THINGS THAT SHOULDN'T EXIST: Internet Explorer for UNIX

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If you know anything about early Microsoft, it seems very odd to think of them having anything to do with UNIX in any form. After all, one of the main goals of Windows NT was to make Microsoft a viable competitor in the workstation and server fields. It thus begs the question of just why Microsoft took the effort to port Internet Explorer to their most fierce competitors. After teasing my IE for UNIX during my Solaris 7 video, I felt dig need deeper.
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Blog: casadevall.pro
Chapter Marks:
00:00 - Intro and Installation
02:28 - Struggling With Solaris 7 Patch Madnesss
05:10 - Exploring Internet Explorer for UNIX
09:46 - Outlook Express on UNIX
13:00 - What Actually Makes Up IE/UNIX?
14:29 - Introducing Mainsoft and the Windows Integrated Source Environment
17:30 - Visual SourceSafe for UNIX
19:09 - Why does IE/UNIX Exist?
20:32 - Closing
In truth, this wasn't my first experience with Internet Explorer for UNIX. Back in 2012, I had an opportunity to explore it remotely via X11 forwarding, and I learned enough to keep me interested. However, because IE for UNIX required either a HP-UX install, or old Solaris to work, I didn't really have much opportunity to research it further. Digging into Solaris 7 gave me the excuse I needed dig in deep, and begin putting this mystery together.
From struggling through finding old Solaris patch sets, kernel panics, and more, I finally managed to get Internet Explorer for UNIX to load up. It quickly becomes apparent that there's quite a lot more here than just a simple port of IE. Through testing IE for UNIX appears to incorporate a lot of specific Windows technologies. Through testing, VBScript and more works, showing that is a true port of the Trident rendering engine to Solaris, and that raises even more answers than it answers.
By doing some simple reverse engineering, and a lot of searching, I eventually learned that IE for UNIX was made by company called Mainsoft, who, rather notably,was responsible for the Windows source code leak in 2004. Mainsoft had been part of a program from Microsoft known as the "Windows Integrated Source Environment" or WISE where Microsoft licensed the source code of Windows to various companies to create third party products. This lead to the creation of Visual MainWin, a toolkit that exists to help port Windows software to Linux.
What I found shocked me. Mainsoft had ported the core Windows API and more to run ontop of UNIX. Infact IE for UNIX ships with a fairly complete set of files that won't look out of place in Windows system32!. This finally began to let me put the pieces of the puzzle together, and by digging through their website on the Internet Archive, I finally put all the pieces together. I ... also managed to find Visual SourceSafe for UNIX, whch tells me some ancient horrors should just remained buried.
Afterwards, we walk through the how and why. I'd love to hear your own theories on why IE for UNIX is a thing, and more. This is NCmmander, signing out.
Music Provided by Epidemic Sound. Tracks, in order of performance:
-Sumerian Paradise - Dew Of Light
-Extravaganza - Jules Gaia
-The Forest Grand - Trevor Kowalski
-Circular Thought - Ethan Sloan
- Tiny Soul - Spectacles Wallet and Watch
- Chef Extraordinaire - Trabant 33
- What We Discovered - Philip Ayers
- Truth Interlapse - Robert Ruth
- Melted Mind - Max Anson
- Hidden in the Snow - Jon Bjork
#ncommander #unix #internetexplorer

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2 июл 2024

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Комментарии : 422

@NCommander 2 года назад

Finally got this one put together. This was my first real experience with using DaVinci Resolve Fusion, and learning to do complex animation and effects. I might have gone overboard ...

@44Bigs 2 года назад

It’s a great video! I dig the ominous music in the last half

@marziyehrafieian5826 2 года назад

کک گم ک کک ک گم ک ککک کککککککک

@timsot 2 года назад

You did great !

@LaurentiusTriarius 2 года назад

@@timsot still waiting for the voodoo 6! What the heck are you guys doing I've had to buy a matrox...

@LaurentiusTriarius 2 года назад

No 1990's fondue effects tho. Loved it.

@SuperSmashDolls 2 года назад

I just realized. If they had actually shipped ActiveX SDKs for this thing, we probably would have had Flash for IE for Unix.

@thorsteinj 2 года назад

These three words should not appear like that in one sentence, I made an audible gasp while reading it...

@TheDemocrab 2 года назад

@@thorsteinj It's genuinely hard to come up with stuff that'd be equally bad as that...Best I can do is "Sony XCP (Sony's old audio CD rootkit software) support for playing CDs with iTunes for Unix"

@thorsteinj 2 года назад

@@TheDemocrab Could raise that with Flash plugin for Safari for Windows XP 64-bit Edition (native, not WOW64). But my brain melts just thinking about what would have had to happen for that to occur.

@kaitlyn__L 2 года назад

That would’ve been sweet. And terrible. And great. I love Flash and I hate Flash. Can’t forget Shockwave too. Damn.

@thorsteinj 2 года назад

@@kaitlyn__L Just imagine if Apple went all in on Unix with A/UX. Then Adobe would maybe also follow. But then again... well... I'm not going to say Flash on OS X is Flash on UNIX. But I kinda am. Will X11 come to the rescue to bring IE 5 for UNIX on Mac OS X? Am I missing something because that almost sounds too easy.

@adriansdigitalbasement 2 года назад

Michael, your digital sleuthing and troubleshooting skills are unmatched!! I'm honestly in awe that you got this horror-shot POS fully running.

@JeffreyPiatt 2 года назад

Getting Microsoft Edge for Linux running is easier.

@The_Boctor 2 года назад

The defaults having both vi and emacs selected in different fields was funnier than it had any right to be.

@NCommander 2 года назад

Peace, at any price :)

@nathanpc 2 года назад

Seeing VBScript running natively on Unix was the absolute most insane part of this whole thing for me. I wish someone out there has a copy of the Visual MainWin to be archived. Something like this would be amazing to play around with.

@ikannunaplays 2 года назад

Same here, I was blown away. Makes me wonder what the code execution limits are in Unix cause there weren't many in the windows version

@makethingsbetter Год назад

When my generation developed portable code, it usually worked, but that’s when the limitations were time and not thought of, not impossible, only mathematically improbable, was the answer to “can you do it?” Vb is actually quite portable, it calls basic functions only and only when you mess with break out with Assembler embedding statements will it biff your OS. We used to find these things out for fun, when I were a lad! Lol 😝

@jp46614 Год назад

you are such an npc

@raxpyraxp Год назад

That was the thing I definitely wasn't expecting for

@MarcDoughty Год назад

I wonder how much was implemented, or whether some simple functions were just mapped-through.

@agenttexx 2 года назад

My ex-wife used to use this. She was an configuration analyst working for Sillicon Graphics. They used SGI Workstations in office that were running Unix. When we met, SGI was still developing their NT Workstation and they were not yet ready. She said they used to use an Internet Explorer based in DOS, also.

@fuzzywzhe 5 месяцев назад

Really??? I used Internet Explorer on Linux way way back in the day. It was kind of a joke in our country, because it was so brutally unstable that we just made fun of it. I'm shocked anybody actually used this.

@BAgodmode 2 года назад

Ask Dave’s Garage about the Unix IE stuff. He was an engineer around that time and might have heard rumblings.

@ian_b 2 года назад

MS weren't strangers to UNIX. In the early days they sold their own distro, XENIX, with the idea that MSDOS was for single user workstations and XENIX for servers etc and eventually aimed to upgrade everyone to some type of single user XENIX from MSDOS. They dropped that strategy and went for NT instead, but there's no reason to consider them to have some kind of aversion to UNIX.

@raxpyraxp Год назад

Also, NT almost always had some sort of UNIX subsystem. From just a set of POSIX tools then to the ability to run Linux environment today on top of NT kernel

@wrtlpfmpf 2 года назад

From what I've heard Microsoft itself wasn't actually running their own computing Infrastructure on their own operating systems until the mid to late 1990s. Considering Workstations had a fairly long useful life, it may even have been that they were simply using it themselves.

@NCommander 2 года назад

Microsoft ran a lot of things on Xenix (their own variant of UNIX) and later SCO UNIX until NT was production ready. Hotmail ran on FreeBSD for quite awhile though, since the company they acquired it from built it on FreeBSD.

@TheErador 2 года назад

Aye Hotmail was mostly a single line of Perl ;) before Microsoft ASPed it

@zoomosis 2 года назад

@@NCommander The early versions of NT were built under OS/2 1.3, though conceivably it could also be cross-compiled from Xenix.

@starfrost6816 2 года назад

They never used VSS internally lol, before 86 they used Berkeley SCCS, then they used a internal clone of RCS called SLM (Source Library Manager) from 1986-1999, before switching as SLM lacked brnaches to a proprietary Perforce fork called Source Depot and then moving to Git in 2017

@brdrnda3805 Год назад

@@starfrost6816 We used VSS - for a while. When the pain grow to big one of the devs insisted on writing his own tool. He got a week from our boss and at the end of the week he had a working version we could work with and was already better than VSS (of course, further improvements where made later). In hindsight, seeing that there is one (known) guy who had a first version of git written in one day, a week looks generous ;-). On the other side it's embarassing for MS that you can easily write something better than VSS in this short periods of time.

@steeviebops 2 года назад

The most likely reason why VBScript works on the Unix version is because it looks to be a direct port of the Windows version and its Trident engine. The Mac version used its own layout engine (Tasman) and had very little in common with the Windows version.

@stephclements6226 Год назад

.net tasmanium devils in tandon weave ibmpc used ie on macs when22ca?..bc-borland torugh-backs ditch weave vikings aw netscapes,jav?

@Pesthuf 2 года назад

I had a feeling they would have done this by porting core windows APIs... This approach still isn't dead today - Apple ported many of their MacOS APIs to windows, for itunes and icloud. What a way to port.

@nikkiofthevalley 11 месяцев назад

Ah, so instead of porting a single application, you port half the OS instead. An _interesting_ approach to porting software. At least you only have to do that once, if you do it properly.

@davidgreen8512 2 года назад

I used to use Internet Explorer on Solaris! In college, we had a Solaris computer lab, and our lab support desk had a Solaris workstation (sometime between 2001-2003), so if you wanted to surf the internet on it, that was your only option. Definitely a flashback!

@durrcodurr 4 месяца назад

Netscape Navigator was also available for Solaris. I used that instead of IE. :D

@metageek 2 года назад

I worked at Netscape at the time IE for Unix was announced. IIRC, the reason was that Netscape was selling to enterprises who ran Unix platforms, and MSFT wanted to undercut Netscape any way they could. I never saw it running, but I remember reading that, when it was demoed at the announcement, it crashed. I don't remember whether it panicked the OS, though. IIRC, Netscape ran on Solaris, IRIX, HP-UX, OSF/1, and AIX. I think I remember there being a VMS port, too, but I don't think it lasted long. And Win16, Win32, and MacOS, of course.

@zoomosis 2 года назад

Netscape also ran on OS/2 Warp.

@alexhajnal107 2 года назад

Netscape Navigator/Communicator (v3+, maybe earlier) also ran on Linux.

@johnsimon8457 2 месяца назад

Undercutting Netscape explains why Apple had IE5 as the default browser on classic macOS. MS wrote a check and cash strapped Apple isn’t going to say no.

@itsdragoman 2 года назад

Hello! I work as a communications engineer for an Italian company that uses a version of Oracle Solaris alongside a bunch of oldschool hardware called 'Marconi' (still refusing to die). From what I understood, UNIX was used as a separate machine to manage that specific type of remote hardware, since back in the days it was not possible (or at least rly expensive) to create VMs, they sent requests to Microsoft to port IE and Outlook so employees can access their mail and upload html data documents generated by Marconi while using UNIX. Oracle was supposed to be replaced a long time ago but the project was scrapped due to mismatch issues between the remote hardware and the new OS that was supposed to be implemented. SO I think (I repeat, think) IE and other ports were made after countless requests from businesses. Eventually virtual machines became easier to build and manage so there was no need to have those services on UNIX anymore. Now you can just run UNIX on a VM and have the regular Windows in the background running Outlook/Browsers.

@finkelmana 2 года назад

This was a common sight long ago. If you were developing web based software on a UNIX, you still needed to test how things looked in IE. All those who worked on the UNIX version of our software team has Solaris workstations (with IE while it was supported), while the Windows side had PCs. And of course, there was the lone Mac in the corner that QA used for testing the web interface.

@DrewTNaylor 2 года назад

IE on UNIX seems so cursed. Looking forward to watching this when it's up.

@SuperSmashDolls 2 года назад

More cursed than even Safari for Windows.

@NewRepublicMapper 2 года назад

@@SuperSmashDolls EVEN MORE CURSE than Microsoft Edge on Mac and Linux

@ukeyaoitrash2618 2 года назад

@@NewRepublicMapper hey I like edge it's fast why everyone hate them they're a good boi 🥺 I use it on my kubuntu pc ;3

@NewRepublicMapper 2 года назад

@@ukeyaoitrash2618 well yeah, Microsoft Edge is much better than Stupid Chrome, Firefox and Brave Combined

@hexagonist23 2 года назад

@@ukeyaoitrash2618 Why not just use Windows? If you're using edge you may as well use windows.

@HowardGittela 2 года назад

I vaguely remember something about Microsoft trying to shoehorn in some government contract for Windows and that IE/OE had to be able to run on Solaris too since that was the preferred platform at the time, at least for the important stuff. I remember those cool Sun laptops that where unobtainium for mere mortals pricewise... I worked at Opera software around 2000 and we had a Solaris-monsterbox for development of a Unix version of Opera. Our main Unix-guy specifically noted that IE or OE was one of the few things he had see being able to cause such an efficient kernel panic.

@Jason-fp7vi 2 года назад

Your retro investigation stories are so well cut and written. Not many channels can get me to sit through a 20 minute video, lol. Awesome video once again Michael

@gentuxable 2 года назад

I didn't even realise it was a 20 minute video until I finished watching, read your comment and scrolled up to see the indicator, lol.

@zc32-official 2 года назад

Fun fact: This version was designed for Solaris and HP-UX

@robertstratton6444 2 года назад

This doesn’t often to me, but I must admit that when I saw that “patchlevel is newer than expected” message after your cluster install, I instinctively cackled aloud. Now I want to get my Netra X1 from the barn and fire it up.

@NCommander 2 года назад

Things that only a Solaris administrator know to experience.

@naharandomaccount3782 2 года назад

Hey! I'm Toxidation2, the one you know on the Discord server of WW. Your videos are always interesting, especially that Windows for Workgroups 3.11 networking video! Hope to see more videos from you soon ;)

@TheMightyOmega-NotTheAlpha 2 года назад

I’d love to see something about Visual MainWin, that is just the sort of Lovecraftian horror that should never have been spawned. At the same time, it’s pretty certain to be sanity blasting for Our Intrepid Channel Host.

@TheMightyOmega-NotTheAlpha 2 года назад

@@NCommander while it’s a horror show, it’s still a shame that such a mutation is most likely lost to history. Maybe someone will dig a copy up from somewhere.

@NCommander 2 года назад

@@TheMightyOmega-NotTheAlpha one can hope

@TheInconspicuousMan 2 года назад

I discovered your channel through RU-vid recommendations and I'm really enjoying it! I'm into retro tech and programming history, and your channel hits the sweet spot. I also find your videos presented in a way that's easy to logically follow. So yeah, you got a new subscriber.

@toddfraser3353 Год назад

Having lived and Used IE for Unix. The main theory was the fact at that time Microsoft was scared of Linux, and Unix Systems like Sun Microsystems were scared of Linux as well. Giving IE compatibility for Unix (but not Linux) was a way to make sure that the Devs (who were big on Unix at the time) would make IE sites and not Netscape sites, as well encourage those devs and said companies not to switch to Linux. The Unix workstations we're not a threat to Microsofts desktop business, so having IE for Unix and being Closed Source friendly made good business sense.

@Dizrak 2 года назад

It beings to feel like a Lovecraftian horror. We see really cursed stuff for our minds and can't even comprehend why it was made on the first place.

@lemagreengreen 2 года назад

I mean it is odd and I never heard of it at the time but Microsoft wanted IE dominance and made sure it was on every platform, while it was unlikely that many running Solaris would use it they did kinda have to make it an option, Solaris was on (some) office desktops after all.

@NCommander 2 года назад

If there were OEMs that were hesistant because they wanted to have Netscape to match UNIX, I can see why MSFT felt it necessary. That being said, I've never really found a satisifactory answer. The WISE stuff and Mainsoft at least I can hypothesize on.

@Xenotypal 7 месяцев назад

love your content Ncommander. you've helped a more casual computer nerd like me understand a lot of things i hadn't before in an interesting and fun (for us...hehe) way. hope to see more stuff soon and hope you're doing alright. prayers.

@Jgs92692 2 года назад

This is a really interesting look at such an old and historical piece of software. It's always interesting to see how the early days of the internet came to be and how different it is from the internet we have today.

@The1stImmortal 2 года назад

Ah this takes me back. At uni we had a mix of eMac machines and Sun Ray terminals in different labs. Most of my classes I was forced into the Macs (which also ran IE, incidentally), but usually I'd just fire up the X server, SSH into the Sun server and run everything remotely from there (including IE, as the Netscape version installed there was ancient and broken for a lot of sites) Yes, my uni gave me Macs to use, and I turned them into Unix thin clients and ran IE.

@PeterBakNielsen 2 года назад

Wrt. to how easy it was to port Windows software to Solaris using this approach: I worked with the MainWin competitor, Wind/U, in the late 90ties. It was surprisingly easy to work with. As I recall the main issue was C++ compiler differences.

@NCommander 2 года назад

I'd actually love to cover Wind/U, and I was tempted to bring it up in context, since most of the information I found on WISE actually came from the Bristol Technologies v. Microsoft suite, but there's fairly little extant software for it, and I have my doubts the SDK will ever surface. Microsoft did attempt to port IE3 with Wind/U, but for whatever reason, ended up having Mainsoft port IE4 and 5.. From what I've seen, the largest difficult conceptually is that Wind/U was built onto of Motif, while Mainwin normally maps GDI to Xlib, so you get Win32 style controls. (IE5 being an exception).

@goebelmasse 2 года назад

MS Visual SourceSafe for Unix: Perhaps the least missed software in the history of computing. I totally forgot about this crap.

@coop_0128 2 года назад

The fanfare noise after the drum roll was hilarious. Great vid

@gkavner 10 месяцев назад

I'm glad your channel exists. I love this nostalgic esoteric nix nerdiness. Thankyou!

@NJRoadfan 2 года назад

IE for Mac used a separate code base, no surprise the VBScript stuff didn't work. There was that half-assed effort in the mid-90's to try and "Standardize" the Windows API on UNIX during the era of WISE and things like Sun's WABI. Naturally it died in committee. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_Programming_Interface_for_Windows Getting a hold of something like MERGE or Willows TWIN would be very interesting to see. Too bad any remaining traces have likely been wiped off the face of the earth. The concept of mostly porting a core OS's API to run a browser didn't die though as Apple did it with Safari for Windows.

@NCommander 2 года назад

I can get MERGE. TWIN is probably an entire loss. There's also Wabi and such.

@francoisrevol7926 2 года назад

We did have Sun workstations at engineering school 20 years ago… I recall trying IE on there once or twice…

@jackgenewtf 2 года назад

I still remember when I moved our team from vss to cvs. What an improvement that was.

@kodaloid 2 года назад

If it helps, I believe the Windows version of Internet Explorer uses the registry to tell if a certain internet protocol is supported. For example HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\http and HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\ftp are two keys that enable Microsoft browsers to identify "web" protocols. It's possible that something different was done for the Unix version, however knowing Microsoft, they likely have something similar lurking around. I bet if you added a ftp entry in whatever settings it's checking, IE5 would be able to handle ftp like in Windows.

@NCommander 2 года назад

There is the Mainwin Registry which acts as an analogue of the Windows one, and I even have a version of regedit, so I should look into this for the time time I can bring myself to open the pit madness.

@todortodorov940 Год назад

No, it's not 100% correct. IE version 4 and newer used the OS to support the different protocols. The support was introduced by twisting the existing OLE (Object Linking and Embedded) technology introduced by MS Office in the early-mid 90's to support this. The concept they used is the IMoniker interface, which is a way to say: "I have this reference to a document, can you please load the document and give it to me". This is used for example, where you can put a link to one Excel document inside another Excel document and have the second document access data from the first document. Microsoft created a component called the *URL Moniker* to resolve internet URLs and return document objects. If the URL is a http address, the returned object is an IHTMLDocument object. The registry entries tell the URL moniker which DLL implements which scheme (URL type). The thing is expandable, and 3rd parties can add additional support. The out-of-the-box protocols are supported by the standard handler (Urlmon.dll). And when it comes to rendering and interactions, it was the document object that was responsible for visualizing itself (rendering) and responding to user interactions. This was mostly done using existing OLE/COM interfaces, meaning that if you could get an URL to any standard OLE document, the IE could display it. This was the reason it was very easy for them to add support for opening Word/Excel/etc. documents in IE, as those were already OLE compliant. The IE browser was just a shell to load all the underlaying stuff, coordinate and set some policies. This also made it possible to take an IHTMLDocument document (which was the one that actually implement the Trident engine) and using the above mentioned OLE/COM technologies, embed and use the HTML document (and engine) in your app. The Outlook Express email app used this trick to show HTML formatted emails. So did many other apps. Back to the original posting. On Unix, they may have had to emulate the functionality of the URL Moniker. How they did this, I don't know. But it is not IE that does the work - it is the OS. That said, versions of IE often updated that part of the OS.

@chrisdiehl8452 Год назад

I remember the IEs4Linux project. The nice thing about the project is that you can run multiple versions on the same computer.

@TimSedlmeyer 2 года назад

I used to use IE4 and then IE5 for Unix daily on a Sun Ultra 5. It had a SunPCi card running some version of Windows, my memory fails me here, which was used to access the general corporate systems such as Exchange for email and any productivity applications. This was an ISP and Solaris was used to access/manage the networking hardware along with a couple of network management systems. Some of the hardware had web interfaces, which generally were not used, and the network management systems had web interfaces. The performance of the NMS interfaces in Netscape was horrific but acceptable in IE, so IE was installed on all the workstations.

@NCommander 2 года назад

I've had an offer to have real Sun hardware sent to me. If I ever get a SunPCi card, I'd definitely demo it.

@TimSedlmeyer 2 года назад

@@NCommanderFrom a historical and "cool" factor one would be worth having but the version 1 card I had was slooooow and kind of finicky. I honestly would have rather had a separate PC. I hear the later versions were much better though.

@TimSedlmeyer 2 года назад

@@NCommander No doubt it is perfect for this channel which is why I said from a historical and "cool" factor it is worth having one.

@grant-aesirbane24 2 года назад

You are incredibly correct when u say we like to see you suffer, cuz the effort you put into it is inspiring and admirable. QUALITY CONTENT

@chaimdominicvazquezaragon6999 Год назад

I love your videos, I don't speak English natively, but I activate the subtitles and translate them little by little, I hope to learn enough to understand them later just by listening to them. Keep it up, greetings from Mexico

@SoulcatcherLucario 4 месяца назад

hi! wishing your journey of learning english has been fruitful a year later :D

@foobar1572 2 года назад

Thanks for making this video! It's cool to learn that Microsoft's programs and libraries of that era were ported to UNIX systems. Makes total sense though, since they probably wanted their core tools to be a viable solution for large companies running multiple operating systems.

@LordAlacorn 2 года назад

Jokes on you! I'm also a Druaga1 subscriber - suffering, binge-watching and zero research. Now I subscribed to you NC, so bring it on! :)

@dusthillresident Год назад

19:06 RE:"Why" As someone who did a lot of reading of Nathan Lineback's "IE is Evil" webpages back in the early 2000s, I can tell you that something he spent a lot of time ranting about was how IE was a requirement for a lot of internal business intranets and internal proprietary/bespoke web applications used by businesses. These internal custom applications that only worked on IE were so prevalent that I can see how Unix and Mac versions of Internet Explorer might have been really handy to have during those days.

@retroke6560 2 года назад

halfway into the video and already thought about subscribing. Amazing content loved it

@davidshepherd265 2 года назад

Interesting to see it in action. I'd heard of it, and figured that they may have been involved in some kind of government contract or something where they were required to either provide this, or at least some kind of equivalent.

@brockogomexico3541 2 года назад

Michael, I really enjoyed the OS/2 stuff. Did you know you can (ver. 4.52 at most) have chess play itself and watch. I use this to get better at chess, I guess the next move then see what OS/2 picks. As far as sleeping issues, I have them too and have used Melatonin natual sleep aid, make sure to use time release. Start small does and jack up as needed. You will have real trippy dreams too.

@makethingsbetter Год назад

What an interesting video, you would get along with people I know. As for Solaris, it even today remains very picky about its patches. I had just the same level of idiosyncratic patch related fun installing multiple java versions and oracle databases on Solaris 10 and 11, in fact 11 was harder almost. As for the IE5 OExp combo, I used this on a Solaris by mini computer back in late 90’s, it was a real thing and until the PCs arrived. We would often install things to see what it did. Try compiling an older version of Perl, with deprecated lib and Liba dependencies, I wrote a shell script to alter paths, setup links and path insertions into menu options, alter display variables, just to get oracle db to install. I love the sol hardware though, best context switching in town, always will be ;-)

@NaoPb 2 года назад

I'd like you to dig deeper in the WISE kits.

@HansOvervoorde Год назад

Seeing Outlook Express on Solaris hurts. A lot. Totally love your videos!

2 года назад

You said that Microsoft wasn‘t a friend of UNIX. I’d say they weren’t a friend of Linux. But they offered a UNIX by themselves, XENIX, back in the day, and there was quite a bit of effort into this. Later, there were Services for UNIX, to be run on Windows. And bits & pieces, like your find IE5 for UNIX. MS did in the 80ies and 90ies whatever that didn’t endanger their business model: selling software for nearly everything. (And sometimes hardware, see the Z80 card for Apple II.)

@sagitariusa8962 2 года назад

You have a very soothing voice my man. I didn't even notice when I was asleep. 😎👍

@tech34756 2 года назад

I think IE for UNIX does make sense, for example: 1) It's a good tech demo for the porting technology I.E. it shows that it works. 2) It was another way to 'attack' Netscape (I.E. reduce the chances for them to get a niche which could sustain them). 3) It could have made more websites become comfortable using IE exclusive features. 4) It could have been another way to 'embrace, extend, extinguish' but this time UNIX/Linux. I.E. if they got a foothold but then dropped support, it could push casual Linux users towards Windows.

@Exelius 2 года назад

and don't forget an important enterprise-level thing at the time: Java applets (Sun vs MS Java)

@hughmarshall8704 Год назад

6:13 - If you needed any more proof that this was literally a copy and paste from Windows, check the error page. The fourth bullet point reads "If your Network Administrator has enabled it, Microsoft Windows can automatically discover network connection settings..."

@abyssalreclass 2 года назад

Hey, I used Outlook Express all the way through the Windows XP days. It was only when I upgraded to Windows 7 that I finally switched to Thunderbird.

@mulderite Год назад

VERY GREAT video. it helps me a lot.

@andresbravo2003 2 года назад

Woah! I never knew why IE should be on Unix system, but that's so cool!

@elzariantlp4594 3 месяца назад

hoooo !!! that reminds me my beginnings as a Solaris admin. The first thing I installed on all our Ultra5 stations was Internet Explorer as I couldn't get used to Netscape. I also tried to find something similar to Notepad as 'vi' was pretty non-natural, and 'tcsh' as standard "ksh -o vi" was too much ... "vi-ish".

@tux9656 2 года назад

Thanks for showing this. I’ve always been perplexed by the existence of IE for Unix and have been curious to see it in action. If Microsoft would have released this for Linux, I probably would have completely ditched my Windows 98 install for RedHat Linux way back then.

@CMDRSweeper 2 года назад

IE for Unix may have been made as a lot of strange MS Software was and as NCommander have specified before, to meet some contract agreement initially. Then afterwards it may have seen usefulness elsewhere past that initial contract and it was then more widespread.

@kelownatechkid 2 года назад

Amazing work!!

@gsgatlin 2 года назад

The scene where you jumped into lava reminded me of the time I tried to run minecraft on a solaris 10 SPARC ultra 25 "workstation" when minecraft was kind of new. It did not work because the java lwjgl it downloaded was for x86 java and not SPARC java. Shortly after that we got rid of all of our SPARC equipment. 🤣 I remember running IE for UNIX once or twice. But I did not install it at our site. All the people who did either work on Linux now or retired. Those Solaris "patches" were hell to deal with.

@thorsteinj 2 года назад

Well this was a spiral of recursive curses... I'd love to see more in this series of "Things that should not exist!"

@morezco 2 года назад

I absolutely SCOFFED at the question about VBScript running on Unix for that clock web page and then gasped at it working lol. I am working on a VB6 product from a macbook air now and looking at that makes me wish I did not have to remote into a windows machine to work on the code.

@reiner0609 2 года назад

I used IE for HP-UX for quite a while on a PA-RISC HP-UX workstation at work and there it was slow but actually quite good and on par with Netscape Navigator in most areas. With some websites, it did even work better.

@NCommander 2 года назад

I didn't really compare it that heavily to Netscape on Solaris since due to the emulated nature, I wasn't going to get an accurate impression of performance, but from what I remember of Netscape on real hardware, it was slow as a dog :/

@reiner0609 2 года назад

@@NCommander if I remember correctly, we used it to access the "made for IE" websites that you mentioned from the HP-UX workstations that we did use to develop on. The company IT was already very Microsoft biased at that time and had a number of internal web applications that they refused to offer in a way that would work with the regular HP-UX Navigator. They also moved from OpenMail to Exchange in that era as the backend for the Windows PC based Outlook clients... and yes, with OpenMail, there used to exist an alternative backend for MS Outlook once upon a time 😀 and for quite a while that was the better and more stable backend compared to the Exchange versions then!

@44Bigs 2 года назад

Porting Windows applications to UNIX, what an odd niche. Most migrations were happening in the other direction by the time NT 4 arrived. Those ports were facilitated by simply running an X server on top of Windows.

@sundhaug92 2 года назад

If you think that's strange, imagine openstep apps on NT

@airfixer9461 2 года назад

Man man man..congratulations for persevering.....Marquis de Sade was looking over my shoulder and he gave up.....

@NCommander 2 года назад

I had to look up that reference, and then it took even longer for me to realize what you meant. Well played.

@meatpockets 2 года назад

Wow, I was a Solaris admin for years and never seen a kernel panic. Though that was v10 not v7.

@eveypea 2 года назад

I think that IE for UNIX was made because... During the 80's Microsoft not only sold it's own IBM compatible operating system (MS-DOS), but also had a licensed version of System V UNIX. Also Solaris ran on UNIX and possibly was a target corporate sales customer for Microsoft software products. Hence the idea of making software for UNIX would not have been much of a stretch.

@Alexlfm 2 года назад

Corel made a version of Word Perfect for Linux and if I recall correctly their entire office suite that operated similarly however I believe they took advantage of the work that wine was doing regrading windows libraries on Linux instead of paying Microsoft. It certainly was odd times then with Unix/Linux and MS. If I had to guess I would think Microsoft thought they needed this to A) help pretend they weren’t monopolistic in the internet browser space (offer it on other platforms to pretend it was a legitimate product independent of the OS) and B) capture the workstation market which most people expected to remain separate and had a lot of power users (however I’m not sure that article is legit either). Regardless of the reasons amazing job getting this to work. I tried recently to install some old Loki games on a Linux machine, had terrible flashbacks to the nightmares of getting them to work 20 years ago and promptly gave up. Quality product Corel Linux was considering the stuff that came in the box, doesn’t and didn’t even work straight out of the box.

@HappyBeezerStudios 2 года назад

Troubleshooting with the helpfile that comes with it? That help environment is indeed also a web browser based on the same engine.

@zach446 2 года назад

you inspire me to start making videos of my own!

@NCommander 2 года назад

Go for it. That being said, success on RU-vid is hardfought, and its a long windy road. You may want to checkout the NewTuber communities: www.reddit.com/r/newtubers discord.gg/UKap4W9w to learn things. The Discord i find is more helpful that the subreddit, but both are good.

@sab0403 2 года назад

This is a historian at work, folks. Thank you for making these!!!

@georgH 2 года назад

I've managed to run it from a computer room at uni which had SunRay terminals hooked to a Solaris server. It was slow AF and unstable, but it was quite amusing to see.

@johnsimon8457 2 месяца назад

My school had a similar thing where they had a powerful quad cpu system that could be brought to its knees by too many people running Netscape and having it peg a CPU when it hung

@kaitlyn__L 2 года назад

I love this. Also you’re totally both the sadist _and_ the masochist here, since you’re also devising these hellish projects (like the Ubuntu mail intermediary! yikes!). Autosadomasochism? Also I did predict vbscript would work but I was skeptical about ActiveX, so I’m happy to have been 100% correct! The fact that they reimplemented Windows APIs for Unix is actually kinda cool. Though I wonder why the transparency in some of the icons is messed up in comparison to the Windows version of IE? Hmm. That design language looks good with CDE’s colour scheme though. Especially the nostalgic download dialog! 😁

@NCommander 2 года назад

The transparency appears to problems with Solaris's X server. Its not obvious, but I'm stuck in a 16 color mode, and QEMU's display emulation seems a little iffy. It crashed and burned when I tried to go to 256 or higher. WHen I had Outlook running over X11 forwarding, it was fine.

@kaitlyn__L 2 года назад

@@NCommander ah, I see! That makes sense. So it probably didn’t present on real workstations.

@patrick1020000 2 года назад

Can you complete the cycle and run Internet Explorer for Unix under WSL?

@NCommander 2 года назад

IE for UNIX? No. I could use WINE to run IE5 for Windows under WSL :)

@pikaporeon 2 года назад

first question is to make default, and kernel panics because the system is updated? the more things change the more they stay the same

@danagoyette7932 2 года назад

Speaking of shims for Windows software on Unixes, I seem to recall some old versions of the Xilinx ISE using some Wine-wannabe thing called "Wind/U" on Linux, and Cygwin on Windows. So they weren't native to EITHER platform. Seems to me like they should've just used GTK or QT.

@vmlemon 2 года назад

I remember seeing a port of Adobe Acrobat Reader, and an ARM toolchain, based on Wind/U, a while ago. Didn't get to run it, but it includes a few fun tools, like a "binder", registry implementation, and a resource compiler, if I remember correctly.

@gaiuspliniussecundus1455 Год назад

@NCommander can you try to install Corel Draw or Adobe Photoshop for Solaris? They exist. Old old versions, i,e. Cdraw 3.5.

@RafalRzepecki Год назад

I remember using this!

@YvanJanssens 2 года назад

You know what's even worse? The way this is being built/compiled. They have a large part of win32 cross-built for Unix and Mac OS; Visual C++ 4.2 even has native cross-tools for PowerPC and M68k Macs and older software for Mac inlcudes even a cross-compiled MS Help.

@lepidotos Год назад

I dunno if you've done it yet, but this is the most relevant video to leave a comment on -- I'd love to see what it takes to compile Netscape Communicator 5, if that's even possible.

@NCommander Год назад

Earliest open source Mozilla was post Communicator but maybe for a livestream ...

@d3stinYwOw 2 года назад

I'm interested - how did you run this IE5 on Ubuntu? I'd love to poke around it :)

@NCommander 2 года назад

Its a bit of sight of hand. I'm X11 forwarding from a Sun system, although the Unity screenshot was actually from an HP-UX box.

@megamanfan3 2 года назад

0:21 Microsoft lazily reused the about window from the Windows version of IE5. 7:36 I remember those Internet Explorer and Netscape badges quite vividly. I guess I miss the joys of my youth when I went to Star Trek's, Disney's, Cartoon Network's, Nickelodeon's, PBS's, Ma Ma Media's, Bonus's, EA's, Nintendo's, and The Weather Channel's websites back in the late 90s and early 2000s.

@HappyBeezerStudios 2 года назад

There is also Safari for Windows. Honestly, at least for the time Apple went to x86, some cross-platform stuff wasn't unexpected.

@qoombert 9 дней назад

I wonder if there's a copy of other Mainsoft products in a corner of the internet somewhere

@hikaritrh1366 Год назад

I love music in your videos. Sometimes it feels like TV show, sometimes like ASMR. In this video it feels like some kind of global conspiracy. You know, Majestic, FBI, black projects...

@spacewolfjr 2 года назад

So around January 2002 Steve Balmer tried flushing IE for UNIX down the toilet (MS still only had one toilet in those days) and he was freaking out because a few seconds after he'd flush a few stray ELFs would appear from the poo-water. I had eaten a bad batch of ribs after the Gatlin Brother's concert and was knocking on the stall door loudly as my spaghetti house was about to implode. Finally I (politely) kicked the door open and just as I did Steve dropped his house keys down the toilet which was executing the flush() function. We later had to ask Bill G to call an excavator to dig up the septic tank. This incident spelled the end for IE for UNIX, ribs, Gatlin Brother's concerts and of course house keys at Microsoft.

@Michael_Brock 2 года назад

A possible reason for IE5 on Solaris (Unix). Is NT4, not sure on timing. But NT4 had a solaris (SPARC), PowerPC and DEC Alpha and MIPS builds as well as IA32(intel/amd). Perhaps Microsoft was angling for a dual boot windows and Solaris solution. With similar possibility for Unix on powerPC IRIX/Linux and possibly MIPS, don't know if MIPS had a company Unix, certainly Linux could have run on it. NT4 morphed into windows 2000, with the alternative platforms in alpha and beta build status. Then XP followed killing alternative platform support, (limited to IA32, AMD 64, itanium) but it's multi platform support is still in there buried deep in the code that has allowed Microsoft to release the current Arm build for Windows.

@NCommander 2 года назад

NT was desired entirely to support multiple architectures. That was the mission statement as it started life as "Portable OS/2", and you can find plenty bits of that. Even now, the Windows 10 SDKs still have symbol and defines for Alpha, PowerPC, and such. That being said, I'm not convinced NT for Solaris *actually* existed. I think it's an urban legend that refuses to die. There are plenty of bits of code in the NT SDK back from Intel 860 and even 64-bit Alpha support, but none for SPARC. I think it was announced, but never got shipped, and then got confused with this.

@jackgenewtf 2 года назад

I actually used this a little bit, just for fun, back in the day. I also tried Safari for Windows for a while.

@ikannunaplays 2 года назад

You should have looked at the Geocities archives for test sites

@kkolakowski 2 года назад

I think IE for UNIX was made because Mainsoft wanted to use it as a "show-off" project, as prove that their tech works, and it works great. IE and Outlook were "flagship" Windows apps - so if you can port IE with those tools, you can probably port any Win32 app imaginable. MS blessed it probably because they had not much to loose and they could improve their "image" a bit.

@NCommander 2 года назад

Mainsoft was specifically contracted to do IE/OE though. The actual Mainsoft product works a bit differently (see how Solitare displays). IE/OE was modified to be more Motif based.

@jezp1976 Год назад

Netscape 4 that shipped with Solaris wasn't very good at rendering more modern websites - I ran IE5 on my Solaris workstation back in the day. I never ran outlook express though.

@aa664_ 2 года назад

great video.

@drxym Год назад

I ran this at the time on a Solaris dist and while it worked it seemed like a box ticking exercise - something to bring up in court if Microsoft were faced antitrust suits but never intended to actually be used for anything.

@Mattstech12 2 года назад

I'm very glad that Visual Source Safe did not work! That brought back bad memories of a job around 2005...

@MaximRecoil Год назад

I loved Internet Explorer and Outlook Express. They were both very lightweight and opened instantly. I wish someone would make a true clone of OE as a standalone program that would run on currently supported versions of Windows; I would ditch Outlook 2007, which I've been begrudgingly running in Windows 10 since 2015, immediately. My favorite time period of the internet was 2002 when broadband internet first became available in my area, until about 2010 when it started getting to the point that you could no longer use IE6 anymore because many websites would no longer display correctly in it. With cable internet, Windows XP (my favorite OS to this day), and IE6 during that time period, the internet was blazing fast, pretty much every website loaded correctly, and the websites looked good because none of them had been downgraded with giant fonts and weird layouts to appease the tiny vertical screen "smartphone" crowd yet.

@NicolasPimprenelle Год назад

What is the user-agent ? I need to change mine

@Unirule 2 года назад

Interesting that this unix port is of the same version of IE that stuck around with OS X all the way to around 2003, longer if you never wiped your mac between version upgrades