In the early days, microsoft.com was just one computer tucked under a table at the end of a long hallway. It was designed to test Microsoft’s first 32-bit Windows implementation of TCP/IP, the software plumbing in Windows that enables Internet communications.

Microsoft legend says that this machine once lived under the desk of the site’s first official administrator, Mark Ingalls, but like most legends that’s only half true. A staging server for Microsoft.com was actually housed beneath his desk, and it was relocated because too often Ingalls reached down and turned off the wrong machine by mistake.

The first page however should rise some eyebrows, even though this probably was considered decent design 13 years ago…

And to see how Apple was doing at the same time check out this Flikr photoset.

Amazing isn’t it how the web, networks, design and programming has developed in such short time (compared to other forms of media).

In the past I’ve used Macromedia Dreamweaver’s insert feature ( “Insert -> Media -> Flash”) to inject the necessary HTML tags in order to display short flash movies/commercials on client websites. Recently I discovered that this doesn’t work quite as intended as my sites don’t validate over at W3C any more.

All my recent projects are made using XHTML and since <embed> is not part of the XHTML specification it will prevent the pages from validating. Fortunately there’s a very simple workaround.

Social bookmarking service Del.icio.us has one of the more popular Firefox Add-ons, but until recently it didn’t sync with your account and bring bookmarks and tags to the browser. A few months ago they quietly released a new version that basically takes over the Firefox bookmarking function, but it wasn’t syncing fast enough for power users.

Read more | Digg story

How to get free drinks at a bar for you and your friends (given a friendly atmosphere).

Or how about this one? Doesn’t even have to be particularly skilful or anything…

April 7, 1969 is often cited as a symbolic birth date of the net because the RFC (Request For Comments) memoranda contain research, proposals and methodologies applicable to internet technology. RFC documents provide a way for engineers and others to kick around new ideas in a public forum; sometimes, these ideas are adopted as new standards by the Internet Engineering Task Force.

Read more