| Thanks for the good explanation. I'm manifestly too young. > That's anti-competitive behaviour. Yes that is way more obvious illegal behaviour than the current iteration of the trend. I envy this previous decades legal system for that obviousity. > the shell locks up until it's finished. You can still have this. If you create a folder in an open dialog, and the Windows Defender kicks in or it's a network mount, the inner window of that dialog freezes. Same for searches sometimes in the Windows Explorer. If you press the Window close button several times, the whole shell (including the taskbar) crashes and restarts. > the Explorer now rendered their contents as HTML and used the IE engine to show them. The desktop backdrop was Web content and could change through the day. You could pin a Web bookmarks bar to the Taskbar, or have it floating. I think if it didn't happened as anti-competitive behaviour, but as a real OS-rewrite, it could have been a really good feature. People could write their blog post/social media posts like normal documents and then upload them by a simple drag-and-drop in the Windows Explorer. I think we would have quite a different web then with the walled gardens of today. (I know this is easily doable with a text editor, ssh/ftp and a bind mount, but the layman doesn't do this.) |
Oh, nice. Just what you want.
There was context at the time of Win98, good and bad.
Jobs had just come back to Apple. He cancelled most of its WIP projects. His other company's OS, NeXTstep, was set to replace classic MacOS.
But he didn't just axe everything, and among other things, he set the classic MacOS developers to salvaging as much as they could from the failed "Copland" project to make a multitasking next-generation classic MacOS.
They took quite a lot of the UI tech from the MacOS "Finder", broadly its desktop.
The result was MacOS 8, and one of the big things in its new desktop, as well as loadable themes and pop-up drawers (which never made it across to OS X) was... multithreaded file operations. This was a huge win in the day: Macs were a bit slow anyway so being able to keep working while the Finder kept copying was a huge boost.
So, that was new out in July 1997. Microsoft was left behind: the Win95 desktop couldn't do that, and neither could the fancy pre-emptive multitasking NT 4, released in 1996.
I do miss the era of bold OS experimentation like that. Now, it's just "how can we embed as many cloud services they'll have to pay for?"