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Comment by spijdar | Hacker News Reader

There's some wiggle room here, depending on how you "count". The first HTTP client and server were certainly created as NeXT apps, and I love NeXTSTEP so I love mentioning this trivia, but the reality IMO is the web that people actually used in the 90s and the web that evolved into what we have now doesn't really resemble Tim Berners-Lee's vision for what he called "the web" or his client/server.

So as far as popularizing the web for the masses and developing the de facto WWW so many people experienced, I think the earlier DOS and other Unix browsers like Mosaic were more instrumental, with Internet explorer and Netscape really "birthing" the web we know.

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> So as far as popularizing the web for the masses and developing the de facto WWW so many people experienced, I think the earlier DOS and other Unix browsers like Mosaic were more instrumental, with Internet explorer and Netscape really "birthing" the web we know.

In 1995 windows was at his birth. The majority of people used other protocols than http to explore the internet. I was searching for a DOS browser to run it on the university computer (DOS diskless) to see the new web. Then MS bought Spyglass (or something) and they destroyed Netscape by bundling IE with windows. Windows did not bring anymore the web to the masses than netscape, chimera and others did. They just happened (as today) to hold a monopolistic position on the market and exploited this position.

> Then MS bought Spyglass (or something)

This is actually kind of an amazing story when you dig into it. Microsoft licensed Spyglass -- which was the commercialized version of the original Mosaic -- on a royalty basis. Microsoft's version of Spyglass was Internet Explorer 1.0, part of the commercial "Microsoft Plus!" package. But then Microsoft released IE separately for free, and when it was bundled with Windows, a bit of accounting sleight-of-hand treated it as $0 direct revenue (after all, it's just freeware they're not making you download separately, right?). So, the royalty payment to Spyglass became: $0. They still paid a fairly small flat minimum, but that was it.

Amazing? You mean despicable. Like pretty much everything Microsoft has ever done.

In case you or others are not aware: "amazing" and "awesome" are commonly-inferred as having positive connotations in the native-english-speaking-world, but the dictionary definitions of these words have no such connotations.

Amazing: causing great surprise or wonder; astonishing.

Awesome: extremely impressive or daunting; inspiring great admiration, apprehension, or fear.

So, "Amazing" is not incompatible with "Despicable". It's like a magnitude without a direction (whereas "despicable" is magnitude and direction).

Right. One could fairly describe both Casablanca and Tommy Wiseau's The Room as amazing movies, but for markedly different reasons. :)

Thanks, the intent of my comment was to apply the 'direction', as you described it.

Amazing's common usage was too ambiguous for this topic for me. :)

We might even see MS making popular Progressive Web Apps!

>Quote : That is going to be the fundamental challenge in such a world, but we feel that there are ways. One of the ways I look at this is you can light an Android app or a PWA app or a UWP app on Windows in the future, or even today, for some of the new AI APIs.

Would it be fair to say that the web we know today, with a few big players that gather all our data was born on Windows but the web we know and love, with an abundance of personal websites was born on Unix?

Probably not, but there is some correlation I guess

Probably not. Most people in the 90s had their personal websites in some shared hosting service, while clients across the board were and still are predominantly Windows.

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