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Active Desktop and MS DHTML was awesome. Insecure as hell for "consumers", but awesome. VBscript/Wscript on/in the desktop as an application was really useful.

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If containers had been a thing, many of the wild MS ideas of the early 2000s wouldn't have been actually crazy.

They were a thing, on mainframes, micro-computers, and a few selected UNIXes like the (shortly lived) Tru64 and HP-UX.

My introduction to containers was HP-UX Vaults.

they were not a thing that commodity hardware, but most importantly the target user, was really prepared to run at the time

same as virtual machines were a thing in the early 70s and client-server in the 80s, but not for the target market despite the industry thought so for some time

It depends on the definition of target user/market. For IT professionals definitly yes.

that wasn't remotely the target of Active Desktop

Indeed that was for Electron like applications, and not at all matter of discussion.

Aye, BSD jails have been around for a while, and the chroot jail has been a concept since I've been using *nix OS's.

But there wouldn't have been the hardware, resources, or depth of support available for the end user in the 2000s. There are still non-technical folks I deal w/ at work that don't get what a VM is...

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