What the Hell Was the Microsoft Network? (2018)(codersnotes.com) |
What the Hell Was the Microsoft Network? (2018)(codersnotes.com) |
That backdoor is still there and causing problems in 2022. You can buy a 64-bit multi-core "modern" Amiga but it is still running an OS with a stop-the-world backdoor to switch off pre-emption, and so it only ends up using a single core in 32-bit mode. Or you could put Linux on it.
You saw some of this stuff live on as ActiveX objects in IE for a few years after the client wound down; MSN Money was the last big holdout with it's portfolio manager and charting engine, which also was released as part of a Quicken competitor for personal finance management called Microsoft Money.
Money was pretty impressive: easier to use than Quicken, but powerful in a lot of places that Quicken just struggled. Quicken couldn't figure out if it was an accounting package or a personal finance tool, while Money (and a few others) drilled down on real money solutions. My wife was a holdout for a long time as well, asking me to find ways to keep it running on each new system I installed in the house.
I have no idea what I'll do if it ever stops working.
The killer feature I would switch instantly for is a way to automatically set part ownership of a joint account. I want to download credit card transactions and mark them as being 1/2 mine, so it doesn't throw off my budget tracking.
This feature does not exist in any financial software, sadly.
that's right. iirc the windows 95 ppp drivers were a separate package and msn included them along with a custom dialer that integrated directly into the shell as a tray application?
Here's a video of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uyje8xlGc9Q
Truly a product of its time, but they really tried to experiment with multimedia (at least in MSN 2.0). I think there was an online version of Encarta and a bunch of other things that I've since forgotten.
;)
Microsoft <3 Plan 9?
It's not so easy to add to the filesystem, but you can make things show up in Explorer that you can click on.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/repars...
This video was linked in the article. What a trip down memory lane. This is the most 90's thing that ever existed.
Also, the explanation of what a "right click" is and how it is for "power users". Wow, how far we have come. (This is at 21:50 in the video).
[0] Or, on very specific old iPhone models, force pressing
And then everything swung to the web and then back to rich clients i.e. mobile apps.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbird_(online_platform)
"It was later revealed that Blackbird had severe performance problems because of an over-complex architecture which made excessive use of multi-threading. When prototypes of the Trident HTML layout engine were completed, and it was shown that the goals of complex layout in Blackbird could be achieved in HTML at better performance, it led to executives to rethink the project."
MSN was one of those things that you played around with because it came with MSN and you used the free trial (like you did for every ISP you could find back then). But I didn't know anyone who really used it past that.
There was a 'second' MSN, that was just a dial-up ISP. Very popular for including the $400 rebate when you bought a new computer at a retail store, you also got 2 years of a MSN dial-up contract to pay the $400 back.
But heat.net — anyone remember that one !!
War2 on heat.net
meimei ^_^ ekulfx anyone? :) hehe
Fun times
(also known as Zone.com - formerly known as The Village, Internet Gaming Zone, MSN Gaming Zone, and MSN Games by Zone.com)
Just had a quick poke about and my last post was 22 year ago. Which was a bit of a gut-punch
Fast forward to 1995: Windows 95 still didn't have TCP/IP (that only came with service pack 1). MSN was clearly intended as a Windows Internet, to eclipse and make irrelevant the existing one, leaving Mac and linux outside in the cold.
Of course, the local pizza guy would have to pay to be on it. Win-win for Microsoft.
Which is exactly what Microsoft is pushing today with their idiotic "Microsoft account," making it increasingly impossible to use Windows or their other products without signing on to this bullshit.
They clearly didn't learn the first time around. Nobody wants another goddamned account, Microsoft.
So nice. I bloody wish we still had numeric IDs instead of email addresses and nicknames.
It would be nice to rsync to send/retrieve emails and manage my inbox. Maybe the original MSN concept needs to be revisited?
I later migrated to Demon, which was originally formed by members of the Cix "tenner-a-month club" - a group that banded together to get real internet, instead of using Cix's curated internet gateways. Demon was a great ISP, until they were taken over by Scottish Power.
Everybody thought they could make a walled garden people would like better than the open internet. IBM had SNA, DEC had DECnet, Compuserve, WELL, ... None lamented.
And today I can't live without OneDrive. It's on all my computers, phones, tablets.
"They didn't even give you the decency of a username on CompuServe, they gave you a number like you were Patrick McGoohan"
I think MSNBC began as a joint effort between Microsoft and GE, but Microsoft sold its stake a long time ago at this point. It's bizarre that MSNBC has kept the name, but I guess it has branding value at this point.
What I miss was comic chat.
there was a demo cd that had an offline example demo though (msn classic not 2.0)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EWorld
In reading that Wikipedia article, I was reminded that another online service used by Apple morphed into AOL. I had an AppleLink dial up account as the tech support lead for all things Mac at work. It wasn't marketed as a consumer product.
Another native-like front end for dialup service at the time was "First Class", which could be self-hosted by any provider. The Berkeley Mac User Group BMUG had a great FirstClass BBS.
I date it to late 1991/ early 1992 when JIPS stops being a pilot service.
Background, by 1990 there are two popular global networking technologies, the Internet Protocol suite of Unix adjacent technologies born in the US, and the X.25 suite of technologies popular in Europe and standardised by the ITU (ie mostly the world's phone companies). In the UK, naturally influenced by both as an English-speaking country right on the coast of Europe, in 1990 they have JANET, the Joint Academic NETwork, providing X.25 service to various universities across the country, much as the early Internet joins US universities.
In 1991 JANET announces JIPS, the JANET IP Service, as an experimental "pilot" project. Universities can choose to have this American protocol to try out as well as their existing X.25 service. JANET tries very hard to sell TCP/IP as merely an interesting experiment that you could use where X.25 doesn't have a good way to achieve something. Campuses rapidly ignore that, installing a Unix with a TCP/IP stack is something the enthusiastic Unix nerds in your Computer Science or Electronics departments will seize on, and despite an insistence that they should not use the Internet's email, because X.25 has email, too bad they're going to start doing SMTP. By the end of the year this "pilot" project is driving JANET adoption, it's no longer experimental, new "customers" see X.25 as an afterthought, their Unix nerds want IP and they want it ASAP -- JANET begins transitioning to just an IP network, the X.25 services will eventually be terminated.
That's game over, on a level playing field, X.25 v TCP/IP is a win for TCP/IP and the third Network will be the Internet. X.25 goes in the scrap pile with mechanical television and Boustrophedon. Things that might have taken over the world, and if they had we might think them normal - but in the end they did not.
You need an account to login to a Mac, but it’s not an iCloud account. If you want to use iCloud, you can link your login account to it. But it is completely optional. I don’t understand at all why I needed to setup (and link) a Microsoft.com account to my personal computer.
The worst part is, I use multiple Microsoft online accounts. Which one should be associated with my computer login? My Xbox account? My work account? None of this makes sense to me.
I set up Macs for people without an iCloud and it was not an issue - they didn’t miss it, aside from notes not syncing between devices and other features that need iCloud.
On Windows it will keep trying you to sign up all the time. I have just one machine with Windows, I don’t need an MS account, I don’t need their cloud features nor their store, and Windows keeps pushing me to set up one.
Who says that your parent is not similarly opposed to these accounts?
iOS is a bit more tied to an online account, but still not as offensive as Microsoft's execrable hounding and hobbling in Windows.
My daughter went through that yesterday. Stupid Microsoft continues to be stupid Microsoft.
Here is a link to a site describing a system that you could use (probably considerably earlier than 1997) to access the Internet (in this case an FTP server) despite only yourself having X.25, via hhcp:
The mechanism mentioned in the article is Shell Namespace. Explorer.exe and friends do not operate on file system (ie. files and directories) but on tree of COM objects (called folders and items) that can represent pretty much anything, although usually represent file system directories and folders. The "Classes root" in "HKCR" means that this registry hive describes how names of these objects are transformed into the COM instances (either by directly naming the CLSID or by parametrizing the behavior of default class of filesystem objects). It works this way to this day. And for example the "Windows 10 God mode menu" is nothing else than exposing internal shell folder.
I'd love to learn how to get rid of those.
Question - is it because you didn’t add any apple ID, or that you added it but didn’t log in?
I remember MacOS prodding me the same way even with non-apple accounts when I added them but had expired passwords.
If it’s that then you can go to the „accounts” preference and remove all the accounts. Perhaps it will help.
However you do have to deal with an unremovable red notification on your system preferences demanding you to sign in to use icloud.
If you set up a Mac without an AppleID you'll constantly get nagged every time anything that requires it tries to do anything, which is frequently.
The entire point of the mandated minimum requirements was hardware that had silicon level mitigation support for Meltdown and Spectre type attacks. Something that impacted both AMD and Intel CPU's and still has new variants popping up (we're on what, Spectre v4 by now?)
The only way to truly mitigate these issues (other than undoing 30 years of CPU advancement) was an entire top-to-bottom set of mitigations. From the silicon up through the operating system and even applications such as browsers
I roll my eyes even further back when knowledgeable people pretend to not understand that the endgame for TPM/Pluton/etc is DRM, censorship and privacy violations.
Forcing hardware obsoletion in favour of those "hardened" platforms has two benefits, as far as certain groups of interest are concerned:
- turning existing machines into ewaste, so people buy new machines, so the money making wheels keep turning for hardware manufacturers
- normalising stronger "trusted computing" (in the Plutonium/DRM sense) capabilities, which is of course a concern for a number of groups interested in controlling what will be running on your machine.
Make no mistake, it appears that Doctorow's article on the war on general purpose computers is becoming more and more compelling as the time goes on. Some of us see forced obsolescence of older machines with weaker "security" norms as a part of that fight - on the side of the enemy.
IMO, undoing/re-thinking the last 30 years of CPU progress might just be the thing we need. We need to re-examine our foundations and fix them.
Why doesn't Microsoft explain exactly why they require new CPUs, what in TPM 2.0 they're using that's not in 1.2, etc.
Do you even realise how diluted this sounds? I’m all for watching corporations closely, but the tale you’re telling is simply wrong, and I hope you know that, even if it sure is tempting that you might know better than the rest of the world…
I’m very much opposed to those too, but comparing them to the security model is apples vs. oranges. All I’ve seen so far, is that telemetry doesn’t open up any glaring holes in the security model of the operating system, but I’d be interested if you have any proof of that.