Tag: computer history

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Whatever happened to WinFS from Longhorn?

20 years back I was excited by the prospect of a version of Windows that replaced the DOS based file system with a database based system called WinFS, although disappointed that it was forever delayed. I continued to be excited by the prospect that it may ship as an add-on for XP and Vista. Another year passed and that idea was also canned.

This post on The Register caught my eye this week, discussing some history behind Longhorn, and an overview by Dave Plummer over on his YouTube channel. Fascinating to hear some of the behind the scenes story, but sad it never saw light of day.

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Paul Allen’s Living Computer Museum computer collection being auctioned by Christies – last day tomorrow (12/9/24)

Paul Allen’s computer collection that was previously on display at the Living Computer Museum in Seattle is currently under auction by Christies – the last day to pick up your own DEC PDP-10, IBM 7090 Mainframe or many other historical computers is tomorrow (12 Sept 2024).

The museum has been closed since COVID, and Paul Allen’s estate have decided to sell off the collection. Many of the machines are in working order and were maintained by the museum, so hopefully the machines will find new homes where this computer history can be experienced by many in the future.

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What tech stack was I working with in May 2003?

Clearing out some stuff in the home office I came across this CD-ROM of tech tools, products and libraries that I was using at work at this time:

  • JBoss – the open source Java EE app server of choice at this time
  • Xerces – Java XML Parsing library (DOM)
  • Amazon WS Kit – not sure what this was, maybe an SDK for AWS?
  • Apache – HTTP web server
  • Caucho Resin – no longer around – if I remember right this was an optimized Servlet runtime
  • EJ Tech Profiler – I think this was a competitor to JProfiler?
  • Homesite – HTML editor
  • IBM WS Kit – SDK for Java XML webservices
  • IntelliJ – still around today. At the time I don’t think it was as popular as Eclipse or Netbeans, but is probably the best. Java IDE around today

Interesting look back at Java versions in use at the time:

  • Java JDK 1.4 (at the time, also called Java 2 after JDK version 1.2, abbreviated as J2SE)
  • Java EE 1.2 and 1.3 – abbreviated to J2EE – the days when J2EE was actually called J2EE before dropping the 2 and just becoming Java EE after Java EE 5 was released in 2006)
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