Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Javan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and how the tech are you? It's time for a classic episode of tech Stuff. This episode originally published on May four, two thousand fifteen, So Hey, star wars day. It is titled The Story of Internet Explorer, Part One, which I guess means you can probably have a pretty good idea of what next week's classic episode is going to be. This episode featured special guest Nate Langson. Nate is awesome, great tech journalist. I should have him on the show again. It's been too long since I last spoke with him. Hope you enjoy. Nate is joining me to talk about Internet Explorer, and the reason we're talking about it is that it's a web browser has a very long history, and that history now seems to have an end cap to it because Microsoft appears to be leaving Internet Explorer behind and embracing a new product that currently is codenamed Projects Spartan, but we'll probably have some different name once it actually goes live. So we're going to cover the dramatic history that's filled with uh tons of interesting stories, as it turns out, and to really get started, we have to turn the clock back before there was ever any web browsers at all, at the birth of the first web browser, which we can trace back to Christmas Day, December nineteen wo m C m x C, as the Romans would call it. Right, I'm glad you took that. Whenever I start thinking about Roman numerals, I have to start dialing I X I I uh, which only takes sense for the listeners here in America. Um So, Tim berners Lee was working at at cern saying people who are responsible for the large Hadron Collider, and had developed a program that would allow for the retrieval and display of information UH in a way that would make sense, make it easy to navigate. This would become the first web browser, which is kind of funny because without the web browser, you really don't have a worldwide Web. You definitely had an Internet because the Internet is a network of networks and a lot of people I realize maybe this isn't as bad as it used to be, but a lot of people often will say web and mean Internet or vice versa. They'll use the terms changeably. I've described it in the past. Touch the two people who get this wrong as the web is the call on the highway that is the internet, right. They they are the websites on top of the net, right, And there are other vehicles on that same highway, right. Because the email does not have to be web based uh FTP, you know, file transfer protocol, other protocols. Um. In fact, the way I originally really made use of the Internet back in the day was through the tel net chat client. I used that a lot when I was in college as a way of distracting myself and making friends with people who were more into the same things I was into. I went to for the first two years of my schooling a small community college in rural Georgia, and a lot of the people I was around didn't share the same interests I did, so telling that was one of those things that allowed me to go beyond that. But that was before I had ever heard of the Worldwide Web and web browsers um. So we have to remember that this time before were there were browsers there, there were there were not really any user friendly ways of accessing information. You kind of had to really dive into the tech and understand commands in order to get anything out of it. Even if those commands were fairly simple, it was an high enough barrier of entry that there were only a few of us playing in that in that world at that time, right, I mean, there were like people in colleges and research facilities and governments that had access to it for various official purposes. There were very few like fun applications outside of some wacky people saying, hey, this computer that's crunching numbers for your your astronomy class, we can also make it play tic tech toe. I mean around about this time, there were also other similar sort of projects they think that we're going on at certain like people built sort of not competing necessarily, but there were other programs that created to sort of browse in a in a more visual way, right, And and it turns out that this was a brilliant idea. And another little thing to fall back on is just a quick explanation of what's going on with a web browser. For those of you who are you know, more casual fans of technology, this might be helpful for those of you who you know, are really deep in the field. This is going to sound incredibly simplistic, but we have to talk about what a client is and what a server is. So your client is essentially your machine, the device you're using to end up retrieving information from some other computer a server which actually holds the information that you are interested in. So if you are using a web browser to visit a web page, there is somewhere in the world a computer that has all that information on it and it gets the request from your browser the client, and says, all right, well, here's what you ask for, and send it across the internet. Your browser is in charge of displaying that information in some way that hopefully is useful and informative. And that's the basic relationship that the web browser is built around. It's not the only client server relationship, but it's a great example of one, I mean, and it's it's interesting because, as I'm sure we will be coming too later, the relationship between the idea of a client server model really has not changed. And in fact, when you get into the likes of the Chrome OS, the browser is just a dumb client. It's a client terminal model for the entire OS and essentially, but we're moving forward twenty five years before we get at that point. The nice thing is that this model works so well that it ended up being the foundation for a lot of different applications, including the Chrome operating system and uh and of course we're seeing more and more services and applications migrating to the Internet side of things where we see this this uh, I mean, it's kind of a seesaw act. Right on one side, we see hardware manufacturers that are still saying no, no, no, you really want the strongest, fastest machine possible. And meanwhile all the service providers are saying, we're handling all the heavy lifting. You just need a device that can connect to us. That way we get to control all the stuff. Uh. So it's it's but it's because of this relationship that that kind of infrastructure is even possible. I mean that, I mean, that's the interesting thing. Also, just as a slight related tangent, I suppose about Moore's law, which is celebrating an anniversary at the moment, is that it's always been assumed that we need the most and biggest and fastest power in our computers because we want to do more and more things locally. Which, in a way, if that was always going to be true, you would need less and less on the on the service side outside of the well the realms of um the web. But of course now it's becoming much more about efficiency and and low cost and and um thinness in our devices, and so we don't need that sort of huge lifting power within the machines we're currently using ourselves, which makes a browser the perfect interface for a modern machine because it just needs to be the go between, the conduit between the very powerful server and the very small, powerful, less powerful desktop machine or laptop or tablet or notebook or what have you. And it means More's law has may actually become irrelevant before it actually becomes wrong. You know, we may not need that power, that sort of doubling of power every eighteen months, because we have actually no need for that power anymore. And in fact, Moore's law originally was all about the financial side of you know, the fact that there were these financial drivers that were incentives to create these increasingly more powerful and smaller components on square inch of silicon. Now we're getting to a point where if if we don't need that, then there's less incentive. So there may be a point of pride among some you know, engineers and computer scientists who want to keep pushing that envelope and try and make it um, you know, try and beat their record in a way. But if the the demand isn't there, then, like you said, Moore's law could become obsolete before we hit that fundamental limit from the laws of physics that had gone through the same exponential growth that More's law predicted for um silicon um, you would be able to do a hundred miles on one tenth of a millilita of fuel and that would cost you twenty five cents in a car that costs five cents. And uh, in order to get back to the world that where this is, this is being you know, this is a relevant thing. UH, going back to the early nineties. This is these are the days where early nineties I was in high school about to go into college. UM and early to mid nineties that's my high school college years. Uh. In the those early nineties, you started seeing lots of different programmers build their own web browsers. A lot of them were within cerns, some of them were in colleges and universities, and we started to see more people get access to it because it was very clear that this was going to be a useful tool to navigate information. We move on to February and that's when Mark and Reason and Eric Bana of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana champaign A eight and C. S A, our mutual friend Tom Merritt I believe, went to the University of Illinois UH and C. S A. They decided to introduce a browser themselves. That was the Mosaic Browser. It was on Unix. It was also for the the X Windows platform UM and UH there there colleague Alex Todec created a version that could run on Macintosh computer. So this was a browser that could run on cross platforms. Although uh, the appearance of web information vary depending upon what platform you were using, So it wasn't a m a smooth experience across all platforms. It wasn't something that was It wasn't like you were going to get the exact same experience on one machine as on another, but you could get to the information. UH and I had a lot of features that said, apart from the earlier web browsers, like things that we take for granted now, like bookmarks, you know that would being able to to mark a specific web page is something of interest so that you can easily navigate to it in the future. It was really important also things like icons and pictures as opposed to just text, which made it more attractive to look at um and it was free to use. And it's important to mention this beforehand because it turns out a lot of the the stuff they worked on would later find its way into other future web browsers. By ninety nine, market Drissa would partner with Jeff clark and who was the founder of Silicon Graphics. They created Mosaic Communications. It was later renamed to Netscape Communications, and they started to develop a web browser for the consumer market. So that's gonna sound really familiar to anyone who was, you know, using computers around the time of the first browser Wars. Netscape should definitely ring a bell. Uh. This is around the time that that Windows is basically about to go gold and and go on sales, So we're still in Windows three point one era at the moment, I think, and uh, and I mean the Netscape navigator, I think was the very I might have used Mosaic when I was in college, come to think of it, But I'm pretty sure. I quickly transition to Netscape Navigator and that became my browser of choice in those days. Um, you know, I didn't ask you, Nate, what browser do you typically use when you almost everything? So you are you are clearly a Mac owner. I am a Mac owner. I I love Safari because I use almost no add ons at all, because I just want speed and fast and I needed to think everything, and so far he's always work really well for me. That makes sense. I I detest Safari with a passion that burns brighter than the thousand explaining funds. But it's mostly because I don't use a Mac. If I did use a Mac, then, like, if you're in the Apple infrastructure, it's amazing. If you're all in, it's phenomenal. If you're only kind of sort of in, it gets really irritating really quickly. But then I'm all in on the Google infrastructure, so I use Chrome. Yes, that's the difference, you see, because the browser is the thing you use the most, I would imagine, and so if your phone is the thing that you carry and use the most in the day, then it stands to reason that you're going to want to use a browser that worked best on a phone, right, and that's kind of peeking ahead to some of the issues with Internet explore. Uh So, so we get the n c s A licensing the commercial rights to Mosaic to a company that was called at the time, spy Glass. The company no longer exists, so that should tell you how things turn out in the future. Spy Glass ended up licensing that same technology to other companies, including Microsoft, So the Mosaic code ends up making its way to Microsoft um and that was really important to Microsoft because, as Nate was saying, they were preparing Windows for launch and they really wanted to have a component in there that would be a web browser, and they had decided that it made more sense to license that technology from someone else rather than trying to develop it in house. So that's what led them to spy Glass and licensing the Mosaic code. We'll be back with more of this classic episode of tech stuff after this quick break October, before and Escape would release a beta version of their project, which was codenamed Mozilla that will become important later to It was designated zero point nine six b uh. I decided early on that when I we started looking at the actual builds of Internet Explorer. We're gonna look at whole numbers only, because otherwise the path leads to madness. You mean you how going to consider Chrome Version twenty six point nine point six point three six four was a seminal release. I mean it was beautiful, really, I mean that the fact that it improves so much upon the press accessor that came out earlier that same day is phenomenal. But no, I'm going to skip it. Um. Yeah, So we move on to to August. That is the day Microsoft released the Windows operating system. Uh man, I still remember the commercials for Windows they had. They had this little band, the Rolling Stones, that had a song called start Me Up that was played during the Windows nine commercials. Because that was also the introduction of the start button on Windows. Uh the little button that wouldn't quit or people wouldn't let the little button quit. And they introduced a web browser which they named Internet Explorer. Made a lot of sense, it was it was, in fact, a way to navigate through the Internet, specifically the World Wide Web. But this is this is the point I just interject here because this is the thing that I've always hated about Internet Explorer is that it's a web browser, right, why is it not cold Web Explorer. I think uh, I think they were afraid they might have, you know, some sort of confusion with spiders or something. I don't know, Nate, It's it confuses me to but yeah, Internet Explorer one point oh came out with Windows. They had an agreement with spy Glass, which was incredibly clever. Some might call it sneaky and underhanded. Their agreement with spy Glass. So Spyglass makes the the code, the technology that Internet Explorer runs on Internet Explorer. The agreement with Spyglass was that Microsoft would pay a quarterly fee to spy Glass. All right, that's cool, and they also agreed to share royalties for Internet Explorer. But Microsoft also decided to bundle Internet Explorer with Windows, so Internet Explore itself wasn't on sale and so if you're not selling it, you can't make royalties, which means they didn't have to share any money from the Windows sales to spy Glass. Yeah. Pretty sneaky. Um. That would end up biting them a little bit later, but at any rate, at the time they were just like, hey, we really scored on this. Now when they started only six Microsoft employees. According to every source, I saw only six people in Microsoft. We're actually working on Internet Explorer, which is kind of hard to believe today. Um And at the time, the web was not what you and I are used to. It had about twenty basic tags and HTML that allowed you to construct pages and change the style things like tables and and the font size, that kind of stuff. So it's really really basic. And if you ever look at screenshots of old browsers at old web pages, I mean it mostly looks like the blandest Wikipedia page you have ever seen, with no pictures or anything like that. A lot of the early ones don't have any pictures on them because if you did put a picture on it, then you were shooting yourself in the foot. Most of us did not have any fast connection to any kind of networks, so accessing a website with pictures meant that you would start, you know, you navigate to the page, walk away from your computer for ten minutes, and then come back to see if the pictures at all loaded. I remember it well. I particularly remember it when I was trying to view pictures on the now defunct page cats scan, where people would use flatbed scanners to scan the undersides of their cats, and yeah, you I could actually walk away and be very British and make a cup of tea while waiting for the photo of the cat to arrive on my computer. I guess this is the point where I I I mentioned that Nate has too particular great passions in life, which include metal and cats. Yes, and the other ones, but they are the ones I am known for. It seems those are the those are the two I whenever I hear if you think from you on social media, there's a there's a probably at chance it's going to fall into one of those two categories. Yeah. So there's still quite a few other things, but they don't they don't. They don't hit as high as slice on the pie chart. Yes, that's very true, very true. So one of the things about the limitations of HTML that were that was a particular are thorn in the sides of early web browsers and web users was that the limitations meant people had to find creative ways around those limitations to create rich user experiences. I don't think did they ever use that term in the UK, the rich user experience experience? Yes, I mean we we probably heard it quite a bit. I don't remember it particularly, but I imagine it was there amongst all the other ones like zip drives and right, all right, Uh, the rich user experience. That was something where the idea was that you wanted to create a a an experience for the user that went beyond just simple text lines and pictures. So one of the earliest ones would be middies that would loop and there'd be no way to stop them. Uh do you remember those? Yes, I do remember those, Yes, middies, My goodness, middies. Yes, yes, So just the days of my sp ace where you would go to someone's MySpace page. I mean this, this that goes beyond what we're talking about here. But even then, oh the not not. I'm not sad to see those days go. However, what it meant was that people had to create software that would be a plug in, an enhancement to a web browser to allow users to access certain types of content, largely streaming content, whether it was audio or video. So if you had a web browser in those days, you had to often enhance it with these plug ins, which made the browsers clung here slower. They they required more memory in those days. Also, memory was not as um plentiful as it is today computer memory, So your whole computer would start to run more slowly if you tried to access anything that had any kind of you know, video or flash animation. Flash is another example. Some plug ins that you had to have in order to get more out of the web pages. We would not see advances to HTML for a while. That would address is the whole point of HTML five is to take away the need for all these different plug ins that often can become security vulnerabilities. UM. The idea being that this way we can support those those different functions natively within HTML and not have to have a Swiss Army knife style web browser where you've added all these extra features. UM. Anyway, the first version of Internet Explorer was a thousand bare bones as you can get, and the second one came out November twenty second nine. So if you remember I said the first one came out August, I E two comes out November twenty that that's an incredibly narrow window for an entire version upgrade. You know, it's uh fast does not really go into it. This one was for when ninety five and Windows NT three point five and Windows INT four point oh. So that means within three months you get a full version upgrade. But that was actually kind of typical in the early days because the browsers were being We're getting more and more advanced very quickly. Everyone was really interested in this. This was the days when the media was starting to take notice of the World Wide Web and it was going beyond just uh, the the governments and colleges and research facilities. So with that focus, you wanted to really get your browser too, to be uh, you know, a destination people wanted to go to. The people needed this technology. There was another feature that they thought people needed an Internet to explore it too. I remember what's delicious cookies? Oh you know what? Those are important? Um, they have been misused and that is unfortunate. They can cause huge problems. They are definitely lee one of those things you've got to worry about if you are concerned about Internet privacy. However, that being said, it's also nice to be able to navigate to a website. You're in the middle of doing something you have to shut down and leave. When you navigate to that same website on that same machine, you can pick up right where you left off. That's thanks to cookies. So cookies are just really short, short bits of data, really just a short, short range of bits if you want to get down to it, and the act as kind of identifier and a placeholder so that when you start a session with a web page the website, the web server can keep track of who you are and what you are doing, so that if you do leave for some reason and come back, you can pick up where you left off. So in retail, for example, if I put something in my shopping cart but I haven't completed the transaction and I leave the website, the next time I go back to that website, I might still have that item in the shopping cart, because the cookies tell the server, hey, it's that same dude who just can't commit to purchasing this squeaky twy for his dog to be a great example for me UM. So cookies definitely had their place, but obviously have been They've got a lot of there's a lot of bad rap about cookies too, because of things like the idea of tracking um web browsing activity and and sharing things that you might have thought were private otherwise. But they come from a good place, they do, and they are useful. Let's be honest, they are very useful. The web would not be what the web is now in a bad way. I think we're it not for cookies. Yeah, I mean, they just allowed the Internet to be more personal. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You you know, the idea that that your experience on the web is at least in some part a fine by and tuned to you, so that you have the experience you want, or at least if you're working at it, you can have the experience you want. I wish that it were effortless, so that just through the use of the web it becomes the way you want. For some people, it becomes the way it is rather than the way they want it to be because they don't know the tricks to, you know, kind of tune it as much as they would like. But without cookies, it would not be possible at all. You would just have the same experience every single time you logged into any web page. It would be as if you were there day zero, like that's the first time you had ever visited it, and you would have to go through whatever it is, you know, like whether it's logging into a service or adding things into a list, whatever that might be. You would have to do that every single time if it weren't for things like cookies. Yeah. Um, the next version of Internet Explorer number three, if you're keeping count, wouldn't them along until August thirteen, nineteen. So they went almost a full year, unthinkable without coming out with a new version. This was the first one to really start to get some traction in the web browser wars because uh, the other browsers had. First of all, you gotta keep in mind it was still a pretty small piece of the overall population. Pie. There weren't that many people online on the web in n UM there were, There were lots, but if you compared to the number of people who weren't, it was a tiny number. Uh. That being said, there were things like like um Netscape and Mosaic and other browsers that were already They already had a good share of the market, so I was just starting to pick up. By the end of ninety seven, it accounted for about a third of the browser market, just under round. And that gets us into the browser wars, which are like Star Wars but more boring. Um. But in my notes, I wrote, many Buffon's died to bring us this information. I'm so out of Uh, my depth to even understand why that is funny. Special guy who hasn't even seen old stal Wars films. Yeah, it hurts me to hear that. But then again, my former, my, my original co host, Chris Palette, I don't think even to this day has seen the movie Jaws. So he's he killed a small piece of me that day when he revealed that information. But that, of course is a quote. We've got more to say in this classic episode of tech stuff after these quick messages. Uh. Internet Explorer three was also the first browser that did not use the Spyglass source code. There were elements of Spyglass technology in there, so that was still listed in the about page on Internet Internet Explorer. They kind of had a you know, a licensed little bit about how some of the technology was licensed from them, but they had moved away from Spyglass to start working on a different source code to underlie Internet Explorer. And it was the first one to introduce internet mail to Internet Explorer and News one point zero and the Windows address Book. Neither of those things would matter for very long, but they were included in the Internet Explorer three. Uh. And they added in the support for lots of the plug ins that Netscape could use, and that goes back to what I was talking about earlier. It increased the ability for Internet Explorer to access certain features that otherwise would just be unplayable. Get a little red X saying this doesn't work here, Um I remember it, well, yeah this also. By the way, one of the reasons why I love the development of HTML five and the conversion to HTML Live is that I also remember the days of those plug ins, leading to lots of opportunities for hackers to create fake uh alert messages saying hey, I know you want to see this, but you can't unless you first download the plug in or up update your plug in so that you can watch it. But in fact, instead of it actually being a plug in, it was a virus that you were agreeing to download and installed to your machine. So you get one of those messages saying, oh, you want to watch this, but you need to update to the latest version of real Player for example. Uh. And it wasn't actually a real Player update or or installed file. It was an install file for some malware that ran that was rampant at a certain point in the history of the Internet. So the the slow migration away from the plug in days is something that I've been waiting for for a long time because I get tired of answering those questions. Um. I E three also and for cascading style sheets. Now this again very technical part of it, but it's basically an easy way to define the style the appearance of a web page. One of the things that was a big challenge in the early days of web browsers was making sure that the web page was going to show up the way the web designer intended it. Um, Nate, did you ever have to build a website without the use of a whizzywig editor or something where you had to do it in like a text editor? Um I told myself to do it. Um, yeah, I do. I do that in text and my my girlfriend Kate actually still does. She She she can type responsive web stuff out in by hand. It's quite impressive. That is impressive. The first web pages I ever built, which I am not going to share, so don't even bother looking for them, because they're awful. If they do still exist somewhere out there, I am embarrassed by their presence. But at any rate, I also did that the old school way, where you had a text editor, you typed in all the markup language and the actual content of the web page. Then you would have to save it, then open up a browser and navigate to the the proper address of that page, which probably wasn't even published online yet, it was just native on your computer, look to see if it was actually showing up properly in the web browser you were using, and then if anything wasn't, you had to quit out, go back into your text editor, change things there, and do it all over again. The bad thing in the early days is that even if you've got it to work properly on whichever web browser you were using, there was no guarantee that someone else's web browser, a different web browser, was going to show it in that same way. So you might take entire you know, hours to painstakingly create and craft a web page, and if anyone was using a different web browser, they might get a totally different experience anyway, so that you don't know how easy you've got it with you a dynamic websites and your responsive designs. You know, back in those days, we were working out how to write out tables in text editors, or there was this one piece of software that I remember getting for free at some point, and it used d HTML and it was actually it was whizzy Wig, but it was it was like dragon drop and all the positions were sort of relative, so you could have objects anywhere and it was brilliant. Right for those of you who don't remember, don't know what that acronym stands for, it's what you see is what you get. The idea being that you have an editor that lets you edit within like you you were actually seeing what the web page looks like as you're building it, so you don't have to do the swap between code and the appearance of the page. It's all there like you might be able. Most of them have an HTML editor components, so you can switch it to HTML and just see the markup language and type in that way if you want to. But a lot of them have it where they are a different template that are built out. Their entire business is based on that, and some of them do it incredibly well. I use them, in fact, when I'm building web pages these days, because while I remember doing HTML coding, uh, that was also when there were very few tags, So I don't think I could do it today because it would look like a website from if I were to build one today, Uh, that way, and and while that would be comedic, it would not be very useful. Um, Internet Explorer three us also when we got a very important development with I E. That is the logo of the lower case, so that you get that icon the lower case that represents Internet Explorer. I don't know what our world would be like if they had gone with something else the web. Maybe you know it's madness, Nate's mad. Yes, that's that. That would have led to great strife in the world. Uh and I days after I E three came out, security experts discovered a backdoor vulnerability that they called the Princeton word macro virus loophole, so it had a very catchy name. Backdoor vulnerabilities are seriously bad news no matter what software you're talking about. That's the sort of vulnerability that gives an attacker access to your machine at whatever level you are logged in at. So, if for example, you had your Windows machine, you are logged in as an admin on that machine. Let's say that's the level of access you have, and if this is your personal computer, then yes, that's the access you have. This backdoor would give people that access, which is bad news. I mean, they could make your computer do whatever they wanted to at that point, install software that you didn't intend to have installed, or direct your computer to attack other other computers. Mostly I would just I would just mostly open people's CD draws, um for things out, leave messages on the screen, you know, fire up the Simpsons dust game, that kind of stuff. I do know, I do know. I have seen that happen. I remember seeing someone who had UM allowed that and their c D drawer the little the little drive door would open and close over and over and there, like I don't know what's happening, except what's happened is you've downloaded something you shouldn't have that has handed over control to your computers. So we're gonna start in safe mode and we'll begin from there and see if we can fix this. Yeah. And and it's still buns like buddy while we're at it. Yeah yeah. Man. Well, in all, Internet Explorer would account for about a third of the browlser market, like I was talking about. That's where they really started to get traction. And in ninete, the n c s A stops supporting the development of Mosaic, so the the web browser that really started all this off. Uh in a real way, had finally kind of run out of steam on the development side, But the the browsers that still use that basic technology and had continued to develop it. They they kept going, like Netscape Navigator continued on, although of course they had they had forked off of the Mosaic source code, so it was not the exact same stuff that was Mosaic. It had changed and evolved on its own. It's kind of like if you look at an evolutionary tree and you see where two different species have forked same sort of thing here, except we're talking about computer programs obviously. And was also when Spyglass threatened Microsoft with a contractual audit because of that quarterly fee royalty arrangement we talked about earlier. The fact that they were getting this quarterly fee but not really any royalties had kind of upset Spyglass because they said, well, when we agreed to this, the implication was that Internet Explorer or whatever the web browser was going to be called it that time, was going to be a separate product. It was gonna be something sold by Microsoft instead of bundled with Windows UM and ended up prompting Microsoft to settle with spy Glass. I think the sum I see most frequently is eight million dollars, which it's not a small amount of money, but when you compare it to some of the huge deals going on seemingly casually in the world of tech, and especially the world of the Internet, it's a pittance tiny mountain. And for Microsoft, yeah, oh yes, especially for Microsoft, eight million dollars it's probably what they have in between the cushions of their executive lounge couch. You just sort through there and kind of spare eight or nine million dollars, I'm sure, um, which I think, if you convert into English currency, is approximately fifteen pounds. I'm not entirely sure. I'm not good with that sort of thing, but I know it's like the exchange rates old messed up at the moment. All I know is that whenever I visit London, I'm always looking for deals because I realized I don't know. I honestly don't know how much money I'm spending right now. Um. Internet Explorer four comes out in that is U marketed with the slogan the Web the way you want it, uh, which I guess is true if you don't want it to be particularly good. Um. It also handled rich text files and plain text email in their internet mail and news program, which was now Outlook express For. It's called Outlook express for, but it really was the first Outlook Express. This is where we run into Microsoft's habit of numbering things in a way that probably makes sense to someone in Microsoft and no sense to anyone else. Like, I don't know why is Windows ten Windows ten when it could have been Windows nine, Apart from the fact that calling it Windows nine could have caused some confusion with people who are running legacy systems that still rely on Windows. I can in an era in an area, Jonathan, my friend, where we have the iPhone five S and the Galaxy S five. I think we are in an era where we need to have Windows ten and OS ten. Yeah, okay, all right, I'm fine with that, I guess I honestly, at this point we could just say, all right, letters and numbers make no difference in the world of the Internet, so just just just go with it. Um, so we don't have HTML email support and an Outlook express for, they could just do rich text files and plain text emails, so you didn't get any of the incredibly fun stuff like people sending you pictures in the middle of their emails. H And what if you're detecting some lackluster enthusiasm in my voice, it's because as those jokes only go so far with me. So please don't send me emails with lots of pictures and them. But first of all, my my outlook immediately blocks them unless I tell it to allow the photos. But you're just wasting bandwidth. Really, um, I'm not a huge fan of those but but obviously it makes it look better than it would if it were just a rich text file U. And they integrated real Player as a streaming media player within Internet Explorer for um, do you remember those days, Nate, where yes I do. I do, the beautiful days of real Player paying inside Internet Explorer. Yes, those those wonderful days. I love those days. I'll tell you every interesting Real Player fact. Real Player used to be brilliant, right real What real did was fantastic. It actually made video stream properly back in the day. While the player itself might have been a clunky mess, the compression they used was genuinely some of the most innovative online technology in my opinion. Um. The problem is that everything else about it was awful and bundled is a plug in also made a clunky experience, so it just it just always felt like a poor piece of technology. But actually what it did was fantastic. Yeah. There was a time where I mean I just remember so this this held true for very way too long, where there were competing plugins and in order to for you to be able to watch video online, it meant that you had to have three or four plugins on your browser. Because one site would use one format, another site would use someone be flash based, someone be uh, you know, a real player base. You would have all these different competing formats, and you didn't have a lot of options of like a one player fits all kind of solutions. So it ended up meaning that you had to add all these different plugins if you wanted to be able to experience all this different media across different sites. I don't miss those days at all. I mean Microsoft really held onto it for a long time. Silver Light was one of those things that when I would encounter it online and I would see something like, oh, you need to download silver Light to see this. If I really do we really are we really still there? Um? Can we get beyond that and just have everyone say, Okay, I wanted to be the person to or the entity to define what the standard was, but at some point I have to admit my approach is not what has been considered standard, and I'm going to get on board with what everyone else is doing. It wasn't like that for a very long time. In fact, you could argue it's still not like that with certain types of media. But it just made it. It made it no fun really, like you would go to a side that, oh, I have to add another place in, which again added that vulnerability. If you had to add in plug in after plug in, eventually you got um, you know, you got conditioned to the point where you thought, oh, of course I'm gonna need another plug in to see whatever this thing is. Never mind the fact that it's a plug in that I don't recognize and that I've never you know, heard of before. I'll go ahead and install it, and then you make your system vulnerable. It's just one of those things that was a necessity at the time. And I think, really, what what plugins did is they just fueled innovation. You know, like a lot of what is plugging What was a plug in back in the day is now either baked into the browser or is baked into HTML itself. You know, when you think about HTML five supporting new video formats, um you know, like web m the Google is behind you know, that's something that back in the day you would need, you know, a plug in for. You don't need those anymore. And it was probably a necessary life cycle, that's true. I mean without it, then web pages would be e bland and limited and would not be nearly as important or influential as the web has become over the years. I mean, you know, this is also we're looking at now. We're looking at the late nineties when we're starting to get to a fever pitch of what the web could be, uh, you know, which of course culminated in and then collapsed with the dot com bubble bursting. Um that whole era, everyone was starting to see what the web could potentially be. But if we relied simply upon what HTML could deliver back in those days, the web would have been a lot more you know, utilitarian and less interesting. So I definitely agree that the plug ins were a necessary part. It was also just as living through it. It just was also frustrating. UM I for also supported dynamic HTML for the first time, which allowed for more interactive web pages. Again a rich user experience we were talking about earlier. That was an important element, and by bumbling Internet Explorer with Windows, Microsoft ends up leveraging itself into a sixt in market share of all web browsers. This was a huge story. It really turned things around, going from an underdog to the major player out of all browsers. So not just um, you know Mozilla's or or Netscape rather uh netscapes Navigator. Now, if you add in all the different competitors, they paled, but it was partly because the market share for PCs far outweighed other computer platforms, especially for businesses and casual users. Um. I mean, you obviously still had a lot of Unix machines running server software and in in various research and R and D areas things like that. But if you're talking about the average person, they owned a piece. See, the Mac was not a competitor really at this time. Uh. And that meant that if you were going to buy a PC and you had a web browser just bundled in with it, it made sense to go ahead and use it. In fact, for people who were not really savvy with the web that was there. It was it was either A O L. Was the web here in the US, or it was yeah and it was here too. The A Well, some of my first web experiences were uh were A O L. The World, garden, YEP, happy, happy times, simple. Yeah. Isn't it great when you an entity that decides what is and isn't the web for you? That makes that makes life so much easier. Stay tuned for the exciting conclusion of this text of classic episode right after we take this break. So this is where we get into where micros off runs into some trouble because of this policy of lumping Internet Explorer in with its operating system. Uh, the United States government brought a lawsuit against Microsoft Corporation. In fact, the Department of Justice was looking at an antitrust suit saying that the company had practiced predatory strategies to push other companies out of the web browser market and the operating system market, as it turns out, saying that because they had packaged Internet Explorer with the operating system, and because the operating system was really the only game in town for the most part, for operating systems had the majority market share. If you were buying a PC more often than not it was going to have Windows preloaded on it. They were essentially saying, you have stacked the deck against any competing company and you're pushing them out, and that's not fair. It's that's why we're bringing this ant trust suit against you. This was big news and it wasn't the only place where Microsoft was having issues that it was also having problems in Europe. There were European antitrust suits brought against Microsoft. They were actually looking at more interesting things in a way. They were looking at how there were also allegations that the operating system had been designed so that it worked really well with the Internet Explorer and didn't work so well with any other browser, almost as if Microsoft had taken pains to create an operating system that would on purpose decrease the use and utility of competing web browsers. And that was a huge red flag. Um, So you had these these massive antitrust lawsuits going up against Microsoft that wouldn't be resolved for years. I mean, we all know these lawsuits can last ages. Uh, And in fact, it wouldn't pan out in the US until two thousand one, and there would be this enormous settlement, And originally the ruling told Microsoft that the Department Justice said, Hey, you're gonna have to split your company into two companies. You're gonna have to have one that is building the operating system business and one that's building the software that exists on top of the operating system. But they're gonna have to operate as two separate entities because if you package them all together, you have an unfair advantage over anyone who wants to build software for that operating system. Ultimately, that did not happen. I mean, if you are aware of Microsoft is a single company hasn't been split. But that was originally what the ruling was um and it was a huge It was a huge news item in the day because anyone who wanted to use any other web browser was already mad at Microsoft for appearing to make it more difficult to use those web browsers. So I remember those days well too, because already at that point I was not a huge And like I said, I had been using Netscape Navigator as my early web browser for years and years, partly because when I first started using the web, I was a college student. So I got Netscape Navigator for free because it was a college application. Um, I didn't have to purchase it. In fact, I was I was pretty stingy about purchasing one for a long time. I was like, why should I pay for this thing that I've had for free for so long? Um, And I didn't like the way Internet Explorer rendered web pages or the user interface or anything. So I was very upset at this time when I heard about about this. I mean, this was I Internet Explorer this point was actually available on the Mac. This was one of the last ones actually that was available in the mic I E five I think was the very last one they made. Yeah, so you could actually you could actually use Internet Explorer on the Macintosh at this time. Yeah. To be fair, though, the Mac was not not what it is today in those things this was. This is that These are also the days where Steve Jobs had been forced out of Apple for a while and was just starting to come back to redefine what the Mac was. This is almost almost exactly the time he came back, and this is just before the iMac was released, if not almost depending on the particular part of the history where we're on, almost month wise at the moment, this is this is when that happened. Yeah, so we've got this this lawsuit going on. It hasn't starts. I was the the dominant web browser, which was not helping Microsoft's case and that lawsuit. It was essentially being pointed at a c if if people are complaining about how this browser matches up against other browsers, how can you argue that the customer satisfaction or the desire for this particular web browsers what's driving the dominance in the market. It's clearly because it's tied so intricately with the operating system. That would be the kind of argument that the Department of Justice would level against Microsoft. But it was I mean, this was I at this point was just so key to Microsoft. Yeah, it had like a thousand people working on it at that point, just on the browser, from from the six people of I E one to the one thousand and a hundred million dollars being being invested every quarter into or actually every year at this point into Internet Explorer. This is then the I E five days because that came out in March. Um they had had a couple of preview versions come out. Bute was when they officially launched it. Uh, this was the one that would come with Windows second edition as well as Windows two thousand and the dot com boom. I mean, this is a thousand people working on Internet Explorer, a hundred million dollars a year. This is this is the these are the months just before the dot com bubble burst. And it's also the this is one where if you were a user, you probably wouldn't have noticed a huge difference in the interface between four and five, but a lot of the stuff that was going on behind the scenes right the back end of the browser had been upgraded, which prompted Paul four ought to write that I E five point oh is I E four point oh done right? So, in other words, the the things that were innovative in Internet Explorer four but we're still kind of clunky, were now much more smooth in the new version. So I E five was seen as a big step up, um, and that was really important because we had this huge boom of innovation in the dot com world, which, as we all know, was not sustainable uh long term anyway, but it was. There was there was no greater moment of focus in the media upon the Internet than at this time. I would argue even today as as instrumental and important as the Internet is, and as we have all these different ways of accessing it, including applications that can work with the web or separately from the Web, things like Twitter and Facebook. I would say that in this time, the late nineties going right into two thousand, that was when we were at the peak of focus on the Internet, specifically on the World Wide Web. Um and uh, you know this is it's funny because if you look at the news reports from a couple of years before this, that was when you had like the the stuff that was caught on camera but not originally broadcast, where you had news anchors kind of talking about what is this web thing? What is that? What's that a symbol for? What is email? Like it was exactly. It went from that to everyone now has to have a website. If you were a business, you had to have a website. Didn't matter if you had anything important to put on there, but you had to have a website. Um, you know that is that was the day and and I E five was the perfect browser at the perfect time to really you know, tap into that, which is is good because I E six would be at almost degree turn from that. So so before that just one little sad bit of news. On March two thousand, Spyglass was bought out by Open TV, and Spyglass became no more. Now. That was, of course, the company that had licensed the mosaic technology from the n c s A and then further licensed at to Microsoft. It no longer existed as a entity of its own at that point. That was the story of Internet Explorer Part one. We will continue the story next week in the next classic episode. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out on Twitter. The handle for the show is text Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon, YEA. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. 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