A Very Long Life – In Internet Time

The concept of “Internet Time” refers to the frenzied and never-ending pace at which things on the Internet, or things related to the Internet, occur.  It’s a sort of “dog years” analogy for technology.  For example, say your company’s product happens to be a web browser.  Software development cycles can run anywhere from twelve months to several years.  But on Internet Time, the development cycle might now be six months to a year.  By Internet Time standards, Internet Explorer 4 has enjoyed an extremely long life cycle. 

It is common for development on the next version of a product to occur simultaneously with the release or near-release of the current version.  This is what happened with Internet Explorer 4.  Version 3 was an ambitious project to begin with.  The project – code-named “Athena” – was scheduled to be released in the Summer of 1996, and it was supposed to include a web browser, an email client and news reader, a new TCP/IP auto-dialer, and Microsoft NetMeeting.

   

Athena would also be the primary client in another project – code-named “Normandy.”  Normandy was a product line comprised of various Internet-related technologies, such as Microsoft Chat Server, Microsoft Personalization Server, Internet News Server, Microsoft Merchant Server, and others.  The “summer Internet package,” as it came to be known, would later become blended into another project – code-named “Nashville” – which was to be the successor to Windows 95 UI shell.

Late in the development cycle for Internet Explorer 3, it became apparent that Microsoft would not be able to deliver Athena as planned in the Summer of 1996.  So, Microsoft cut back on their plans and released Internet Explorer 3, Internet Mail and News 1.0 and Microsoft NetMeeting 1.0.  Microsoft then began working on a new project under the code-name of “Nashville.”  Nashville was being billed as an “Internet Update Release.”  Microsoft had ambitious plans for Nashville.  It would be a web browser (at the time based on Internet Explorer 3), an email client, a news reader, a personal web server, data and audio conferencing, and a personal information manager.  More importantly, it would replace the existing Windows shell, making it a completely integrated product.  Their intent was to release a new version of Windows with Nashville blended in.

Nashville’s goal was to evolve the Windows 95 shell to provide integration between the user’s PC and the Internet, blurring (and removing), the boundary between Windows 95 and Internet Explorer.  The Nashville team merged elements from the Windows 95 Explorer with features from Internet Explorer, and created a new shell (which is still called Explorer).  Nashville’s goal was realized in on September 30, 1997, when Microsoft released Internet Explorer 4.

The demand for version 4 was impressive.  In the first 24 hours it was available, it was being downloaded once every six seconds.  This amounted to the transmission of a whopping ten terabytes of data!  The demand exceeded everyone’s expectations, including Microsoft’s.  But in a matter of days, security issues began cropping up, and Microsoft began releasing what was to be a long stream of patches, updates and service packs, resulting in a number of different builds for version 4.