All entries for Wednesday 04 November 2009

Microsoft promises Mac and Unix versions of ActiveX this year…

... in 1996. I was idly flipping through the October 1996 issue of Personal Computer World(*) the other day when I noticed this article:

I was aware there were once versions of Internet Explorer for both Mac and strange, even optimistic, as it may sound for Unix (**), but this is the first time I've encountered a reference to ActiveX on anything other than Windows. Evidently Microsoft did deliver on the promise, though I've not been able to locate any info on how long the projects lasted. I doubt their demise was much mourned.

It appears that Microsoft did, as suggested at the end of the article, give away ActiveX. Something else I was unaware of. The documentation is available here. Though this article suggests that they only gave away part of it and did not '...disclose the specifications and source code needed to build working client-side ActiveX applications on platforms other than Windows'.

The other part of the article that caught my eye was that part about set top boxes being expected to bring the web in the living room. I can dimly remember such talk. It seems plausible enough on the face of it but it never happened and in retrospect seems hopelessly optimistic. The closest I can recall coming to the 90s web in the living room via a set top box experience was via a friend's Phillips CD-I. It had an email client and a web browser. Both were utterly dismal.

(*) A colleague has a bunch of such magazines piled in the corner of our office. I'm not sure why.

(**) I tried running it on mimosa but it just says "SunOS 5.8 is not currently supported." and displays an empty window.

Mike Willis : 04 Nov 2009 13:17 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem