TechStuff Classic: The Story of Internet Explorer, Part 1

Nate Lanxon from Bloomberg joins the show to talk about the history of Internet Explorer and the future of Project Spartan.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
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

(00:24):
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

(00:45):
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

(01:07):
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

(01:31):
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

(01:53):
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

(02:14):
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

(02:36):
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

(02:56):
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.

(03:18):
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

(03:39):
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

(04:00):
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

(04:21):
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

(04:41):
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

(05:03):
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

(05:23):
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

(05:44):
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

(06:09):
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

(06:32):
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

(06:57):
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

(07:18):
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

(07:39):
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,

(08:02):
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

(08:25):
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,

(08:46):
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

(09:08):
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

(09:29):
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

(09:52):
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

(10:12):
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

(10:33):
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

(10:55):
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

(11:16):
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.

(11:39):
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

(12:02):
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

(12:24):
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

(12:50):
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

(13:11):
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

(13:33):
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

(13:53):
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

(14:15):
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

(14:35):
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

(15:00):
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

(15:23):
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

(15:45):
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

(16:08):
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

(16:28):
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

(16:50):
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

(17:13):
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,

(17:35):
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

(17:59):
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,

(18:20):
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

(18:40):
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

(19:02):
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

(19:22):
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

(19:44):
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

(20:08):
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,

(20:30):
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,

(20:54):
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

(21:15):
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

(21:36):
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

(21:59):
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

(22:22):
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

(22:47):
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.

(23:09):
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

(23:32):
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

(23:52):
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

(24:13):
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

(24:36):
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

(24:59):
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

(25:21):
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

(25:42):
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

(26:05):
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

(26:27):
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

(26:49):
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

(27:11):
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,

(27:33):
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

(27:55):
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.

(28:18):
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

(28:51):
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

(29:11):
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

(29:32):
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

(29:53):
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

(30:14):
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.

(30:34):
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

(30:55):
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

(31:16):
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

(31:41):
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

(32:01):
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

(32:21):
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

(32:44):
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

(33:06):
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

(33:29):
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

(33:51):
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

(34:15):
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

(34:37):
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

(34:59):
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

(35:20):
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

(35:42):
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,

(36:03):
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

(36:27):
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

(36:49):
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

(37:10):
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,

(37:32):
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

(37:56):
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

(38:20):
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

(38:40):
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

(39:02):
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

(39:25):
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

(39:48):
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,

(40:09):
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

(40:30):
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.

(40:54):
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,

(41:17):
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

(41:41):
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

(42:01):
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

(42:24):
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,

(42:47):
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

(43:08):
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

(43:29):
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,

(43:51):
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

(44:13):
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,

(44:36):
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,

(44:56):
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

(45:18):
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

(45:39):
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

(46:00):
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

(46:24):
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.

(46:45):
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

(47:07):
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

(47:27):
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

(47:58):
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

(48:22):
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

(48:43):
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.

(49:05):
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

(49:30):
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,

(49:53):
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

(50:16):
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

(50:39):
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,

(50:59):
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,

(51:23):
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,

(51:44):
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

(52:05):
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

(52:30):
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

(52:52):
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

(53:13):
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

(53:35):
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

(53:59):
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

(54:19):
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

(54:43):
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

(55:06):
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

(55:27):
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

(55:49):
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

(56:11):
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

(56:33):
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

(56:55):
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. For more podcasts from
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