Hi, friends!
Happy Tuesday! I hope your day is going well.
Tomorrow Microsoft is finally killing off Internet Explorer. Nobody likes IE, but I’ve not heard people be like “oh wow that Microsoft Edge is a helluva browser.”
We have a handful of things at work that only work in IE and only seem to be sort of working on Edge, so fingers crossed tomorrow is super entertaining.
My company is likewise all in on IE and now Edge. Both browsers suck in their own special ways.
Right? Firefox or Chrome is what everyone uses. If Microsoft didn’t own shit that they wanted people to use Edge for, nobody would use that piece of crap.
For my work computer I use Chrome for everything that doesn’t absolutely require Edge. For my personal computer I use Firefox for everything except for the telehealth visits for therapy. For some reason, Edge works best for that.
I miss AltaVista. I also miss those printed URL directories publishers used to sell, like telephone directories.
A couple of years ago I did a purge and came across a box that I must have hastily packed up right before a move, vowing I’d get to it once we got to the new place. It was from 1992. It was fabulous. It had old pay stubs and utility bills, which is why I didn’t want to just dump the stuff in the building’s public trash cans, and we didn’t own a shredder at the time. My NY Telephone bills had little promotional offers, like if I dialed a certain number I could get the time (remember that?) or the latest sports scores, or my horoscope, the weather, I forget what else, all for just 25 cents per call. That’s still only about 50 cents. Then I had my separate long-distance MCI bills, which were eye-opening. Adjusted for inflation, my MCI and NY Tel bills were about three times what my smartphone service costs now, and I called long distance very sparingly and only at night, to get the discount rate.
Of course our rent at the time was only $750 for a one+ bedroom railroad apartment (rent-stabilized, natch) in Chelsea, so everything evens out I guess.
Especially amazing since MCI helped break up AT&T monopoly by being significantly cheaper than AT&T’s long distance options!
While we’re discussing old browsers, I loved Opera.
Netscape was the first one I really learned to “internet” on😉
That, and Ask Jeeves as a search engine to find things!💖
When I was in college the first time around (94-98, minus the 96-97 school year), we didn’t really have browsers & search engines…
There were 3 email platforms/browsers at NDSU; iirc, they were Plains, Prairie, and maybe Bison?
All words, associated with NDSU/North Dakota *things,* and each had some different chatrooms that folks could access, by being online via the Plains, Prairie, or Bison option…
We were assigned an email under one of the three, but if you weren’t *in* your email, you could browse the chat rooms in the other two…
I wasn’t very good at it, and the chatrooms were way too confusing for me to try on my own, so I just stuck with emailing the two off-campus people I knew, who even had email accounts back then😉
One was my auntie, a technology Paraprofessional at an elementary school, and the other was a nephew of my grandma’s–who was close enough in age to her (he was the son of her oldest sister), that they were more like cousins than niece & nephew.
He was a professor & horticulturalist at a Nebraska University, and is basically the genealogy buff of the extended family, so we sent family history info back & forth a few times over those years.
After college, I didn’t have *regular* internet access, ’til about ’05, which then ended up being Firefox, until Chrome became so ubiquitous.
And I was laughing with my roommate a few months back, when I realized that I’ve had my main e-mail account, since 2000 or 2001, when SHE sent me the “invitation” to join that new *fancy* email service, Gmail😉😆🤣
(This is the main reason I’ve stuck with Chrome, tbh–the folks at Google have had access to my info, since alllll the way back then… I don’t figure it’s worth switching at this point!)
Just went and did a quick search–apparently it was “Plains, Prairie, & Badlands” (not Bison!), and those were the servers that the ND college system was running at the time;
https://acrobat.adobe.com/link/track?uri=urn:aaid:scds:US:6160e406-175d-3a82-b6e6-19cd2c08cf46
(I still use Opera…)
It’s really amazing how badly Microsoft botched their move to the internet. They had the engineers to get on top of all of the technical issues early and roll out the tools for connecting online for their own users But they frittered it all away because it wasn’t a profit center.
Then they tried to play catchup by bigfooting everyone with IE and declaring it would be the default by fiat, but did a crummy job with the software and worse tangled themselves in antitrust lawsuits. Because they waited so long to build out internet tools in favor of developing under the hood integration with Windows 95, everyone freaked out, and rightfully so, by how much of MS’s work was a black box.
They made Outlook just a mess as an email suite, and completely ignored the need and value of antivirus and online security, which unlike IE they had a legitimate claim to integrate with their OSes.
It was ultimately because Gates and his top execs were positive they knew what the internet was without ever really immersing themselves in it. It was the tech equivalent of the ugly American who is sure he can get around Brazil just fine if he only speaks loudly and slowly, and any problem connecting is the fault of the listeners.
Outlook was decent when it first started, but then they went all MS on it and now it’s an outhouse.
Wait, did we retire this?
We need to figure out a way to light that on fire.
I hate IE. Not a big fan of Edge, it’s not the Ginzu of browsers.
I did not get much sleep the past 2 days and I hit the bed hard last night. Woke up at 6:30am, ate but was so tired I fell hard asleep by around 8:30am. I ended up sleeping till 2:30pm (my shift starts at 2:50…oops.)
Anyway, I have a 2nd interview on Friday, so yay me.
Also, my former supervisor came by to say good bye today. I was told he went to all the rooms, but I saw him walking towards my room and he saw me and moved onto the next room. Hmmm, I wonder what message he was sending to me?
Yeah, fuck you too buddy.
It also needs to be said, that Bing is the woooooooooooost (insert Jean-Ralphio .gif here!) search engine, and is COMPLETELY USELESS if you aren’t shopping (which appears to be what the damn thing is geared toward?!?
It is TRASH!