This is really impressive. It's exactly what I imagined the original Microsoft Network in Windows 95 would have been like.
And so The Microsoft Network wasn't a program you loaded like CompuServe. It was part of the OS, with folder icons that looked just like real folders. It was a kind of version of the Web where you could browse online data the same way you browsed your file system. This is what made it cool.
It was as if the data was suddenly free of the shackles of being displayed in a program. Data wasn't just a web page, or a program showing its own internal databases. The Microsoft Network made it look like the data was right there, and you could click it and drag it around! For a brief time, back in 1995, it felt like we were on the verge of the true object-oriented web, a world filled with open data and free from the tyranny of the walled gardens.[1]
It also reminded me what an excellent job Wikipedia does with their hierarchical classification which you don't see when you're often only searching by article name.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20260129143542/https://www.coder...
Talk about data being separate from programs always reminds me what a good job Microsoft did with the spacial filesystem (that means one folder is one window, and they remember their location), single-document interface (a UI paradigm) and COM (a cross-process communication system). As a novice user not understanding a whole lot about the system, your documents were in the operating system and not in a specific program (this still wasn't perfect and a lot of new users did think their documents were in programs, which might be why we gave that up) and those programs could talk to each other and embed each other's documents.
This stuff probably seemed moderately innovative if you didn't grow up with it, seemed blindingly obvious if you did grow up with it, and somehow, like idiots, we've managed to lose it again!
> this still wasn't perfect and a lot of new users did think their documents were in programs, which might be why we gave that up
To this day there exist office workers—ones old enough that no, it's not because the were introduced to computers via smartphones—who use a computer for hours every single weekday day but get totally turned around in a file manager, and don't know even the extreme basics like how to copy and move files.
There are offices full of such folks, in non-tech offices, where the person who knows how to sort-of use a GUI file manager is the "computer whiz" they go to with questions.
The "files and folders" hierarchical tree model for a file system is one where I wonder about the limits or effectiveness of the skeuomorphism approach to convey such a concept. If you're coming from a place where information was generally held and organized on paper, it _should_ be natural that you can group files within a container like a folder, and the kind of folder the iconography showed should be able to contain sub-folders.
While many did pick up on the idea, where were the shortcomings? Were the early graphics not enough to build the mental link. Was it the common grid view of icons. Was it the icon being an abstract thing you needed to open to see the contents instead of looking at it directly (as previews on the icon which came later), was it things opening in separate windows. It's not as though other more visually 'rich' methods to show a file system such as 3D or animated took off.
There's also the modern version that gets brought up occasionally where people who are using devices with mobile instead of desktop OSes apparently don't know how to work with file systems to manage data, and presumably they'd have even less exposure to the physical paper concept that inspired it.
OLE objects are just FAT like filesystems; nothing too disimilar to Unix if it mounted disk images with text files and different images with it in order to create a document format.
> It also reminded me what an excellent job Wikipedia does with their hierarchical classification
As someone who once tried to use that supposedly hierarchical classification for data organization, it is unfortunately not excellent at all.
It is rather arbitrary, inconsistent, extremely incomplete, and not infrequently circular. Think of it more like a bunch of haphazardly applied tags that make perfect sense in the context of a single page, but quite frequently make very little sense when you look at the actual pages and sub categories that belong to a category. Category membership is just not something visible enough for it to wind up being organized and curated in any kind of systematically accurate way.
On the other hand, the presence of an infobox of a certain type is extremely reliable for categorizing many types of articles.
> They had this project called Cairo that was supposed to throw out that scruffy old file-based filesystem and bring in a shiny new Object Based File System instead. It never happened, so we'll never know exactly how it might have turned out.
Nowadays we call those APIs. They are REST based rather than file-based to make them distributed, the main difference is that you don't get a common user interface that all providers adjust to; you need to choose your own client to read them and write into them.
And because they're created by programmers for programmers, they're not what you'd call user-friendly. Usually the only efficient way to use them is programmatically, so that you need to create a specific user interface for each API. Somehow, I doubt that Cairo would have come to be anything much different from that in the end.
Somehow this reminds me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19249373 released by CERN on 30th anniversary. Pretty sure Berners-Lee in recent years was contributing to decentralized web/Internet concept that does also reminds a little bit of early WWW.
There was also this submission from 9 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13361523 - and probably not the only one of such ideas
> This is really impressive. It's exactly what I imagined the original Microsoft Network in Windows 95 would have been like.
That's actually not far off. It was an old-fashioned BBS like Compuserve in a Windows Explorer-like window. The topic-specific icons you see in this mockup are actually very on-point, though on the Microsoft Network they would be for general BBS sections not encyclopedic articles or media.
That really sounds like the idea behind Plan9. Interesting.