TIL: There used to be an Internet Explorer for Unix

There was also an early version of Windows Media Player for Linux - complete with a spiffy Motif interface!<p>And there was a DEC Alpha port of Windows NT.<p>[EDIT: I don't believe it was called "Windows Media Player" exactly, but it was a media player for x86 Linux from Microsoft. Can't find a link to it after a cursory search, but it did exist - I used it]

And there used to be Microsoft Unix distribution (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix</a>).

Please keep stuff like this limited to Reddit. If I wanted to see "TIL" I would browse /r/todayilearned not Hacker News.

I've actually used this, and IE5 was by far the best/fastest browser on Solaris at the time. Seriously an order of magnitude faster than Netscape 4.x. With IE, browsing the web was practical on a 100 MHz SPARC.<p>IE for UNIX was ported by Mainsoft, now more famous for leaking the Windows NT source code.<p>It also came bundled with an Outlook Express-like mail client, but I never tried it.

It's been mentioned on HN a few times too:<p>(<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1739296" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1739296</a>)<p>(<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3334210" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3334210</a>)<p>I posted that link too! (<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4562692" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4562692</a>)

Adobe Photoshop 3 was released for Solaris<p>Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere all were released for IRIX. It's almost as if IRIX and Solaris used to have a very large workstation customer base then everything was migrated to NT, Mac, and Linux, how spooky those crazy expensive workstations didn't stay viable for long. O-M-G girlfriend, history is like totally repeating itself!

Looking at the version history, I totally forgot about the early days of the web when browsers by default only came with 40-bit encryption because of US export regulations.