What The Hell Was The Microsoft Network?
No, not that one. Or that other one. The letters "MSN" have meant so many things to so many people, a term that's been overloaded with a thousand different meanings. In the same way they throw the words "National Lampoon" onto any random movie to indicate that it claims to be a comedy, they slap the "MSN" label onto just about anything so that your poor brain goes "oh, a brand I've heard of" and you get fooled into thinking it must have a certain minimum level of goodness to it.
But I'm talking about the original MSN. Not the simple three-letter acronym we know today, but it's full title: The Microsoft Network.
The Microsoft Network was a long forgotten experiment that started back during the Windows 95 Preview Program somewhere around 1994. It was an exciting time for me as a young lad. Having a copy of Windows 95 a year before it came out made me feel Special, Hip, and Cool, three properties which were much sought after by teenage computer nerds. For perhaps the only time in its life, Windows was cool, and so was I.
Microsoft had already released all this fancy new tech with NT 3.1 a few years earlier, but no one noticed so after getting good n' drunk they had another crack at it. Windows 95 replaced the tired old segmented memory model with a glorious flat one where the pointers actually worked how C claimed they did. It dumped the bug-prone co-operative task switcher in favor of a slightly less bug-prone version of pre-emptive multitasking, meaning your machine wouldn't lock up due to busy loops and would have to find exciting new 32-bit ways to lock up instead. It had a plagiarized visionary new shell that presented the file system as a truly window-based navigation model. It was a pretty exciting time for PC owners back then. After all, these new directions brought the PC almost up to the same spec that other computers had been enjoying ten years ago.
