It’s been nearly 27 years but, as life teaches us, all good things must come to an end. On June 15th, Microsoft ended support for Internet Explorer on all desktop systems, including its launch platform, the Commodore Amiga.
Or, so it would seem.
Microsoft tweeted the news yesterday from its official @MicrosoftEdge account. In the poignant tweet, the Redmond software giant bade farewell to its venerable web browser, stating with some sadness, “Now, it’s time to surf the big web in the sky,” while marking the woeful moment with an animated image of IE’s orbited-“e” logo, centered on a glowing blue screen which fades out to darkness on an Amiga 1000 computer.
As someone whose 23 year web development career has been made rather “challenging” on many occasions thanks to Internet Explorer and its many unfortunate virtues, this seems its perfect epitaph: A browser released in 1995 for Microsoft’s new, preemptive multitasking OS, Windows 95, memorialized on the screen of an Amiga, a graphics computer released by Commodore in 1985 that brought the first preemptive multitasking OS to the consumer market — ten years earlier. It wasn’t a DOS machine, it didn’t run Windows, and it never ran Internet Explorer.
RIP and good riddance, IE.
It’s crazy to remember all the amazing new features Windows 95 had in 1995, only 10 years behind Workbench!
I still remember my astonishment of perhaps ten years ago when I found that IE 9 reverted to IE 6 behavior when the URL did not include a fully-qualified domain name. I think that it was innerText that was not defined in the IE 6 DOM.
Supported or not, I imagine that IE whatever will be out there browsing until the machines the versions were installed on are all scrapped.
It’s lovely to be aware, as a primarily front-end developer, that Microsoft Edge, which is actually a decent browser based on Google Chromium, has an “IE mode” so that the ghost — poltergeist, perhaps — in the machine lives on.
If I remember, I’ll set up a test page next week to see whether Edge plays the same silly IE 6 game with domain-less names.
And, as a nearly life-long Amiga user, I am indeed aware that PC-on-a-card hardware that can be slotted into various Amigas does allow Windows 95 and IE to be run on an Amiga.
Yes, but I don’t think they ever made a bridgeboard that would let the A1000 run Windows. They did make a version of the bridgeboard for the A1000 but it was the 8088 one.
There is the A1060 “Sidecar,” which is the forerunner of the BridgeBoard, as I think you’re aware. It has three 8-bit ISA slots in it. I’ve seen people using MDA and VGA cards in those slots. I think it’s conceivable that someone could install one of the odd 80386 “accelerators” (more a PC on a card) and run it on that, slotted into the Sidecar. Inception level abstractions there, but I’d bet it would work.
Windows 1 does run on an XT, if I remember. ;)
Every version of MicroSoft Windows up to and including version 3.0 will run on an original IBM PC/XT (or an Amiga PC/XT bridgecard). Windows 3.1 was the first version that _required_ an 80268 CPU as a minimum.
Windows 95 technically “requires” an 80386DX CPU which Commodore never produced a bridgecard for (3rd party ones were made though) but it will however, despite MicroSoft’s insistence to the contrary, run (albeit slowly) on a 386SX CPU which includes the last official bridgecard Commodore produced for the big box Amigas.