Kris Thom White's Profile

I remember watching a football game which must have been on August 24th or 25th, 1995 (and probably pre-season that early)... they pointed the cameras into the stands at some random happy screaming football fan and the color commentator said "and there's someone who's happy because they finally got Windows 95 installed" It surprised me because I think it was the first time I heard a sports figure reference something in the computer industry like that. When the Win95 hype was so huge it was fodder for NFL commentary, that tells you how ridiculous it was (and how prevalent problems where that someone would be screaming because the "finally" got it installed!)

I'm sure that new content will be available much quicker in digital format than old content. Take books (remember those?)... Despite the vast array of information available online, it's barely a dent in all the printed material available in the world. Scanning that content, as well as older music, older movies and TV programs... that back catalog of "stuff" will take decades to get online (mostly because there's little money in it and therefore no incentive for big business to do it.) Also, the older the material, the more work to get it into a digital form (especially if it has to be cleaned up during the digitization process), so the slower that process will go.

Actually, Davidwb, we're probably coming to the end of the "blockbuster era" (after about a 30 year run). Blockbusters have been mostly failures in recent years. Check out this editorial: http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/technology/maney/2006-01-03-on-demand_x.htm?csp=N009#

Where's #'s 5 through 10? Seriously, we're so conditioned to "top 10" lists, it seems like the rest of this article is missing.

I meant "booted" into Target mode... damn typos

Oliver: Re, modem -- the modem is gone from the iMac -- it' s now a 45 dollar USB device ordered as an accessory.

Memory has it that Microsoft deliberately withheld the Windows 95 APIs from competitors for as long as they could until Word and Excel had been able to make significant inroads. Lotus 123 suffered the same fate. I don't mean to be a big "Microsoft defender" since I hate them, but in the interest of accuracy, I must correct... Word and Excel took a significant portion of their market share in the early 90's, when Windows 3.1 was the big thing. This immediately negates the argument that it was Win95 APIs since that wasn't for some years later. The fact is, WordPerfect didn't see the future in Windows and didn't migrate early enough (and when WPWin finally did come out, it was a horrendous buggy piece of software.. I know we complain about MS, but believe me WPWin was a joke)... simply because they never understood how to design a Windows application in regards to the user interface. They pretty much took the DOS version and gave it a clunky toolbar. Winword 2 and later Winword 6 (still running on Window 3.1 in 1994) took the marketshare from WP. Also, this was the time that MS combined the apps into Office, which is probably the move that helped bring Excel into the mainstream more than anything else. You bought the word processor and got the spreadsheet. No other company was doing that at that point. (Lotus tried by tying Ami Pro in and creating an office competitor with 123, but that was later and too late in the marketplace.) WP was also bleeding money because of the free 1-800 phone support, which was long a staple of phone tech support but something they had to abandon (in 94 I believe). The thing people forget with 20/20 hindsight is that in the 1993-1994 time period, lots of companies were still debating about converting to Windows. DOS was still popular and running on cheap hardware. DR-DOS was still in business, competing with MS, remember? (Companies asking "Why spend money to upgrade just to get a fancy interface and run the same old applications?") There were no Windows games (except for Solitaire) to speak of -- no game manufacturer was making anything for Windows. And lots of companies took a wait-and-see attitude and it killed them. Microsoft did, ironically, what Apple is doing now -- they wrote their own applications for all these markets to have something to run natively on Windows. Windows wasn't dominant enough to abuse their monopoly position at that point -- that came later, post Win95.