Having worked at MSN during this time, I can tell you, the jealousy of AOL and the client-based walled garden they built was almost physically palpable. AOL was the onramp to the internet for so many folks, but many felt they didn't need to leave the garden. MSN was kind of a halfway spot: a bit more open, but also more integrated into Windows (standard embrace and extend approach). Yahoo! was the other big worry: also had a dialup option, but basically was the internet for many, in that, as a portal, it safely met many of their needs for info and communication.
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.
When I started out at Activision there was a guy doing research so that we would be ready for when Microsoft Network rolled out. It did seem like a cooler version of AOL to us that had like APIs. But no one thought it was going to make it.
Right, Money was around for a while, but it had no investor portfolio tooling for a while. They tried a couple of things, but eventually just used the ActiveX object to give them "insta-portfolio!".
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.
Microsoft Money Sunset Edition still works. I can still download all my credit card statements in OFX (MS Money format). I use it weekly and have nearly 20 years of transaction history stored there.
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?
I recall NetWits, a multiplayer 1950s-style quiz show game on MSN where you played as a contestant against other MSN subscribers in real-time (there was a scheduled "broadcast time" every weeknight -- couldn't play at any other time). There were real prizes, like trips from Expedia.
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.
Definitely a forgotten program. Another one from that era (that actually survived until Win 10 I just learned) is the "Briefcase". It was basically a primitive file syncing tool for multiple devices.
The Briefcase was a godsend back when removable storage was used to move files between computers and there was no other way to keep things synced. It's a shame they removed it.
You could always just build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.
> 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.
Modern NTFS (Win2000 and later) has "reparse points", which are basically file entries with some metadata that triggers special handling. It's the mechanism used to implement soft links (that are handled transparently by the file system, as opposed with the shortcuts you use e.g. on the desktop), or to mount an NTFS volume as a directory inside another NTFS volume, or by OneDrive to download files on the fly when you open them, or to implement unix domain sockets. You can add your own, though it requires adding a filter-driver.
One of the things that came from Microsoft Network that's still around is Expedia. Microsoft needed content to put on MSN and a few engineers got interested in the traveling business. Eventually the experiment turned into a website and then got spun off.
"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."
Readit News
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.
https://youtu.be/ssWZhHBeNVQ
;)
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...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_reparse_point
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."