And so The Microsoft Network wasn't a program you loaded like CompuServe. It was part of the OS, with folder icons that looked just like real folders. It was a kind of version of the Web where you could browse online data the same way you browsed your file system. This is what made it cool.
It was as if the data was suddenly free of the shackles of being displayed in a program. Data wasn't just a web page, or a program showing its own internal databases. The Microsoft Network made it look like the data was right there, and you could click it and drag it around! For a brief time, back in 1995, it felt like we were on the verge of the true object-oriented web, a world filled with open data and free from the tyranny of the walled gardens.[1]
It also reminded me what an excellent job Wikipedia does with their hierarchical classification which you don't see when you're often only searching by article name.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20260129143542/https://www.coder...
This has become a forgotten art: we focus so much on CONTENT these days that we forget that people want to use the mouse to scroll, and use the mouse to resize windows.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=More_milk.&redire...
The "Windows XP" website displays the same article when you click on "More milk" there
> After several hours and several drug injections, Jackson was still unable to fall asleep, and, according to Murray, was repeatedly asking him for "milk", a nickname for the powerful surgical general anesthetic propofol, which Jackson had used in the past as a sleep aid. At 10:40 a.m., with Jackson still not asleep, Murray relented to his requests and injected him with 25 milligrams of propofol diluted with lidocaine. With Jackson finally asleep, Murray testified that he left his bedside to go to the bathroom, and after returning two minutes later, discovered that Jackson was not breathing and had a weak pulse.
But my biggest gripe is, why represent it as a file system with WordPad displaying HTML? I get the idea for media, but not for the articles.
It's pretty obvious that Wikipedia should be a single CHM file. That would be nice and much more immersive.
Should put a shortcut to it on the desktop as well, so that users who experience significant lag can defrag at will.
Generally you can delete your comment if its relatively soon after you posted it and nobody replied.
I've never seen wikipedia from this categorized vantage point. If we're being real their UX is kinda crap outside the usual search->article->link flow and could use a complete rework.
Three tricks if you didn't already know:
1: you'll find categories at the bottom of regular mediawiki pages
2: if you click one, you'll end up on a page like eg. this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Computers
3: the tree style tabs plugin in combination with middle-click is criminally underrated for navigating hierarchical data. (middleclick open-in-new-tab is only mildly handy, tree style tabs seems tepid by itself without it)
