Microsoft eXtreme - Volume 4: Spring 1999

About

TAPE 4/5

The event starts off with a promotional launch ad for Hewlett-Packard's Vectra and Brio line of PCs for 1999, predominantly focused on the latter which launched that year. I don't have any experience with those line of machines, but I can say that the HP Pavilion 8720 I have used for roughly 7 years held up remarkably well for the shaky quality of parts it used. This episode is also heavily sponsored by HP.

Demonstrated this time is a sneak preview of Windows 98 Second Edition, a second look at Office 2000, and a showcase of MapPoint 2000. Midtown Madness, Age of Empires II, and NFL 2000 are also the games played towards the end. Tom Bailey is now the host of the series, alongside Shawn Sanford. Starting with 98 SE, Internet Explorer 5 is demoed using the search assistant and its ability to cycle through various search engines to find the results they specifically want. The ability to keep a list of one's preferred engines is a surefire relic of the times, as most everyone these days regularly sticks to one search engine, or perhaps two or three if really necessary for thorough research. AutoComplete is another major thing touted here, as whatever you inputted previously will be indexed for use later on when typing in those characters again to return to something faster. This feature was already introduced in IE4, although it is used in more areas of the interface than before. Another cool thing is the radio toolbar used to listen to Internet radio stations while browsing the web - something that is typically done through separate applications. I'd have to wonder if any of these features had to be stripped out or gimped for the 16-bit Windows 3.1x version.

Transitioning over to a pre-release version of MGI VideoWave II (2.2.142), Shawn runs across with a digital camera recording the audience doing a "Seattle Wave" and he cheers along the seats. This is done to display the 1394 capabilities of the operating system. Tom Laemmel is then brought up to demonstrate Windows Media Player and its ability to stream videos from the web. I've heard that the ability to stream with WMP requires a central server to send back to before it can actually communicate with the stream file - even if its locally hosted, which only puts the preservation of lots of online videos in jeopardy in that regard.

NetMeeting's latest version is put to the test showing off remote view of Bei-Jing Guo's PowerPoint project, and a brief display of the Whiteboard program bundled with NetMeeting - which is very similar to Paint included with Windows but has extra abilities like transparent colors. The application also has integration with Internet Explorer being able to be embedded on a webpage, all done through a personal page. More family members are seen here.

Pamela Goldschmidt returns from the second segment to demonstrate more of the Windows CE environment, in particular using a Terminal Server Client to remotely connect to a machine running a pre-release version (Beta 3) of Windows 2000 Terminal. Really interesting since it's not every day (or month rather) that you see Windows CE utilizing remote desktop capabilities. Pamela then reveals a newer incarnation of a Palm PC handheld; the HP Jornada. On another Casio brand handheld, the Cassiopeia, Pamela demonstrates a music player, a Disney Interactive game with an advertisement banner at the top (with lots of belching), and a video player playing back techno music on top of snow drifting. It's interesting to point out that having an advertisement banner at the top of the screen during handheld gameplay is something that would become more persistent in the smartphone era up to now, which shows how much it has a lot of its roots here years prior.

The fast-paced promo ad for Office 2000 is then shown here again recycled from the last segment, although its much shorter here than it was in the third segment, with some different usage of footage like parts of it being in a higher or lower framerate. Higher quality audio for the background music is present here too. During the demonstration, a humorous email from Bill Gates entitled "Great User Group Sites" features a long looping vertical banner of a photograph of Gates on the left side. Besides that, almost everything of the Office 2000 demo from the third segment applies here too.

During an intermission, a silly promo for Microsoft Personal Support is played, which I've talked about a bit previously. After that, a brief showcase of MapPoint 2000 is demoed by Deborah Rappaport, followed by the games mentioned earlier with Peter Parsons from the last segment alongside John Rodman.

Human-made No record of this work says a model made it. What this means.

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Credit

Microsoft Corporation

Language

English

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