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John Ludwig's avatar

Great story, really enjoying reminiscing about this time. Everyone was so busy with Win95, NT, etc and yet somehow made the time to respond to the internet. An incredibly hectic but fun time at Microsoft.

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Johnnie Odom's avatar

I arrived in Amherst at the tail end of this era--Fall 1996. While everyone was running Netscape on Windows with Trumpet Winsock, our e-mail was still on VMS servers accessible via telnet and POP (by the time I graduated they had IMAP up). I worked as a student computer center supervisor and spent many, many hours on a VT220 wrangling print queues and poking around the system. We made extensive use of plan files and Usenet. It was an age of wonders.

I think my favorite manifestation of Microsoft's reaction to The Internet was the release of the TCP/IP stack in Windows for Workgroups. WFW3.11 was my favorite version of Windows until 2000 shipped, and the TCP/IP stack had a really solid feeling of quality to it. I know that sounds strange, but it really was one of the best networking experiences I ever had. I delayed upgrading to WIndows 9x until my senior year because I was so happy with WFW.

They installed Windows 95 in the computer lab during my freshman year and I remember asking how to troubleshoot and deal with the registry. The reply from the Windows specialist on staff was, "You don't." And it was true--it wouldn't be until the "95B" release that we felt it was stable enough to go poking around in. During those days the most dreaded error messages were all about corrupted hives ...

I do miss the software universities built for themselves and then made freely available--much of it was really high quality, and it feels like every institution decided to build one specific thing to fill a niche. I still use Fetch (originally from Dartmouth) for file transfers even though Panic's Transmit is probably a more full-featured and modern program (although I do use their Nova for some web development, so it comes out in the wash).

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