| dbo:abstract
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- Blackbird was the codename for an online content authoring platform developed by Microsoft in the mid-90s. Intended to be the online publishing tool for the first version of MSN (The Microsoft Network), "Blackbird" was born of a Microsoft acquisition of Daily Planet Software, and the tool was first conceived prior to the advent of the Internet and Web as we know it today. At the time, AOL and CompuServe were the primary online venues, and the introduction of the Web to mass consumers was about to begin, even as low-bandwidth, dialup connections dominated. "Blackbird" was based on the concept of an object-based backend file system in Microsoft Data Centers (Microsoft "Cairo"/NT), a low-bandwidth-streaming rendering client with page-based layout (similar to Aldus PageMaker but based on online streaming) and embedded interactive client-side ActiveX objects (then OLE). Fundamentally, it was based on the SGML standard (the direct ancestor of HTML) for client-side layout. It became a Microsoft-promoted alternative to HTML for a brief time, just as the commercial Internet and Web Browser were born. But with scripting capability for HTML yet to be demonstrated, it was to be a means to serve dynamic, media-rich applications and documents that contained processing logic, similar to what a user would experience in a desktop environment. Pages in a "Blackbird application" would be able to contain video, audio, graphs, and other OLE based document formats without the need of plug-ins. The technology had already been demonstrated in Microsoft's dial-up service at the time, MSN, and plans were in progress to port it to Internet use over a dedicated protocol, but work on the platform was cancelled due to the overwhelming move to the HTML/WWW/Internet standards commercialized and consuming the computing world, for example by Netscape at the time, and the need for backend, server-side scripting technologies which were lacking. Performance problems also plagued the pre-releases under beta testing. In 1995, Microsoft hence refocused its efforts for online development around the Web/HTML standards, including ASP and ActiveX, and the "Blackbird" designer was refashioned into Visual InterDev. As such, the technology, integrated into the first version of Visual Studio (VS 97) as its now Web-standards based core and trademarked as "Microsoft Visual Studio" is an ancestor to one of the leading Web development tools dating from the commercial birth of the Web, to today. Prior to this, the codename was derived from a Cold War era stealth spy plane, the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird. (en)
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| rdfs:comment
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- Blackbird was the codename for an online content authoring platform developed by Microsoft in the mid-90s. Intended to be the online publishing tool for the first version of MSN (The Microsoft Network), "Blackbird" was born of a Microsoft acquisition of Daily Planet Software, and the tool was first conceived prior to the advent of the Internet and Web as we know it today. At the time, AOL and CompuServe were the primary online venues, and the introduction of the Web to mass consumers was about to begin, even as low-bandwidth, dialup connections dominated. "Blackbird" was based on the concept of an object-based backend file system in Microsoft Data Centers (Microsoft "Cairo"/NT), a low-bandwidth-streaming rendering client with page-based layout (similar to Aldus PageMaker but based on onlin (en)
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