[HN Gopher] Email from Bill (1993)
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Email from Bill (1993)
Author : pr337h4m
Score : 49 points
Date : 2022-11-13 07:21 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
| Shared404 wrote:
| > Our email is completely secure. . . .
|
| It's very interesting looking back at historical
| software/communication, and realizing how wrong we have been
| about so many things, and realizing how wrong we likely are about
| many others.
| adtac wrote:
| Security only makes sense in the context of the technology
| available to an attacker _at that time_, so I don't think he
| was wrong. The same way I'm not wrong to say X25519 ECDH is
| secure even though it's very unlikely we'd still be using it in
| the year 2100.
| Shared404 wrote:
| True, but wasn't email transmitted unencrypted over the wire
| back then? That seems like a pretty big leap to call secure
| even when adjusting for the technology available to attackers
| at that time.
| fipar wrote:
| It was transmitted unencrypted, along with traffic for many
| other protocols. I have not read the article, but the 1993
| note implies this was a time when rsh, telnet, and ftp were
| still in common use. I don't disagree with you that it's a
| big leap to call it secure, but my point is I reckon he was
| not alone making that leap back then.
| doctor_eval wrote:
| No, nobody thought email was secure at the time, that
| statement stood out to me as well. It's just an example
| of marketing bullshit, as is the whole article.
| kragen wrote:
| yes, and the sender was entirely unauthenticated, bgp was
| and is entirely unauthenticated, and dns was entirely
| unauthenticated
| kragen wrote:
| it's an amazing testament to bill gates's cluelessness that this
| entire 12000 word article about writing email over the internet,
| when the www was already three years old, doesn't mention the
| word 'internet' even once
|
| nor, obviously, 'html', 'web', 'www', 'gopher', or 'ftp'
| ok123456 wrote:
| "Barbarians Led by Bill Gates" has a good overview of the
| internal power struggle over their online stagey at this
| juncture. They largely resisted the wider internet because it
| was already developed and based around Unix tools and open
| standards. They saw no commercial value.
| kragen wrote:
| reading the tidal wave memo i linked, it sounds like
| microsoft just didn't take software seriously unless it was a
| commercial product
|
| in the 'server' category the competitors they were talking
| about for http servers were bsd (which i think means bsd/os
| from bsdi, because they're talking about it as if it were a
| company), sun, netscape, lotus, novell, and at&t
|
| linux, freebsd, and ncsa httpd were not even on their radar,
| even though yahoo was, and yahoo was mostly running on
| freebsd at that point iirc
|
| let me remind you that we're talking about may 01995, not
| 01992. in the first netcraft server survey that july https://
| news.netcraft.com/archives/1996/08/01/the_first_year... they
| found 57% of the 18957 web servers were running ncsa httpd
| and 20% were running cern httpd. apache had started a few
| months ago and was only running on 658 servers at that point
| so it's not surprising it wasn't on their radar
|
| i had friends and family who'd been running linux since 01992
| and who had used it to set up isps and email setups and
| stuff, its capabilities were leaps and bounds ahead of
| microsoft's products at the time if you could get it working
| doctor_eval wrote:
| Not cluelessness. The thing is that Gates was trying to build
| his own, walled garden, version of the internet - MSN.
|
| These days people think MSN is a content network, but it
| started out as a physical, dialup network, a competitor with
| AOL or CompuServe. Gates didn't talk about internet technology
| not because he was clueless, but because he was trying to
| compete with it.
| kragen wrote:
| msn launched in august 01995 and this article is from 01993
| (albeit december 01993)
|
| maybe msn was in development but this was years before bill's
| famous fire alarm 'internet tidal wave' email about how the
| company was totally fucking up by missing out on the internet
|
| like a year and a half before
|
| https://lettersofnote.com/2011/07/22/the-internet-tidal-
| wave...
|
| it has a paragraph about msn that kind of supports your point
| that it was intended to be a compuserve-like thing at the
| time
|
| > _MSN. The merger of the On-line business and Internet
| business creates a major challenge for MSN. It can't just be
| the place to find Microsoft information on the Internet. It
| has to have scale and reputation that it is the best way to
| take advantage of the Internet because of the value added. A
| lot of the content we have been attracting to MSN will be
| available in equal or better form on the Internet so we need
| to consider focusing on areas where we can provide something
| that will go beyond what the Internet will offer over the
| next few years. Our plan to promote Blackbird broadly takes
| away one element that would have been unique to MSN. We need
| to strengthen the relationship between MSN and Exchange
| /Cairo for mail, security and directory. We need to determine
| a set of services that MSN leads in - money transfer,
| directory, and search engines. Our high-end server offerings
| may require a specific relationship with MSN._
| ok123456 wrote:
| They were developing RIP at this time (unrelated to the
| routing protocol), as the basis of their online strategy.
| This would become the core of MSN.
| kragen wrote:
| ripscrip? i don't think that was a msft effort
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_Imaging_Protocol
| ok123456 wrote:
| No different RIP.
| kragen wrote:
| it doesn't seem to be mentioned in the 'internet tidal
| wave' email i linked, is it possible you are
| misremembering
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| Offtopic, but putting zeros in front of years is obnoxious.
| I just spent several seconds trying to parse those numbers
| as full dates with missing digits/delimiters in various
| formats.
|
| If your goal is to aggravate readers, then mission
| accomplished.
| doctor_eval wrote:
| Well, MSN launched in August 95 and the tidal wave memo was
| from May 95.
|
| My recollection from the time was that (a) it was clear
| that this was intended to be an "embrace and extend" play
| by MS, against the whole internet (!!) and (b) the tidal
| wave memo was taken to be acceptance that this previously
| successful strategy was too late. So MS shut down MSN and
| repurposed the name.
|
| Gates seemed to believe that he could beat the WWW and he
| set out to do so. He considered it competition, so he
| didn't mention it in interviews.
| znkynz wrote:
| https://archive.ph/B0l8g
| victor106 wrote:
| > My original vision of a personal computer on every desk and
| every home will take more than 15 years to achieve.
|
| 1993+15 = 2008.
|
| He was correct but I think he was off by at least 7-8 years..
| twobitshifter wrote:
| Wow, what a time warp that article was. I see many parallels
| between Zuck's Metaverse and Bill's information highway. You can
| try to predict what the future devices will look like, if the
| idea is already there, but it's not cohesive enough to make a
| winning strategy.
| ok123456 wrote:
| Bill didn't invent the 'information superhighway'. That term
| was coined by Al Gore in the late 70s. By the early 90s it was
| a pervasive 'meme' used to obliquely refer to the sum of all
| the available electronic information services. Its cultural
| currency and relevancy went to zero once everyone had an
| instantiation of a computer network they could access be it
| AOL, MSN, or the wider internet.
|
| Zuck tried to create the Metaverse out of whole cloth. The
| thesis is just keep doing what we're already doing, wasting
| time online, but let's add in some augmented reality and VR
| headsets!
| cat_plus_plus wrote:
| "Email is not a good way to get mad at someone since you can't
| interact. You can send friendly messages very easily since those
| are harder to misinterpret." LOL
| dhruvmittal wrote:
| I'm too young to have imagined thinking about Bill Gates the way
| we think about Zuckerberg today but reading this, it occurs to me
| that people must have.
| Shared404 wrote:
| We're probably about the same age, but that is definitely the
| case! If anything, Gates was likely seen as somewhat worse.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents
| adventured wrote:
| Gates was widely revered by the public as primarily a
| positive wunderkind business genius until the later half of
| the 1990s, when he became particularly richer than everyone
| else, Microsoft became increasingly powerful, and the robber
| baron image took over. In the early days he didn't have to
| survive an era of everything-public as Zuckerberg did (there
| are no leaked chat logs from when Gates was 19 et al).
|
| At 30, most people in the US still didn't know who Gates was
| (maybe they had heard his name once), much less know anything
| of consequence about him. Today, if Zuckerberg does or says
| _anything_ embarrassing, tomorrow hundreds of millions of
| people will see the headlines and read about it on Facebook,
| Reddit, Twitter, etc.
|
| Gates and Microsoft got to ride rather quietly to the top of
| the tech universe until the mid 1990s. Tech just wasn't
| nearly so important circa 1980-1990 (vs comparing Microsoft
| or Apple to GM or McDonalds or Coca Cola today).
| kragen wrote:
| revered by the public but not by hackers
|
| the 'dos isn't done until lotus won't run' rumor was 80s
| kalu wrote:
| Hi Mark
| Shared404 wrote:
| Hah, no, don't get me wrong - Facebook sucks, the Zuck
| sucks. Full stop. As much as I dislike what Microsoft has
| done, Facebook is far worse.
|
| But I've seen less art of Zuckerberg drawn as a demon
| coming for your software - though that may just be a
| difference between the internet now and what I've seen of
| the internet in the past.
| hulitu wrote:
| Microsoft hasn't finished.
| msla wrote:
| High-Period Microsoft looked like it was on track to utterly
| own the desktop and, therefore, consumer and small business
| computing world to the point it would be able to keep any non-
| Microsoft-approved software from existing. (Hardware and
| software, with Winmodems pointing the way to hardware that only
| works with Microsoft drivers, not to mention BIOS makers
| basically giving up and turning their code into first-stage
| bootloaders for MS Windows.) It killed Netscape and turned IE6
| into a millstone around the Web's neck, showing what Microsoft
| could do to anything it didn't deem sufficiently profitable at
| the moment. Later, in the early 2000s, Palladium (Trusted
| Computing Platform) was seen by the most pessimistic as the end
| of the line for non-Microsoft OSes on commodity hardware: The
| hardware would only boot encrypted OSes, MS would hold the
| keys, the government would prosecute anyone cracking the code
| as a terrorist. Good game, scrub.
|
| The Halloween Documents were only the start of Microsoft's
| attacks on Open Source in general and Linux in specific; it
| arguably funded SCO during that company's lawsuit against
| Linux, IBM's support for Linux, and basic common sense, by
| buying Linux and Unix licenses from SCO and introducing SCO to
| BayStar Capital. That isn't so much at arm's length as at
| finger's length. Around the same time, Ballmer said the Linux
| kernel was Communism, said it infringed Microsoft's
| intellectual property, and a bit later called Linux cancer. He
| also used the "viral license" insult, proving that big
| companies are sufficiently stymied by the GPL to dislike it.
| You kinda lose plausible deniability when you call something
| cancer and then give money to the company trying to sue it out
| of existence.
|
| But that's Ballmer. Gates all by himself was seen, at least by
| people who didn't just view him as a Funny Rich Nerd, as a
| sharp operator at the very least who did nasty things to
| competitors and had no scruples about doing questionably legal
| things to win. Jobs without the Cult Of Mac, in other words.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| I commented on this before, but I'm surprised Microsoft
| screwed up mobile as thoroughly as they did.
|
| They could have dominated, but instead they all but gave away
| the personal computing space to Apple and Google, and had to
| pivot the company to cloud computing instead.
| [deleted]
| mproud wrote:
| I love the journalist's email, with uppercase letters and all:
| 73124.1524@CompuServe.COM
|
| I also love how they spell it "E-mail" with a capital E no matter
| where it is in the sentence.
| RyanShook wrote:
| It's surprising to me how many tech companies wanted to dominate
| the TV set top box in the 90s.
| 10241024 wrote:
| Bill Gates was prescient about many things we are living with
| right now - video-on-demand, online shopping, "wallet PCs"
| (smartphones), voice recognition, "social interfaces" (Siri,
| Alexa). I recommend his book The Road Ahead (1995).
| msla wrote:
| Java was derived from a language called Oak, which was intended
| to run on set-top boxes.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_(programming_language)
|
| The 1990s had two big things: The Web and cable TV. The smart
| money was on convergence, which meant that the Web would merge
| with cable TV and create something entirely new. This happened,
| kinda, but not in the way people back then imagined; as it
| turns out, "Cable TV" + "The Internet" = "The Internet" so
| "Convergence" is just doing everything over an Internet
| connection.
| discretion22 wrote:
| One of the carefully orchestrated PR articles at the height of
| the investigations into Microsoft. Even in the early '90s,
| Microsoft were operating at genius level for their control of
| public discussion about the company.
|
| One of my all-time favorite bullshit claims is the "Gates always
| flies coach when he is traveling on business." and the
| hilariously ridiculous "Experienced fliers into and out of
| Seattle know to scan the cabin for a man with a blanket over his
| head--that's Bill Gates, taking a nap."
|
| Total bullshit; even then, no-airline would have Bill Gates check
| in as an economy passenger and not instantly upgrade him and move
| mere mortals well away from him. The article even talks about
| Gate's temper just before the coach claim - no-one would risk
| their career or livelihood by failing to treat him with super-
| special billionaire status.
| WalterBright wrote:
| People did run into Bill at the airport eating a burger like
| anyone else. The couple of times I saw him he didn't appear to
| have any visible security people.
|
| > Even in the early '90s, Microsoft were operating at genius
| level for their control of public discussion about the company.
|
| The company had been around what, 15 years, by then? They
| weren't newbies at business, and could afford the best PR
| people.
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