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6
A Quick Glance into History
While Sun Microsystems maintained in the nineties that "the Network is the computer", Microsoft
was not going to rest until a Windows computer sat on every desk.
The computer that Microsoft was concerned with was a mixture of data files and binary executable
files. Files with executable binary contents are called programs and were bought and installed by
customers to manipulate data. Microsoft Office was the winner in most of the offices around the
world. The computer that Sun was working with was a cheap, dumb terminal with a screen, a
keyboard, a mouse, and access to the Internet. The programs and data were not stored on this
computer, but somewhere on the net.
The mine philosophy governed Microsoft's practices whereas the our philosophy was adopted by
Sun. The motivation for these philosophies was not for pure humanitarian reasons, but for
economic interest. Primarily, Microsoft sold software for PCs to the consumer market; Sun, on the
other hand, sold server hardware and programs to the enterprise market.
The Internet, invented in the sixties, spread like an explosion in the mid-nineties. Among other
things, HyperText Markup Language (HTML)--the language used to write web pages--and
the development of web servers and web clients (browsers) helped its expansion. The Internet
itself was a set of rules that could be understood by different devices and was developed so
skillfully that it covered the entire planet in almost no time.
An individual without an e-mail address could no longer be reached and a company without a
website was not only old-fashioned, but didn't exist in the eyes of many customers. The whole
world swarmed to the Internet within a short time to become a part of it. Movies like The Matrix
(
http://whatisthematrix.warnerbros.com/
) became huge hits and 1984
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984
), a book by George Orwell, was forgotten.
New net citizens came from the mine world on one hand and from the our world on the other
hand. Those who were used to buying programs bought HTML editors and created Internet pages
with them. The others preferred to write their own HTML code with any text editor they had on
hand. And the web agency, where one could order a homepage, was born.
Both groups faced the problem that HTML pages were static. To change the contents of the page,
it first had to be modified on a PC and then copied to the server. This was not only awkward and
expensive, but also made web presences like eBay or Amazon (
http://amazon.com/
) impossible.
Both groups found more or less good solutions for this problem.
The mine faction developed fast binary programs with which one could produce HTML pages and
load them via automated procedures onto the server. Interactive elements such as visitor counters,
among others, were built into such pages.