PART 4: HoTMaiL - THE FIRST WEB-BASED APPLICATION?

Windows 95 was becoming an established norm. This signaled the death of DOS, and the advent of the point-and-click interface, once and for all in the personal computing world. Of course, there had been a few Mac users before this time, and early adopters in the PC world had been using Windows 3.1 and Windows for Workgroups, but the "IBM compatible" world was still pretty dull until then. All of this contributed to a further dumbing down of Internet (now the Web), bringing personal computing and Web browsing in line. It was around the time that Windows 95 came out (which was really 1996, right?) that I decided to hang up the Mac and go over to the dark side. I bought a Windows computer, a nice Toshiba Satellite Pro with Windows 95. I still have that machine in the bottom of a box somewhere. It was a real workhorse, and I wouldn't touch another Mac again for 10 years.

One of the things I liked about this period was that Hotmail (meaning HTML, or Web-based, mail) hit the scene. It was and continues to be an HTML-based email system that allows you to do all your emailing, formatting, saving, folder creation, etc. directly from a Web interface. This is a pre-cursor of "Goin' Commando." Once again, you could connect to an online account and do and save your work on that site without having to download and save your work on disk. This was just like the good old days of five years earlier, when it seemed like the future of computing would entail applications being available online, and the need for saving work or downloading files onto disks wouldn't be necessary. However, the office and personal computing worlds were really going in two opposite directions at the same time.

Disks were getting to be a hassle, having to be carried around all the time, and stacking up all over your desks at work and home. Personally, by the time I got my Hotmail account, circa 1997, I also had hundreds of flopppy disks containing Mac and PC applications, in addition to all the files I'd accumulated over the years. The notion that work could be done online and kept there was appealing again. Computers with CD-ROMs drives, however, were hitting the market, and soon, CD-RW was on the horizon, locking us into disks for years to come. Until this day I have hundreds of CDs and DVDs, though I've only hung onto about a dozen floppy disks with files that I never transferred to CD. Some day, I'll do that.

Around the same time that Microsoft's Hotmail was gaining popularity, several other companies such as Lycos, GeoCities, and Angelfire were offering Web-based Web development applications. Essentially, they'd give you a place to make your own Web pages with your own URL. These were nice, but they were limited to creating Web pages only, and there was no real potential for creating other kinds of documents. Microsoft did have another set of applications linked to Hotmail that were part of MSN groups, and I recall trying to use their online equivalent of Word, which was an application that edited and saved RTF documents, but for some reason it wasn't that memorable. I say that because I've forgotten the name, though I know I tried to make it work. I remember mapping this online folder as a network drive, which basically FTP-ed the documents back and forth for file management.

Things stayed this way, more or less, for several years. It seemed like Microsoft (was there anybody else even competing?) was going in the direction of PC-based applications with capabilities to save to online folders, but this was mostly "publishing" documents to the Web. You still needed to have local access to your files, either on your desktop PC's hard drive, or on some portable storage device such as a CD, Zip, Jazz, or DVD or USB drive in more recent years.