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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
