Microsoft: The Early Days (2000)

http://www.memecentral.com/mylife.htm

by kristianp • 8 years ago

74 20 8 years ago

mbrumlow• 8 years ago

This was a good read, but now the colors are all messed up. Nothing looks normal after looking at that green background for so long...

jccalhoun• 8 years ago

Holy Crap. That is what happened. I read it and then went to look up Multiplan and everything seemed pink. I was a little worried.

senozhatsky• 8 years ago

He also mentions:

Richard Brodie's published books include:
Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme

http://www.memecentral.com/votm.htm

I regret I clicked...

-ss

ktpsns• 8 years ago

My mission: write the world's first wordprocessor with a spreadsheet user-interface.

Can somebody elaborate on this?

ratboy666• 8 years ago

The original Word for DOS had a user interface (for command selection) similar to MultiPlan, which was (similar) to VisiCalc.

Windows was not yet a thing.

cityzen• 8 years ago

Yes! Well, sort of, but a little backstory... Yesterday, I believe, there was an article posted here called, “Perhaps it is simpler to say that Intel…was disrupted”. It was written by Steven Sinofsky (who I wasn't familiar with) but had a look at his Medium posts. There was an interesting article there titled, "Design for an “Audience of One” (https://medium.learningbyshipping.com/audience-of-one-107bad...)

Funny enough, there is a quote in there, "Did you know that a spreadsheet is a much better word processor than a word processor? After all, a word processor is just a spreadsheet with one cell."

That design for an audience of one was a great read. It may not answer all your questions but I think it will at least point you in the right direction of what he is talking about.

Btw, Steven Sinofsky is the former president of the windows division at M$.

seanmcdirmid2• 8 years ago

Sinofsky also took the blame for Microsoft’s Mexican stand-off culture when he was fired, though I think it was mainly billg and Balmer’s fault.

UncleSlacky• 8 years ago

I thought it would have been the word processor in Lotus Symphony, but apparently that only came out in 1984: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Symphony_(MS-DOS)

llaolleh• 8 years ago

Why did this guy have that super green background??!!! Everything is pink =(.

wetpaws• 8 years ago

https://outline.com/6jZFjf

krylon• 8 years ago

When the father of a friend retired and cleaned out his office, I ended up with Multiplan manual. It's kind of funny, because I have never used Multiplan or even seen it run, and these days I find myself swearing at Microsoft for not providing decent manuals (or any manuals at all) for many of their products. And one day, I might even read that thing, just because I can. ;-)

2bitencryption• 8 years ago

oh my god. what a visionary.

n4r9• 8 years ago

Hah, "memetics" had been a thing for a long time by then. Easy to forget that Dawkins coined the term way back in 1976.

toopsss• 8 years ago

Not so much

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/1994/10/godwin-if...

firemancoder• 8 years ago

Eh, not exactly. Domain was registered in 2002.

Still not a bad prediction tho

sram1337• 8 years ago

You can remove the green background with the Basic Formatting chrome extension and make this (and other unstyled sites) easier to read.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/basic-formatting/a...

Shameless self plug here :)

wluu• 8 years ago

Or just open the dev tools and remove the bgcolor attribute from the body tag?

Pretty simple.

bdcravens• 8 years ago

Still committed to Microsoft after all those years:

Microsoft: The Early Days (2000)

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