I’ve been reading old articles by Joel Spolsky lately. Starting with post mocking java installation dialog, I went to “People don’t like to read” link and was absorbed by adjacent articles. While enjoying old stories about UI design I found that there are quite a lot of things I don’t know about the past of software industry. Here are some things I read on Joel’s site and googled afterwards (they might be not surprising in the least to you, though):
- in the 80’s and early 90’s there was “almost complete monopoly” by Lotus 123 on the spreadsheet market and Microsoft overtook it by making Excel compatible with Lotus.
- “when Microsoft Excel 3.0 came out in 1990, it was the first application to sport a new feature called a toolbar”
- there was a complete rewrite of Netscape Navigator which lasted for 3 years and gave IE an opportunity to take over the browser market
- IE was default browser on Mac for 5 years (I believe I’ve heard about it but since I never owned a Mac I didn’t really care)
- Opera is much older than I though with the first release in 1994 (this is from browsers timeline)
I wonder if there is some book about software history over the last 15 years or so.
Update:
There was a good illustration of why I don’t read Joel often in his podcast #38 and following blog post by Robert Martin (with lots of interesting comments). In my view Joel and Jeff make a good point that software development techniques are just tools to provide “business value”. On the other hand, they obviously didn’t try to understand SOLID principles before criticising them. Not to mention that regarding usefulness of TDD I’m totally on the side of Robert Martin :) Looking forward to listening stack overflow with Robert Martin.
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