[HN Gopher] 25 years ago Microsoft released Internet Explorer 3....
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25 years ago Microsoft released Internet Explorer 3.0, developer
talks about it
Author : kuu
Score : 71 points
Date : 2021-08-14 17:49 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| figbert wrote:
| Here it is on Thread Reader:
| https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1426587396343099397.html
| dt3ft wrote:
| Thank you! This format should have been the first choice. I
| simply can't fathom why people post an article on twitter.
| Every sentence is a tweet, so that what, people can "like" each
| sentence? I wish people would stop using twitter for this type
| of data...
| piker wrote:
| > Sadly, there were divorces and broken families and bad things
| that came out of that. But I also learned that even at a
| 20,000-person company, you can get a team of 100 people to work
| like their lives depend on it.
|
| Just curious if anyone has any idea what the financial reward was
| for these approx 100 folks? Presumably options worth a few
| millions today, but that's some price.
| LanceJones wrote:
| Ugh... that term, "broken families". I divorced when my sons
| were 10 and 7, and the divorce actually healed our family.
| throwawaysea wrote:
| Given it was 25 years ago this would have been the mid 90s.
| They are probably multi millionaires but more so for simply
| getting MS stock rather than being personally rewarded for
| their efforts. After all this was already a big company with a
| lot of structure. Your compensation was likely based mostly on
| your role and level rather than the personal contribution you
| made to the company, and a lot of the gain you realized would
| have been from the general growth of Microsoft share price.
| [deleted]
| lsllc wrote:
| Ah the introduction of flat toolbars and the subsequent race to
| copy it (in MFC):
|
| https://www.codeguru.com/cpp/controls/toolbar/flattoolbar/ar...
|
| Good times!
| linguae wrote:
| This brings back memories of playing around with Visual Basic 6
| as an 11 year old, trying to figure out how exactly Microsoft
| came up with the flat toolbars used in Internet Explorer and
| Microsoft Office 97 while the toolbar controls provided by
| Visual Basic were the standard Windows 95 rows of buttons
| (though VB 6 itself used flat toolbars). Today I have no issues
| making flat toolbars even from scratch, but my 11 year-old self
| had no idea how to come up with them. Still, sometimes I miss
| being a kid.
| aendruk wrote:
| What does "flat" mean here? I tried looking up screenshots of
| this but they just look... normal.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| The non-flat toolbars had each button separate, with its own
| border. IE 3 did away with the borders. (Also seen in Office
| 97 vs 95, for example.)
|
| Compare the screenshots:
|
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/c5/Internet_Expl.
| .. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b3/Internet_Ex
| pl...
|
| or in Office:
|
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/4a/Office_97_on_.
| .. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/92/Office_95_o
| n_...
| [deleted]
| warning26 wrote:
| _> Sadly for me, Microsoft broke up the IE team because it
| thought "we won." (...) Years later, Internet Explorer would
| plummet in marketshare and become a sad joke among Web
| developers._
|
| Looking back at the version history of IE, a lot of people forget
| how _good_ earlier IE was compared to its competitors. "Best
| viewed in Internet Explorer" ultimately ended up being a
| punchline, but there really was something to it; IE had a _far_
| better and faster rendering engine than anything else did at the
| time, with more extensive CSS and JS support.
|
| Abandoning it after they "won" was really a testament to the
| hubris of 90s-era Microsoft.
| linguae wrote:
| From Hadi Partovi's thread:
|
| "The Internet Explorer team was the hardest-working team I've
| ever been on. And I've worked at multiple start-ups. It was a
| sprint, not a marathon. We ate every meal at the office. We often
| held foosball tournaments at 2 am, just to get the team energy
| back up to continue working!
|
| "Sadly, there were divorces and broken families and bad things
| that came out of that. But I also learned that even at a
| 20,000-person company, you can get a team of 100 people to work
| like their lives depend on it."
|
| Unfortunately these extreme work hours seems to be prevalent in
| our industry. Steve Jobs' "90 hours a week and loving it!"
| T-shirt from the early 1980's is a legend, and I remember reading
| about the history of the Apple Newton and how the very long work
| hours spent on that project broke up families and even led an
| engineer to suicide
| (https://www.nytimes.com/1993/12/12/business/marketer-s-
| dream...). When I was a graduate student, I've seen people boast
| about their 90-hour work weeks. Thankfully I've been fortunate to
| work at places where it's okay to work a normal 40-hour week, but
| I've heard of places where working long hours is not only the
| norm, it's encouraged. I understand being passionate; sometimes I
| stay up very late working on side projects. But when work
| conflicts with health and with family, something has to give.
|
| I would love to hear stories of products that were successful and
| where the engineers and other people who contributed to that
| success were able to maintain a reasonable work-life balance.
| GrumpyNl wrote:
| He forgot to mention that it wasnt a "great" product, they left
| us frontend developers with several headaches.
| x0x0 wrote:
| ie quickly became revolutionarily better than the
| alternatives at the time.
|
| My team at the time held contests to find the shortest html
| that would crash Netscape. There was a hallway at the office
| with over 100 Netscape crashers printed out and pinned to the
| wall.
|
| By the time ie5 was released, almost 1/3 of the frontend code
| existed to work around netscape bugs. It was standard for us
| to fingerprint point releases of netscape to work around
| bugs.
| franze wrote:
| I remember the news (think it was on Techcrunch) when MS
| disbanded the IE team. Even from far away it seemed like such a
| clear as day stupid decision. IE 6 was a buggy mess and everyone
| knew and hated it. And then they just ... walked away.
| earthscienceman wrote:
| I don't think people indoctrinated in tech culture can understand
| just how weird something like this reads. All I could comprehend
| when I finished was "100 people work themselves to emotional
| exhaustion so American mega corp can retain monopoly status". I
| see nothing of valor, just a strange subculture that people are
| willing to sacrifice themselves to for reasons that make no sense
| to me. I can't imagine ruining my family for a paycheck so I
| could say I developed the 3rd version of MS' web browser.
| brundolf wrote:
| Without making a value judgement, there's an aspect of the
| human psychology that revels in certain challenges simply
| because they are hard and impactful. This can be a good thing,
| and it can be a bad thing. It can separately be good or bad for
| the people involved, and for the world that they impact. But it
| is a normal and recurring part of human nature.
| splatzone wrote:
| To give an example from another industry altogether, James
| Lapine just released a book detailing the process of creating
| the American musical Sunday in the Park with George.
|
| The experience described in that book matches what you're
| saying very closely, it sounds absolutely excruciating for
| all involved, but the director and composer's belief that
| they were making something worthy carried them through.[0]
|
| [0] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Putting-Together-Stephen-
| Sondheim-C...
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| It's a good trait, but we must be responsible in gratifying
| that urge.
| LanceJones wrote:
| It's entirely possible that for some of those marriages, the
| additional strain of the project simple accelerated the divorce
| timing (versus causing it).
| [deleted]
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| It's well-known that given enough stress, many marriages that
| would have otherwise been relatively healthy can be pushed
| into insolvency.
|
| For example: controlling for other factors, the divorce rate
| among married parents who have a child with autism is
| measurably higher.
| kenjackson wrote:
| This subculture exists everywhere. I play basketball and the
| most revered player is Kobe Bryant. He isn't the best, but his
| work ethic and competitiveness was beyond all others. He'd
| probably be a jerk to play with, but most people are never in a
| position to do hard work to deliver something that they
| consider valuable.
|
| Now what is valuable differs to each person. Basketball is just
| a sport. Chess just a game. A surgeon saves just one life at
| time. He helped write a new version of a browser. But to all of
| them, it's important to them.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Well Kobe Bryant isn't a scab like these people that work
| overtime for a monopolist.
| kenjackson wrote:
| The NBA is a monopoly for pro basketball in the US.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Yes, but the Lakers are not. And the players have a
| union.
|
| Competition within the NBA is zero-sum so it isn't like
| Kobe working really hard further entrenches the NBA
| anywhere close to the same degree as IE for MS.
| tdeck wrote:
| It's very reminiscent of "The Soul of a New Machine" which is
| an early example of the genre.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| ^ Underrated comment. If you want to gain a real sense of how
| people thought and felt during the computer revolution, read
| this book.
| vvanders wrote:
| Showstopper![1] covers Windows NT in a similar vein and
| Dealers of Lightning[2] is another good read that goes into
| some if the really interesting history of Xerox PARC.
|
| [1] https://www.amazon.com/Showstopper-Breakneck-Windows-
| Generat...
|
| [2] https://www.amazon.com/Dealers-Lightning-Xerox-PARC-
| Computer...
| sbarre wrote:
| I'll say one thing, and I know it will come off as cliche: If
| you weren't there, you may not understand.
|
| In the early days of the consumer Internet (mid/late 90s) there
| was a real wild west / gold rush feeling to things and it did
| feel like we were changing the world (spoiler: most of us
| weren't).
|
| I am not defending or excusing anything here, just saying that
| I'm sure it was a lot easier for some people, perhaps already
| predisposed to such behaviours, to become unhealthily obsessed
| with working on new Internet tech at the time because it was
| incredibly exciting to be working on what was genuinely a new
| frontier back then.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| But it was kind of a gold rush, race-to-first?
|
| I mean look at the Web today using TCP, IPv4,
| HTML/CSS/JavaScript, with companies like Google, Facebook,
| Amazon. If the internet was created with what we know now it
| would look much different. You will never be able to create a
| technology or company so flawed like that today.
| taf2 wrote:
| I was a teen but I remember watching my dad work on one of
| the first video codecs and playing a small video on an even
| smaller square frame inside a tiny computer monitor and him
| telling me how this would be the future... his codec wasn't
| the main stream we use today but he was right and it was
| definitely a gold rush / change the world feel. Later in the
| 2000s for me I carried that same feeling we worked our asses
| off and yeah it didn't amount to much but we learned so
| much... in the 2010 it's how I was able to go on the build my
| own software business... It's why I believe hard work ,
| dedicated and consistent work does yield results that are
| worth it
| adventured wrote:
| > All I could comprehend when I finished was "100 people work
| themselves to emotional exhaustion so American mega corp can
| retain monopoly status". I see nothing of valor, just a strange
| subculture that people are willing to sacrifice themselves to
| for reasons that make no sense to me.
|
| Or so those people could work hard for 5-10 years instead of
| working hard for 40+ years like most people do. Microsoft
| employees have been paid very well for a long time and the
| stock compensation they received in the early to mid 1990s was
| exceptionally lucrative.
|
| The most important part of what you said, is "make no sense to
| me." It's tremendously wonderful that we don't get to dictate
| what other people choose to do with their lives and time.
|
| It's perfectly ok to be enamored with something like new
| Internet tech circa 1995, want to work in a segment that
| excites you, work exceptionally hard for three or five years,
| and then change out of that work to something more routine and
| less demanding.
| kerng wrote:
| That's a fair point.
|
| Funny how without these efforts the web and technologies pretty
| much the entire world used over the last two decades would
| probably have been very, very different - I'm not judging
| better or worse.
|
| In fact Microsoft as a company might not even be relevant
| anymore without what these folks did. Sun, Netscape and Corel
| might rule the IT world today.
| whoisthemachine wrote:
| Agreed. As I read the lines on the long hours and resultant
| divorces, all I could think of was "...and for what? A better
| browser?". Certainly IE advanced the state of the art at the
| time, but if Microsoft hadn't won the browser wars and Netscape
| had remained dominant and inched along with incremental
| improvements, we still would have reached the point where we
| are today, but maybe a little later.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| > we still would have reached the point where we are today,
| but maybe a little later.
|
| or maybe a bit earlier if MS hadn't won but just been a
| credible competitor and then something like Opera came along
| - a 3 way race would probably have evolved things quicker.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Like those overplanted baby forests that grow up quicker.
| neilsense wrote:
| People have pride in their work. The MegaCorp, the politics,
| the noise all fades away and you just want to X or achieve Y.
| It's not something to belittle, it's something to be
| celebrated.
|
| Not everything has to come back down to a paycheck. You can be
| paid for work but you can absolutely love what you do and/or
| the challenge it brings to your life.
| throwaway13337 wrote:
| It is a missing part of the human condition and, especially it
| seems to me, the male human condition to strive for something.
| Especially when that something is as a group. It's the feeling,
| I imagine, we got as hunting mammoth, or raiding others and
| defending our own community, or exploring a new land with
| dragons around the corner.
|
| We don't have that anymore and we are poorer for it.
|
| I envy, therefore, those that get glimpses of it through spacex
| achievements, or internet explorer 3.
|
| I get mine from video games but it's probably lessor in degree.
| Yet still, when I felt it the strongest, it still holds one of
| the highest places in my memory.
|
| Family and children are simply not the same.
| zemvpferreira wrote:
| It's not a bad thing that us men don't have to kill and die
| in large proportions just to keep the rest of the tribe
| going. Let's not overly romanticize an evolutionary trait
| useful for getting us throw ourselves into meat grinders.
| Let's enjoy our games and leave it at that. (Mine is tennis)
| throwaway13337 wrote:
| I didn't mean to imply that I'd trade modern life for it.
|
| It's just that the drive is still there. And it's useful in
| understanding depression in men, and the will to make the
| best piece of software for your corporation.
|
| Tennis cannot replace it or video games. We are stuck not
| wholly satisfied and must make the best of it.
| zemvpferreira wrote:
| Oh I agree with you there - let's recognize this vile
| impulse and do our best to prevent it from causing any
| more harm.
|
| " If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace Behind
| the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes
| writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil's
| sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
| Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as
| cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on
| innocent tongues,-- My friend, you would not tell with
| such high zest To children ardent for some desperate
| glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria
| mori."
| kristianp wrote:
| IE 4 was better than Netscape, partly because Netscape dropped
| the ball around version 4. Someone can correct me, but I think
| after ns3 they decided to re-implement a lot of the user
| interface code which caused a big delay and allowed IE to pull
| ahead.
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