Brent Eades wrote:
> And in the afterword:
>
> "In 1994 I thought that millions of Americans might be connected to
> broadband interactive networks as early as 1997... what we actually got
> was millions of people interacting on the Internet."
>
> No doubt Gates and his minions will be able to produce documents and
> affidavits "proving" that MS discussed browsers in some shape or form
> back in '93 or '94 -- an octopus like Microsoft surely talks about how it
> can dominate *every* sector of the software biz at one time or another --
> but Gates' own words certainly imply that he and his company were
> caught unawares by the boom of the Internet, and that they were making
> mere baby-steps towards participation in it as of 1994 or so.
Well, if we're doing revisionist history, then I'm staking a claim, too
*chuckle*
<satire>
I remember being logged in on an August evening in 1991, when Boris
Yeltsin was standing in front of parliament facing down the guns.
People in Russia were posting to Peacenet newsgroups as fast as we could
read (about two hours ahead of Dan Rather's "Latest updates").
Eventually, a law office on Red Square gave up their scanner so students
could scan pictures--they'd take them and develop immediately, and post
to Usenet or Peacenet in UUencoded format within a few hours.
And I distinctly remember, after waiting well over an hour for a poorly
compressed picture to arrive on my 2400 baud modem, posting to a friend
that night:
"Damn, wouldn't it be nice if gopher could display pictures!"
Since this predates the whole Ukansas preliminary Lynx prototypes and
Berners-Lee releasing http specs by about 9 months, then, by Microsoft's
logic, *I* conceived the web.
Now, wonder where they're mailing all my royalty checks? :)
</satire>
MS must realize that, unless they can demonstrate that "integration" was
something they "planned" before Netscape came along, the DoJ has them
over a barrel. Hard to argue that what they did wasn't geared toward
slaying Netscape when the timeline (i.e., reality) fits so well.
B
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