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JL's avatar

Enjoyed the entire article and this part specifically.

"What kind of questions did Bill ask? Though I was able to show BillG a lot, he stumped me asking to explain the difference between WinHelp, Microsoft’s relatively new online help engine, and the WWW. They were both formatted text with hyperlinks and the user experience was similar. The formats even looked the same. WinHelp used Word’s RTF format, which was also tagged as ASCII format. In fact, WinHelp looked world’s ahead of HTML because it was richer and compressed, so it took fewer bytes."

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Johnnie Odom's avatar

I could put together a really crackerjack college course on “Tech Companies And The Early Web” using only this Substack, jwz.org, and Merrill R. Chapman‘s “In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters“ as the (well-grounded but wildly differing in viewpoint) course reading materials. This was a fantastic entry, and I can’t wait for 28 and getting to the Fireworks Factory.

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