other computer manufacturers started doing the same thing, although they kept the floppy a lot longer.
And it helped make USB more ubiquitous.
Unfortunately, it also included the famous hockey puck mouse, which was completely round, which was awful.
Because by feel, you couldn't tell which direction you were holding it. So you had to look at the mouse constantly and ergonomically.
You had to hold it like that. It was awful.
Steve Jobs.
Do you know what the reset programmer switch did like two slides back on the bottom of that computer?
Yeah, I mean…
It was for programmers. It got you. It was kind of like going into single user mode, I think.
Is what it did, what we would say now.
I think that's what it did.
that's been on Macs for a long time. It was not.
Oh, it was. Oh, yeah.
used here.
Oh, yeah. Yep.
And in fact, Steve Jobs was so proud of it. He said, the back of our computer looks better than the front of their computers.
It was an immediate hit with consumers.
It was the top selling desktop in the US for three months.
Nearly half of sales were to first-time computer buyers because it seemed friendly.
And that's how Apple sold it.
as of being a computer that you could buy and you could be on the internet in three steps.
And this is amazing, nearly 20% were the people switching away from Windows.
Over the next four years, they sold six million
iMac G3s. And as I said, this was enormously influential on the PC industry.
In fact, outside the PC industry, even the George Foreman grill started to look like an iMac.
And I love this detail.
Tim Cook's the current
Back then, he was the chief operating officer and he's ruthless.
He is ruthless. And Tim Cook.
Back then, pre-booked $100 million in air freight to guarantee
Shipping and delivery of IMAX
So Apple would have them everywhere available for the holiday season.
And as a result, their competitors, all the other computer makers, had problems and experienced delays because Apple basically bought everything.
That August and September.
Bill Gates gave depositions in the antitrust suit and those became public and he looked very bad.
He was invasive. He was argumentative. He seemed to whine a lot. So it did not help their case with the public.
That September, a little company called Google gets incorporated.
Still created by people that were grad students at Stanford University.
Well, that October, developers have looked at Mozilla and the code that Netscape had.
And they've realized this is a mess. We have to start from scratch.
And that's why you're not going to hear about Firefox for the next several years.
Because of that decision okay
Last year of the decade.
1999.
Get up.
The matrix becomes a huge hit for nerds and other people everywhere.
Bringing, most famously
bullet time.
No.
into our shared cinematic vocabulary.
And I know every single one of you guys saw it.
Oh, Agent Smith.
Ow.
He is the one.
That June AOL bought Nelsoft, the company that made Win-AM for $80 million.
That was the time, man. If you could develop a website or software and get it even halfway popular.
companies would snap that up.
That July, Apple announced.
that the i book that i
would become the world's first Wi-Fi enabled laptop.
And it was going to have 80211B Wi-Fi wireless networking, which was very new at the time.
And this was a big deal. Now, the iBook was made for kids.
for schools. And so that's where they started.
We're going to put Wi-Fi into the iBook. And at the same time, they announced that they were putting Wi-Fi into their laptop.
They also announced the airport base station, one of the very, very first
wireless routers that supported 802.11b.
And in fact, this is how important it is.
Cease links a wireless networking pioneer, said, if there's one person
who caused the wireless LAN world to happen. It was Steve Jobs.
At that time, interim ceo of apple
He decided to select wireless LAN as a differentiating feature for the iBook launch
In 1999.
Then October, PayPal launched
By August of 2000, there were 2.7 million accounts.
By October of 2000, it was 25% of eBay transactions were all conducted.
And several people that were in this company went on to some
good things and some not the so good things.
Then November 17th, VA Linux.
open source forge. Now, this was a pretty small company that had been founded back in 93.
to sell computers with Linux pre-installed.
And they decided to start the very first free site for open source software developers to host their work.
And they included, because this is way, way, way before Git.
CVS, the concurrent versioning system for source code management, a bug tracker and mailing list.
And this became a very big deal very quickly.
that December, they decided to go public with an IPO, LNUX,
With the stock price at $30.
In one day, it went up 700%.
to $240. How much had they sold for the year? $17.7 million. Again.
dot com mania.
Because they knew, oh, Linux, that's the internet. That's this new thing that's getting hot.
that companies are getting into. Oh, this company makes Linux computers. Let's throw money at it.
And as a result, you had a company that made less than $18 million in sales for a year.
being valued at $240 per share.
in one day. Now, unfortunately, by December 2002, it was down to $1.19 a share
So you should have sold as soon, you know, as soon as you possibly could.
And that's how I'll end. That is the end of the 1990s.
I am now available for questions.
comments and brick bets.
That was absolutely amazing.
Thank you.
Oh, you're welcome.
I agree. I have a question. So you covered several different antitrust
I think they were all against Microsoft.
Yeah.
And now we have all the antitrust going on.
against Google. At one point you said that the antitrust suits were coming way too late
I was wondering what your feelings are looking back at all the antitrust suits in the 90s and then thinking about the ones now against Google. What are your thoughts?
I still think they're coming way too late.
on stuff uh you know the problem is the government moves very slowly
Technology moves very quickly.
And the other problem I have is that when the companies are found guilty, they basically get a slap on the hand.
Supposedly, the government wants to split up Google.
I will be very happy if that happens
Kind of. I will be shocked if it does happen.
We'll see. Part of the reason…
I do think Google needs to be severely punished.
I don't think what the government wants to do makes a lot of sense. So what the government has said is we want them to sell off Chrome.
That doesn't make any sense.
Because who's going to buy Chrome?
is not a standalone business.
And Chrome and the thing I don't think people understand, you guys do probably. I've certainly talked about it before, is
The important thing about chrome
is too many people use it.
The important thing about it is, is that Google oversees the chromium
project, which is the open source
version underneath.
And so every six weeks or so.
Google takes the latest version of Chromium the open source
browser engine and browser.
And they slap a bunch of proprietary stuff in there and they put Google spying stuff in there and they push that out as an update to Chrome.
Microsoft does the exact same thing with Edge.
Every few weeks, Microsoft takes Chromium
adds a bunch of Microsoft stuff onto it, proprietary stuff, and pushes that out as an update to Edge.
Well, plenty of other browser makers do the same thing.
So I like Brave, as you guys know. Brave is based on Chromium.
Vivaldi is based on Chromium. I mean, many, many, many, many, many browsers are based on Chromium.
Well, that's essentially an open source project
Google can pay for that because it's Google.
My question is, who would take that over?
If the government said, okay, Google, you've got to get rid of Chrome. Well, Chromium is going to go along with it.
Who's going to take that over? I mean, Microsoft?
Well, then isn't that just as bad as Google? Now, Microsoft controls the main browser.
used by the majority of the web. We've already been down that road before.
Apple's not going to buy it.
Who else? Amazon?
I don't think Amazon is going to want it.
I just don't know who would purchase
that platform, it doesn't make a lot of sense. And then the other thing they want to do
is pull the Play Store out of there
And I have less of a problem with that.
But I do think computer operating system
creators should be able to have app stores. I think they should be more open.
I think Apple needs to open up the app store a lot.
on iOS and iPads.
But I do think it's reasonable, just like it's reasonable now to say any operating system, it's okay to have a browser built in.
That's expected. Any operating system should have a file manager. It should have a calendar, contacts, a browser.
And that, you know, and nowadays, virtually every operating system has some sort of store.
where people can make it easy to download apps and buy apps and so on.
So I just think it's problematic what the remedies
for that. Sorry, that's a long answer
It's a complicated question.
Yeah, well, just to make it a little bit more, one thing you didn't cover was the, you know, the deals to make Google the default search
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Because like, you know, it would be super ironic if like one of the outcomes of this was Firefox dies, right? Because that's how they get most of their revenue is from Google paying them to be the default search.
Right.
And if you have an antitrust case and it results in even less competition in the browser market, that would just
show the ineptitude of the government right there.
Yeah, I agree.
I agree. But…
I agree. But it also shows the attitude of Firefox because they have made
shitty decision after shitty decision for the last 10 years. So yes.
Part of that is definitely on the fact that that would hurt them, but also they've made really bad decisions about how to allocate
their resources, what to pay their executives.
You know, what gets priority in the company and what doesn't and so
You know, they've also shot themselves in the foot repeatedly.
But yeah, but the other funny thing is funny
So let's say that they have to stop paying Apple $20 billion a year to feature Google.
What do you think Apple's going to do? Do you think Apple is going to go, well, okay, we're not going to include Google.
I mean, I wish they wouldn't.
Maybe they'll actually give people a choice when they start up. But what are most people going to pick? Google.
So now people are still going to be using Google, but Apple's not going to be making any money off of it, which I guess is better.
But it's not like it's going to hurt Google per se.
it might inspire.
It might inspire that.
to create its own circuit.
I'm hearing an echo.
So I was saying it's a good…
Great presentation, brought back some memories from
working in that time.
Good. Excellent.
How about the rest of you? Let me go around.
Around.
Somebody has the mic on because I'm hearing it.
Did you say the presentation will be?
Will the presentation be available as the slide on the website or something?
It could be, yeah. I'll PDF.
It could be, yeah.
There's a PDF. Okay. So it'll be available from sle
The SL. SL.
Yeah, I always send the link. I send the link to uh
Hi, Steve.
The recording will be available on our archive.
Okay. Okay. Thanks.
He's echo.
Yeah.
I think it's Eric.
So somebody has their mic off now. Good.
Okay.
Yeah, I think that was Eric, actually.
Yeah, so…
Does anybody have any questions? If not, I'll go around, see what you guys thought was interesting.
Anybody? Okay.
So, uh.
Rob? Yeah.
Oh.
I would say skim the comments and see if you have any response to them.
Oh, yeah. Good idea. Thank you.
So try to put them there.
as you were saying things to hint back to what you were saying
So I didn't interrupt you.
I appreciate it. Oh, I left out Y2K. I completely forgot.
turn me on. You're on.
Okay, well, Scott…
No, it wasn't. I completely forgot.
While Scott's reading, I'll give just a little filler. That last comment about uh
VA Linux and the huge rise in the stock price in the first day.
I remember that week very well. I don't remember if it was that exact day or just later that week.
We had one of our monthly meetings and that time there was one of our members
Mike King.
who had invested very well on that first day early in the day and had made a killing in the first day rise in the stock price
And at the end of our meeting that night, he invited everybody to come out to whichever restaurant bar we were going to at that time and paid for
the whole crowd that night. So thank you, VA Linux and thank you, Mike.
And those were back in the day so we had
Very nice.
the days when we had between 30 and 50 people short of a meeting, wasn't it?
Yep, we had a crowd.
I remember VA Linux
being one of the first
non-traditional PC server vendor
that was trying to take x86
early 64-bit
x86 systems
And actually, you want a box to be a server. You want to run Linux, you want to do some amazing things with it.
Have we got something for you?
And it seemed like everybody I knew
really liked them. And it wasn't…
vaporware.
Lombardi asked earlier.
about what I meant by a lot of different operating systems.
This is a slide I did not make because it's butt ugly.
But I show my students
And you can see you can see
that back in 75, when the first personal computers started to appear.
Right. We have other
And that goes till about 85.
TRS-80, Atari.
Red is apple.
Commodore is in there. Amiga's in there.
So, you know, through the 80s.
And even into the 90s
You know, you had lots of different operating systems, the Commodore, the Atari, the Amiga.
Apple operating systems, Windows, DOS.
And there were other others. I mean, it's not like others stopped in 85.
But that's what I was talking about. That just gives you an idea
about the different world that we were back in back in the 70s, 80s and then even
But notice by like 93, it's all Windows running on Intel. And eventually they got to the point by the end of the decade and into the 2000s
Where they're at 95% of the market
95% of personal computers
we're shipping with windows on them.
And that didn't really start to change until 2007.
with the iPhone and then the Android to the point where Windows by 2012 was only about 35%.
of the operating system shipments.
out there and it's less today.
And then I also provide this one
to my students. And that's just from 2009 to now
And that shows Windows. So when I made this in 2022
or 2023, Microsoft is at 31%. Android was 39%.
Mac was seven, iOS 17. That includes iPads.
Linux is the little red, Chrome, and then other. So we still have other.
But that…
Where did you source those Linux numbers from? Curious.
I sourced them from Stat Counter.
And I've got the links on all of them.
in the notes. But this is a separate presentation.
This is in one called Scott and Jan's an introduction. I always show it to my students.
in the first class of many of my classes.
And I will show you where you can acquire it.
If you go to my website at graneman.com
and go to presentations, all presentations.
So Graneman.com, presentations.
all presentations, it's the very first thing on the page.
Right there. There's the slides and there's the notes.
So if you download
the slides and the notes you'll have
the links to everything.
And I know it's notoriously hard to
market share on Linux and other things. So you got to pick something and stick with
So in my case, I went with stat counter.
But it's certainly something you could quibble over.
Hmm.
You know, one thing I remember a lot from the 90s is like the different games that came out, right? Like Doom was so influential. And then I remember like
the hardware that came with it, different graphics and sound blaster cards and stuff.
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
I think some of that would have been cool if you do another version of this one.
It's in the other one I hadn't transferred over.
Yep. I'm just looking at the notes here.
So there wasn't a lot of Linux milestones.
Well…
Truly, there were more Linux milestones in the 90s.
I put some in there and I need to add more and I didn't get a chance to copy over a bunch too.
What I mean by Linux was done correctly the first time, I don't mean it was perfect and there was nothing nothing to change.
I mean, as something to build on.
the ideas they had the ideas they had
were good. And it was a good product that we've built on and obviously some of the same commands are around some of the basic paradigms are still around.
I didn't mean that it was sent from on high perfect.
I mean, it was a good, it was about as good a start as you're going to get to a lot of things.
That's what I meant.
Cubs asked John if you want to. Yep, yep. I mentioned that Pepsi.
9,800, yeah.
Yeah, 14.4 was
fast, although I quickly got a 28.
PowerPC.
Your dad paid for Netscape. Nice.
What an honest man.
uh…
Yeah.
Yeah, he said nobody called it navigator. I remember this one school librarian called it navigator. And I remember looking at her like.
what are you even like you're so old. What are you talking about
Right. Well, there's the exception proves the rule, huh?
Well, I called it Navigator for a while, and it really became a thing and it was either version three or version four.
When they introduced
Email, I think, was called composer.
They had a web page creation. It was more than just
the web.
That was communicator and that was version four.
The programs were separate.
It was like a sweet Netscape communicator suite
Right.
But I remember each program navigator was a program, Composer was a program and
So…
Yep.
They had an irc client they had a web page builder. They had an email. They had a contacts program.
Yeah, it was way too much.
way, way, way too much.
So, yep.
Absolutely. Anybody else?
All right. Robert Levitt, real quick.
This is…
Go ahead, Grant.
Are you going to say something, Grant?
No, this is Stan. I wanted to make some comments. I got a list of them.
Yeah, go ahead.
Here we go.
I'd like to point out that don't like to point out that
I'm of opinion that the hypertext concept came from that 1948 Atlantic article about microfiche collections.
By Vannevar Bush, as we may think.
And…
Of course.
Yes, yes. That's my favorite thing because that's the year I was born. ARPANET, pre-DNS ARPANET that i i
was first introduced to.
It started out with a list of user sites with IP numbers. That was before the DNS concept.
Correct. Right. That was the host file.
I…
I think that NEX failed because they were ethernet only and they didn't have a floppy drive.
Nick?
I thought it was a wonderful machine until I saw it had no floppy drive.
Well, the problem with next
Oh, you know.
Yeah.
Go ahead. There were several problems with next
It was way too expensive.
Yeah.
It used an optical disc, which was slow.
Not a lot of software supported it. Bill Gates said
develop for it, I'll piss on it.
So Microsoft refused to develop for it.
So it was
it was both too good in a lot of ways and not good enough in others.
Edsel.
Yeah. And Windows 2 made my brain hurt.
So it was bad enough when I saw Windows 3.
And some things I have questions about, and I'm not sure when the dates fall in.
When did Richard Stallman start the new software tools? I think you should
point that out somewhere.
And I think it was…
Wasn't that in the 80s?
It was in the 80s, yeah.
That was in the 80s. I covered that.
Was it?
Okay. And I'm not sure how
I'm wondering, wasn't there an initial legal court ruling that
And an idea or software or look and feel was patentable?
And let's see, that's part of you
problem with our problem with our
They allowed software patents? Yes.
Yeah, I think that was a bad mistake.
But the patent office never showed him. That was stupid.
Yeah. And when was Bill Booksgate, what, the way forward or whatever it was titled, wherein he did not recognize the
Oh, that was around 90…
496, something like that, the way forward.
by Bill Gates.
And…
Because he got a lot of stuff.
And I've got it. The other thing I've got somewhere is the link to, I've got it on my
new linux.
website, the link to the Microsoft
Halloween papers.
Right. Yep. That would be good to mention. I should have mentioned also, I don't know if it was
the 90s or the 2000s, I think it was 2000s where Ballmer's saying Linux is a cancer
Yeah.
The book came out in 95, The Road Ahead.
And then it was revised by a year later
And I can't remember what
Yeah, there was some stuff in there
that was hilariously wrong.
Yeah, but anyway, it was a big seller.
Definitely.
Oh.
Yeah, I really appreciate what you've put together here. It brought back a lot of bad memories.
Yeah, I bet.
Yeah, I agree.
Thank you, Scott. Thank you.
Absolutely.
You've definitely highlighted
some of the bad parts of Microsoft I remember and i fear
going forward and people that cut their teeth 10 or more
15 years after me, you're like, Microsoft's not that bad it's like
I know. I think, yeah.
I remember things from the 90s.
Yep, I agree.
I agree.
I remember this one. So the West Wing, that show, the political show. I remember on one episode, you know, there's like this bad story and they're like.
oh no, does everybody know about this yet? No, no, no. It's just on the internet.
Nice.
Right. Like just saying, you know, the internet was this fringe thing, so only the nerds go there. So nobody really knows about this yet, you know?
Right. That's great.
Yeah, well, the drudge report changed that one.
Obviously, I started at Dead King.
I remember it was very early 2000s, but when Active Directory was coming out.
And people are talking about what Microsoft had done with Kerberos. And it was like, yeah, they embraced and they extended it. And they're like, that's a good thing, isn't it?
No, not from Microsoft.
Right. Nope.
That's true. Because the third one is extinguished.
Embrace, extend, extinguish
people forget that.
That's right.
So Robert Leavitt, in 30 seconds or less, what did you find most interesting?
Oh, I left out Bob. You're right.
Robert Leavitt, you here?
Nope. Okay. Gary Meyer, what'd you find most interesting?
Within the bathroom.
of…
Oh, okay.
Too much information.
Well, Robert, why don't you go first then? What do you find most interesting?
The entire presentation was interesting.
Okay. That's not really answering my question, but okay.
Yeah.
I have students that say that.
All right, Gary, what did you find most interesting?
Let's see, a couple things. I'm gonna have to
figure out which one I like which i like
think is the most, but yes, we already mentioned you missed the Y2K warnings. I mean, God, by 1999
Yeah.
But…
I did.
The…
the money. Loved it when you…
started quoting IPOs, stock prices and i mean
Those were the years when, as you said, boy.
If you came up with something two months later
big corporation went buy it off you.
Oh, yeah.
Great way of making money.
Oh, yeah, absolutely. It was crazy.
Good. Bruce Lee, what did you find most interesting?
The tie, the history of that 12th employee at tie and
Oh, yeah.
paying so much money.
And then I thought you were going to go down the way of GoDaddy and everybody and their mother taking on the
You know, dot-com sites, but I think that was more of a 2007-ish thing, wasn't it?
Yeah. Yeah. By the way, she was paid $12.50 an hour.
So that's…
Well, in that time, that's probably pretty good.
minimum wage in my area now.
Yeah, but still she was responsible for majorly important things
And the whole time she was the one who did the website the whole time she was making 1250 an hour.
Hopefully she got some stock options.
I don't know if it ever happened.
at the right time.
I think it's private. I don't think it ever went public.
Oh, okay.
Oh, wow.
Yeah. Carrie Shug, how about you?
Gary?
Carry, Carrie. Okay.
Sebastian, how about you?
Well, good evening, Scott. Thank you for watching us and directing presentation. I didn't know about the Linux web browser and
Oh, good.
Since I love using a terminal, I really appreciate you sharing that.
So thanks.
Cool. Excellent. Tony.
How about you?
I thought it was um
like the like how the web pages started out, like Amazon and eBay, how like they were so simple back then and they're
billion dollar companies now. It's like so ridiculous.
Yeah. Yeah. You're absolutely right.
there's kind of a charm to them, definitely.
their simplicity. Sean, how about you?
Well, Scott, you know, I really appreciate you coming out. And, you know, you've had a really good run here giving presentations at Slug, but I'm afraid that's all over now.
After watching us make that early 90s
After making us watch that early 90s Microsoft marketing material, I'm afraid that's the last straw. We just can't invite you back.
You played like two or three minutes of that cringy sitcom thing and
inexcusable. I'm sorry.
I don't know. I just wanted to share the pain.
It's been nice knowing you.
Okay.
Thank you. Just wanted to share the pain.
Yeah, why is there no cringe emoji?
I should put one on there.
There's a swear emoji.
or a projectile vomit emoji
Yeah, those would all be appropriate.
Thomas Clark, how about you?
Yeah, I mostly grew up in the 90s, but I was pretty young tyke about 1990.
So it was very interesting.
seen a lot of things in more detail and like slowly having
you know more of my own recollection as it went on. It was very interesting
Good.
You know, because there's that kind of weird decade where, you know, you're a little tyke and then you're growing up into an adult and you're
memory is kind of strange.
Right. Right.
Good. Okay. Gary Meyer.
Did you go? Yeah, you did yours.
How about Lee? Lee, how about you? Are you here?
Yeah, I'm here.
Okay. How about you, ma'am?
uh other you know in addition to the recap
a lot of stuff I didn't know about Apple.
and history and netscape.
But like somebody already said, just seeing some of the early websites out there was just really interesting.
Oh, yeah. Yeah, I've got a whole bunch of them. I could have put more in.
I'll try to think of that.
Just like the stupid commercials, you know, a few of them is good
Too many of them is weird.
Oh, yeah. I hear you.
I hear you.
But thanks anyway. You're a good guy.
Yeah, I've got a collection of them, but I'll hold off.
Did I not, did I miss anybody? I don't know if I missed anybody or not.
You didn't single me out, but…
Oh, go ahead. Go ahead.
I think you actually…
brought to light some of the more darker aspects of Microsoft.
that I had known about but forgotten about you know it's
Mm-hmm.
25 years or more since some of them.
I put a couple of things in the chat that I noticed.
you didn't mention.
Yeah, it's good.
And being the Information Superhighway and how that is
Yep.
supposedly something that was supposedly something
going to be cable but not internet. It's just
Right.
Yeah.
flash in the pan, nothing in the internet just takes off.
Yep.
And nothing novel.
And…
Right. That's true. Forgot them.
Yeah.
Good. Okay. Yeah, those are good.
Pretty good presentation nothing to really nitpick.
I like it a lot.
Okay, no problem.
Anybody else? Anybody else left?
Kerry Shug, I noticed your uh
video came up. Were you trying to say something?
Yeah, go ahead.
Kara?
Terry Shog, were you trying to get in?
Nope.
No.
I have a follow-up comment on Microsoft Bob.
Yeah.
I feel like it was a very, very, very badly executed experiment.
But one I ended up going through myself
sometime within the last decade.
wherein I would have different desktops
for different functions that I'm working on.
Mm-hmm.
And I have the icons for whatever I'm doing arranged how I want to optimize the workflow.
And then if I'm going to something else, I go to a different desktop that is set up
whatever for that. And that really
parodies or patterns
the different rooms
Microsoft bob
it was like a shell
exploration or we're just going to try this
and they didn't take it very far, but I think there could have been something of
different profiles for different tasks and they're all you
Right. Yeah, we have that now, I think, with browsers, you can have profiles in browsers, right?
I have cookies for this site and these logons for this site, this group of sites for this profile and others.
I think part of the problem was
Going back to Microsoft has no taste
Yeah.
it was poorly implemented.
it was often a solution in search of a problem in certain ways, but given what they were doing.
The, you know, Clippy started out.
as one of the characters in Bob, and it was often seen by people that wanted to like it as way too annoying.
So it didn't do it. Because again, we didn't have AI. We didn't have good tools. It would just jump in all the time.
So, yeah, it was an interesting experiment.
But it's still fun to make fun of.
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah. Yeah.
I should have put that in there because that's definitely worthy of mocking.
Oh, yeah.
So, yeah.
Anybody else?
All right.
I remember, this is Stan, I remember Microsoft buying uh
box base, which is a box base
very good improvement over DBase extremely
and a number of other things that they bought that were really good and they just
vitamins, they said they incorporated
the technology into their stuff
But it was garbage.
Afterwards.
Really? Yeah.
Yep. A lot of companies do that very poorly.
Very, very poorly. You're right.
It was interesting that the uh
Office version you showed.
Outlook was not a thing yet.
No.
I mean, Schedule Plus was its own thing.
No, I think that was until 97.
Yeah.
Think Office 97 introduced Outlook.
So, yeah. Okay, guys. Well, thanks.
I appreciate it. It was fun.
Thanks, Scott. Hey, thank you.
All right. I'll see you.
really appreciate it and really appreciate it
I'll see you next for the 2000s.
Yeah.
Yeah. And for some of the new guys here
some of Scott's well scott's previous decades of history for computers are up on our archives.
Yeah. Yep.
And Stan, if I haven't sent you stuff, I probably forgot to send me an email. I'll try to remember to send you the slides.
Okay.
Because I think I've forgotten one or two. I can't remember.
I can go back and look.
Yeah, happy to.
Thank you. Thank you.
All right, gentlemen, you all have a good night.
And I will talk to you all soon. Take care.
Yep.
While we got you, let me just check one quick thing.
Yeah.
looks like jeff already got off.
Let me go back here.
when it was in discuss
his question about the uh about brave
I put an email late this afternoon that he figured it out. Oh, yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah, he updated manually and then it pulled the update next update
automatically okay that update wasn't in when I last looked at it this afternoon and yep, okay.
And yes, he has updated that. Okay.
Cool.
Okay. Thank you once again, Scott. As always, this week.
All righty.
tour divorce and a wonderful reliving history so uh cool
Right. Cool.
Appreciate the quick job, too.
Oh, no problem. No problem.
Definitely, definitely.
Happy to do it. I'll talk to you all soon.
Thanks a lot.
Bye.
Yeah, I need to bow too.
The rest of the crew that's here, any of you have any other general Q&A that you
We're thinking you wanted to ask or point out
Before we shut this down.
Questions can be asked on our discuss list.
And Scott watches a disgust list.
Not discuss. Discuss.
Yes, we need to start a separate list called the discussed list.
There you go.
All right. And before we do pull a plug, Grant, can you
give us a little information about your V6 issue.
Just so we can figure out if it's in any of our wheelhouses or not.
Grant's gone. Oh, he's gone? Yeah.
Oh, shoot. Okay. He has IPv6 thing I thought he was going to bring back. Oh, yeah, that's right. He mentioned that.
Okay. All right. No biggie.
Next year, I guess.
You got it? Oh, yeah. Next year.
All right, guys, bookend Gary.
Okay, this was the uh this was the
monthly meeting of the st louis log also called St. Louis Linux summer 19th.
as part of SLUG. This is Thursday, December the 19th, 2024. Our speaker tonight
was Scott Graneman, and he took us through the history of computing in the 1990s and uh
With that, y'all have a great holiday. Thank you all for coming and we'll see you next year. Good night.