On Thu, 6 Apr 2000, Zane H. Healy wrote:
>
> OK, I can no longer resist commenting on this. WHERE IS MICROSOFT'S
> INNOVATION?!?!?!
>
>
> MS Explorer:
> Netscape (I won't even credit them with having looked at Mosaic)
>
How much did their purchase of Spyglass [the company and the
product same name(?)] affect the look and feel of Explorer? Did they
use any anything from Spyglass or did they do the Adobe "acquire and
squash" two-step on them? Was Spyglass a license or commercial spin off
of Mosaic?
>
> MS Visual BASIC:
> Now this one has bothered me for several years, did they buy the underlying
> technology or copy something that already existed. I've a strange feeling
> that this one was actual innovation!
>
I haven't had the urge to look at VB. How visual and how object oriented
is it? I believe Serius Developer for Mac precedes it. Serius was sold by
its founder to Novell who renamed it Appware and seemed to carry it to
version 1.2. Was this Novell's effort at competing with VB? It became a
dual platform (Win and Mac) development environment, a connect the module
(ALMs - Appware Load Modules) IDE. I believe the modules were written in
another language, probably C. I think just before its swan dive in
1994(?) they renamed it AppBuilder, but whether that was just cosmetics
or real changes I don't know. Using their search engine, I find
that Novell has managed to expunge virtually all mention of either
product from its web site. Technically this is on topic as the start date
for Serius has to be over ten years ago or at least close.
Similarly, what happened to Layout? I assume it also doesn't exist
anymore.
I wonder if there were any last patches, updates or extra code
(modules) for both products, material that is now forever lost?
Anybody have either of these two products in any of their various
incarnations?
--- Stephen Dauphin
Received on Thu Apr 06 2000 - 18:39:02 BST
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0
: Fri Oct 10 2014 - 23:32:40 BST