Not a very spectacular story. I guess I would say I’ve earned a decent living telling folks to reboot and beyond. 
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It’s harder than it looks… 
@peepeep , Hey peep, I think WFW 3.11 is less a protocol thing and more a Windows 3.1 thing Windows For Workgroups, was first to have a TCP/IP socket. But of course there was nothing on the Internet to access in those days. Ya know?
I remember having to visit each of the bosses in my chain of command to get their approval to buy licenses for Netscape at $5 a license. Before there was a .com, I was carrying around a single sheet of paper that had just about all the universities, .edu web addresses to show them how we could “jump” from one site to another with a click. They shunned the word, “link”. They could not comprehend what a link could be. I was a tech trying to make them understand the potential of what the web could do for us, and they refused to try to understand. Too new. The old, ‘not invented here’ mentality.
I was having adding 4 meg so it was 8 meg to most PCs to run WFW, 'cause standard, in those days, 4 meg in a PC was not enough. Think about that compared to standard memory in PCs today.
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So 640K of RAM was not enough back then?
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The cost of that memory.
First RAM I bought for my Amiga computer in the late 80’s was $115 per MegaByte. Last RAM I bought for a PC last October was $80 for 32 GigaBytes (or 0.25 cents per MegaByte).
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The first time I saw hypertext was in a help file of a utility program somewhere toward the end of this period. I had a similar experience trying to interest a prof in applying it to his very interesting but overwhelming-in-volume reading list and course work. I offered to do it for nothing (as a motivation to read all that stuff and have it cohere and persist) but he still showed no interest. It didn’t light up his eyes at all. 
I remember seeing a precursor demo thing called… Mosaic? A little overwhelming for the average person at that point, is what I thought at the time…
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Mosaic was its real name. The name they used in development and started working on a more commercial version of it. ___ Anderson. (I can’t remember his first name) came to the project. He was the first real business person on this project. I don’t remember how the came up with the name, but it was ___ Anderson that told them/made them give it a name for the commercial world, hence Netscape. This was a couple of years before Microsoft came out with Internet Explorer 1.0.
On a Windows for Workgroups 3.11 copy, we had to cop a module called WINS32 into the Windows folder for WFW to run Netscape. I can’t remember what its tool name was, but the folder name was WINS32. WFW 3.11 was 16 bit system running on DOS.
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Marc Andreesen? Fun to see what bubbles up from memory, eh?
WFW for me is inert. Never used it (never administered a network.) Though the history is interesting.
A Middle Tech stab at depicting a system:
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I bought 2 additional meg for a NCR Tower. You needed to buy the memory boards in pairs, so 1 MB a board. I paid $1,000 per MB.
Sold a replacement 1 GB 5-1/4 full height HD to the Federal Reserve Bank in Chicago for $25,000. I just recently picked up a 256 GB flash drive for $16. Work those numbers.
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I am in both the 1997 Internet Services Provider Directory and the 1990 Internet Manager’s Phonebook. I got Vincent Cerf to autograph my copy a number of years ago.
The other two were references used at the time. Back when we needed to manually enter the bad sector locations for disk drives before they could be used. And when you had to format a HD in the orientation that it would be installed or you would get errors due to the effect of gravity on the flying head.
I coded an inventory application that used 5 bit Baudot code to send updates and parts requests round robin between hardware stores.
But, even in the last 10 years I have received several patents for BLE and 433MHz projects and developed an algorithms to determine horse position from barometric pressure and know when and where roll-off trucks and containers are.
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Amiga held a video production niche, I think - a ‘Toast’ or ‘toaster’ card? Did you use it for that? 
Hey @CSW. How often has a person of far less expertise assisted you by identifying a ‘blind spot’ you had due to hyper-focus?
Question open to anyone who finds it interesting.
I never had the Toaster, but it was really the first personal type computer that really did multi-taking. It was well ahead of it’s time, but Commodore had no clue how to market it properly. I ran a dial up BBS on the Amiga 2000 for years. It just ran in the background when I was doing other stuff. I still have both the Amiga 1000 and 2000 buried somewhere out in the garage…
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They knew enough to gender it 
, though.
Not girlfriend, but girl friend. Close enough.
I believe that there should always be another pair of eyes looking over your shoulder. I regularly ask the opinion of less technical people, regarding my web and 3D print designs.
Plus, any developer who does not have other developers they can call on for help and opinions is really missing out.
Screw egos. the mission is to design and build products and applications that work for people. If the product doesn’t get used, regardless of how pretty and bleeding edge the tech is, the product is a failure.
Most web sites these days are failures, but people have to put up with them.
When I taught the Capstone class at a local university, I devoted one four hour class to Team Work. If you don’t know what a jelled team is, and have never operated in one, I feel sorry for you. There is no greater sense of accomplishment than being part of a great team.
I devoted another class to Testing. That is another phase that is ignored by most big companies these days. They figure they can use their customers and users as testers, but they never follow through even when the users point out the problems and short-comings.
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The folks that developed the NewTek Video Toaster went on to start a company called Play and developed the Play Trinity, a TV studio in a box. It was very sophisticated, providing lower thirds along with virtual sets with real-time reflections.
I had a Trinity in the early 2000 when I built a webcasting studio in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Back then, Play put on 12 hours of web video a day with shows like “Kiki at Midnight”, “Two Guys on a Couch”, “The Will Williams Show”, and whatever Revelstoke Jim’s show was called. He broadcast out of Revelstoke, BC. Often, he didn’t have the bandwidth available to do full video and had to go audio only.
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Exactly right on those counts. Marc. I could not remember that to save my soul.
Its funny about WFW. It started out only with a BIOS protocol. We could share printers and files. But no one knew why they would want to, so there was not much of that. Then along comes a TCP/IP socket that could be added. Did not come with the box. Had to use a floppy to add it. But funny for a long time, there was no demand for access to the Internet. Shucks, they hadn’t even given it an official name yet.
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A team spontaneously jelled here:
We were operating in the same big room (no partitions) and over time, in an environment of playful bonhomie, it became intimate. We improved our skills and efficiency together, effortlessly, fellow humans.
Unfortunately, supervisors were threatened by what had developed outside their strict control and DASHED THE GDAM JELL.
Literally separated us physically. Enforced misery. Yikes.
After which I ‘bonded’ with Displaywriter.
In hostile self-defense.
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…Some things can never be spoken
Some things cannot be pronounced
That word does not exist in any language
It will never be uttered by a human mouth…
-Give Me Back My Name, Talking Heads (1985)
Just remembered one. Just bought an Amcrest dome camera and you had to remove the dome to access the SD card. I tried and tried, and always got a message there was no SD card. Sent it back to Amazon and got another one. Same problem. Was getting disgusted so my wife walked over to see if she could help. I was in a mood and set the camera down, walked away, and said “go for it”
About 2 minutes later she called me over to show me there is a metal piece with an arrow that has to be slid back then lifted. Then the SD card can be installed.
I had never seen this style, and was just pushing it in partially.
The manual for the camera did not mention this. It just said ‘insert SD card’
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