I've recently been working to make a video about these forgotten pieces of
history, and thought I should check here to see if anyone remembers them. I
actually got Outlook Express/Solaris working (see this messages headers),
and well ... its a very strange piece of software. Curious if anyone has any
experience it, or the broader Mainsoft XDE UNIX products/WISE kits. I
realize this is probably a long shot, but still worth asking.
- NC

On 7/22/21 4:56 AM, NCommander wrote:
> I've recently been working to make a video about these forgotten pieces of
> history, and thought I should check here to see if anyone remembers them. I
> actually got Outlook Express/Solaris working (see this messages headers),
> and well ... its a very strange piece of software. Curious if anyone has any
> experience it, or the broader Mainsoft XDE UNIX products/WISE kits. I
> realize this is probably a long shot, but still worth asking.

I'd be interested to know more about your video.

I vaguely recall hearing about OE and / or IE for Solaris. I don't
think I was aware of it ever being on more platforms.

You might want to ask on The Unix Heritage Society and / or CCtalk.

--
Grant. . . .
unix || die

On Thu, 22 Jul 2021 11:25:52 -0600
Grant Taylor <gtaylor@tnetconsulting.net> wrote:

>
> You might want to ask on The Unix Heritage Society and / or CCtalk.

Also try alt.folklore.computers - which has a very robust audience of
computer users active at around the time Microsoft was still supporting
Unix.

Grant Taylor <gtaylor@tnetconsulting.net> writes:

> On 7/22/21 4:56 AM, NCommander wrote:
>> I've recently been working to make a video about these forgotten pieces of
>> history, and thought I should check here to see if anyone remembers them. I
>> actually got Outlook Express/Solaris working (see this messages headers),
>> and well ... its a very strange piece of software. Curious if anyone has any
>> experience it, or the broader Mainsoft XDE UNIX products/WISE kits. I
>> realize this is probably a long shot, but still worth asking.
>
> I'd be interested to know more about your video.
>
> I vaguely recall hearing about OE and / or IE for Solaris. I don't
> think I was aware of it ever being on more platforms.
>
> You might want to ask on The Unix Heritage Society and / or CCtalk.

I'm on AFC, I was a Solaris user at the time, I remember the
announcement, no way I was interested in running either.

Don't know if comp.unix.solaris is still active.

--
Dan Espen

NCommander <ncommander.oe.unix@gmail.com> wrote:
> I've recently been working to make a video about these forgotten pieces of
> history, and thought I should check here to see if anyone remembers them. I
> actually got Outlook Express/Solaris working (see this messages headers),
> and well ... its a very strange piece of software. Curious if anyone has any
> experience it, or the broader Mainsoft XDE UNIX products/WISE kits. I
> realize this is probably a long shot, but still worth asking.

I think the Mentor Graphics EDA design tools are built on MainWin which was
originally a library for converting Windows programs to Unix. At least I
had to set variables like MW64BIT to get HyperLynx (PCB electromagnetic
simulation package) and Expedition PCB to work, and MWWM=allwm to disable
MainWin's window manager. It looked just like Windows 95, but running on
Ubuntu 16.04.

I haven't used those tools for a few years, but imagine they still use
MainWin.

Theo

In comp.misc, NCommander <ncommander.oe.unix@gmail.com> wrote:
> I've recently been working to make a video about these forgotten pieces of
> history, and thought I should check here to see if anyone remembers them. I
> actually got Outlook Express/Solaris working (see this messages headers),

I remember it, and I downloaded it to try to get it to run, but I never
succeeded. I do not recall the errors I got, but I probably was trying
to run it on a newer version of Solaris than it was intended for. (My
goal was not to use it as a real browser, but just to play with it for
a couple of hours.)

When I was using Solaris as a desktop OS, I was using Netscape. (That
was long before Firefox.) By the time I tried Explorer for Solaris, I
was using Solaris headless only and wanted to remote display on my Linux
desktop. (Probably a SUSE system at that point in time.)

One of the things I'd do back then (but do less of these days) is
capture the complete request headers browsers issue. For example:

# Explorer 2.0 from a fresh Windows NT 4.0 install. For a while this version
# produced funny can't load page errors from the the www.microsoft.com site.
# As of June 2006, it will load the page, but it looks nothing like it should.
# Note no Host: header, not sure if it supports cookies.

GET ${URI} HTTP/1.0
Accept: image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, */*
Accept-Language: en
User-Agent: Mozilla/1.22 (compatible; MSIE 2.0d; Windows NT)
Connection: Keep-Alive

# Explorer 4.01 from a fresh Windows NT 4.0SP4 install.
# As of June 2006 this version cannot run the scripts on
# windowsupdate.microsoft.com in order to update itself.
GET ${URI} HTTP/1.1
Accept: image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, */*
Accept-Language: en-us
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows NT)
Host: ${HOST}
Connection: Keep-Alive

If you could capture the complete set of headers that beast sends, I'd
certainly be interested in seeing them.

Elijah
------
probably still has Windows NT install CDs that was used for the above capture

"NCommander" <ncommander.oe.unix@gmail.com> wrote in
news:sdbitv$u22$1@dont-email.me:

> I've recently been working to make a video about these forgotten
> pieces of history, and thought I should check here to see if anyone
> remembers them. I actually got Outlook Express/Solaris working (see
> this messages headers), and well ... its a very strange piece of
> software. Curious if anyone has any experience it, or the broader
> Mainsoft XDE UNIX products/WISE kits. I realize this is probably a
> long shot, but still worth asking.
> - NC
>
>

I might have seen your video on Internet Explorer for UNIX, and I might have
found your Usenet post you might have made with Outlook Express for UNIX, and I
might have decided to reply.
-Alpatron

onsdag 28. juli 2021 kl. 03:16:46 UTC+2 skrev Eli the Bearded:
> In comp.misc, NCommander <ncommande...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I've recently been working to make a video about these forgotten pieces of
> > history, and thought I should check here to see if anyone remembers them. I
> > actually got Outlook Express/Solaris working (see this messages headers),
> I remember it, and I downloaded it to try to get it to run, but I never
> succeeded. I do not recall the errors I got, but I probably was trying
> to run it on a newer version of Solaris than it was intended for. (My
> goal was not to use it as a real browser, but just to play with it for
> a couple of hours.)
>
> When I was using Solaris as a desktop OS, I was using Netscape. (That
> was long before Firefox.) By the time I tried Explorer for Solaris, I
> was using Solaris headless only and wanted to remote display on my Linux
> desktop. (Probably a SUSE system at that point in time.)
>
> One of the things I'd do back then (but do less of these days) is
> capture the complete request headers browsers issue. For example:
>
> # Explorer 2.0 from a fresh Windows NT 4.0 install. For a while this version
> # produced funny can't load page errors from the the www.microsoft.com site.
> # As of June 2006, it will load the page, but it looks nothing like it should.
> # Note no Host: header, not sure if it supports cookies.
>
> GET ${URI} HTTP/1.0
> Accept: image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, */*
> Accept-Language: en
> User-Agent: Mozilla/1.22 (compatible; MSIE 2.0d; Windows NT)
> Connection: Keep-Alive
>
> # Explorer 4.01 from a fresh Windows NT 4.0SP4 install.
> # As of June 2006 this version cannot run the scripts on
> # windowsupdate.microsoft.com in order to update itself.
> GET ${URI} HTTP/1.1
> Accept: image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, */*
> Accept-Language: en-us
> Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
> User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows NT)
> Host: ${HOST}
> Connection: Keep-Alive
>
> If you could capture the complete set of headers that beast sends, I'd
> certainly be interested in seeing them.
>
> Elijah
> ------
> probably still has Windows NT install CDs that was used for the above capture

Yeah the Host-header is HTTP 1.1+, so you're not gonna see it on HTTP 1.0 or 0.9 browsers. This means that you're only ever gonna hit the default site of a server.

On 7/22/21 1:25 PM, Grant Taylor wrote:
> On 7/22/21 4:56 AM, NCommander wrote:
>> I've recently been working to make a video about these forgotten
>> pieces of
>> history, and thought I should check here to see if anyone remembers
>> them. I
>> actually got Outlook Express/Solaris working (see this messages headers),
>> and well ... its a very strange piece of software. Curious if anyone
>> has any
>> experience it, or the broader Mainsoft XDE UNIX products/WISE kits. I
>> realize this is probably a long shot, but still worth asking.
>
> I'd be interested to know more about your video.
>
> I vaguely recall hearing about OE and / or IE for Solaris.  I don't
> think I was aware of it ever being on more platforms.
>
> You might want to ask on The Unix Heritage Society and / or CCtalk.
>

It went up today, which reminded me to come back and check on this:
https://youtu.be/_AoyQeUzbEU

Last few days have been really crazy, so I'm catching up on my backlog.
~ NC

On 7/22/21 1:25 PM, Grant Taylor wrote:
> On 7/22/21 4:56 AM, NCommander wrote:
>> I've recently been working to make a video about these forgotten
>> pieces of
>> history, and thought I should check here to see if anyone remembers
>> them. I
>> actually got Outlook Express/Solaris working (see this messages headers),
>> and well ... its a very strange piece of software. Curious if anyone
>> has any
>> experience it, or the broader Mainsoft XDE UNIX products/WISE kits. I
>> realize this is probably a long shot, but still worth asking.
>
> I'd be interested to know more about your video.
>
> I vaguely recall hearing about OE and / or IE for Solaris.  I don't
> think I was aware of it ever being on more platforms.
>
> You might want to ask on The Unix Heritage Society and / or CCtalk.
>
>
>

It went up today, which reminded me to come back and check on this:
https://youtu.be/_AoyQeUzbEU

Last few days have been really crazy, so I'm catching up on my backlog.
I'll try looking at them. Specifically, I'm looking for the product that
was used to make IE for UNIX, Mainsoft XDE/Visual MainWin. It was a
commercial product, but it's never been archived.
~ NC

On 7/23/21 5:17 PM, Theo wrote:
> I think the Mentor Graphics EDA design tools are built on MainWin which was
> originally a library for converting Windows programs to Unix. At least I
> had to set variables like MW64BIT to get HyperLynx (PCB electromagnetic
> simulation package) and Expedition PCB to work, and MWWM=allwm to disable
> MainWin's window manager. It looked just like Windows 95, but running on
> Ubuntu 16.04.
>
> I haven't used those tools for a few years, but imagine they still use
> MainWin.
>
> Theo
>

That sounds right. Mainwin works on direct Xlib calls, and maps
GDI->Xlib. IE for UNIX was modified to use Motif, but I found Visual
SourceSafe for UNIX (which is license checked) and Solitaire for
Solaris, which have Win32 like controls. It's kinda trippy.

It looks like Mentor Graphics stopped existing, but it wouldn't
surprise me if they basically kept nursing the same thing along
all those years. Amazed to hear that someone was still using MainWin
as late as 2016 though ...
Michael

On 8/2/21 2:45 PM, Alpatron wrote:
> I might have seen your video on Internet Explorer for UNIX, and I might have
> found your Usenet post you might have made with Outlook Express for UNIX, and I
> might have decided to reply.
> -Alpatron
>

I might have made a video on IE for UNIX and I might have checked my
original thread, and might have seen your post and might have replied to
that indeed
~ NC

In comp.misc, Martin Sundhaug <martinsundhaug@gmail.com> wrote:
> Yeah the Host-header is HTTP 1.1+, so you're not gonna see it on HTTP
> 1.0 or 0.9 browsers. This means that you're only ever gonna hit the
> default site of a server.

I can tell you with quite some certainty that many browsers emit(ted)
Host: headers without doing the rest of HTTP/1.1. Many sites respond
with "Transfer-Encoding: chunked" output for 1.1 level clients, and
that produces stray garbage in 1.0 clients. So rather than implement
all of 1.1, clients advertised themselves as 1.0 but sent Host: headers
so that the vast number of virtual hosts would continue to work.

ab, the apache benchmark tool did (does?) that.
w3m, with xterm images did that.
netrik did that.
Opera 3.6 did that.
XChimera did that.
yahoo-slurp bot did that in early 2000s.
ia_archiver, the Wayback Machine archiver still does it.

curl will do it, if you ask ("-0")

I don't think there are any 0.9 clients left _except_ for bare bones
"site up" monitoring / probe tools. It's hard to tell exactly what
they are, since the 0.9 clients send no headers and do not identify
themselves in any way. The only 0.9 clients I've personally used are
load balancers sending those to verify the backends are up. But I've
seen other cases that appear to just be "scan IP space for http-ish
servers".

Elijah
------
has written HTTP clients and servers for learning and testing things

NCommander wrote:

> Grant Taylor wrote:
>
>> NCommander wrote:
>>
>>> I actually got Outlook Express/Solaris working
>>
>> I'd be interested to know more about your video.
>
> It went up today, which reminded me to come back and check on this:
> https://youtu.be/_AoyQeUzbEU

Hah, just stumbled on the video via davepl's pinball and your pinball
videos, then I thought "hmm, where was that thread about OE for unix?"

On 2021-07-22 12:56, NCommander wrote:
> I've recently been working to make a video about these forgotten pieces of
> history, and thought I should check here to see if anyone remembers them. I
> actually got Outlook Express/Solaris working (see this messages headers),
> and well ... its a very strange piece of software. Curious if anyone has any
> experience it, or the broader Mainsoft XDE UNIX products/WISE kits. I
> realize this is probably a long shot, but still worth asking.
> - NC
>
>
This is pretty amazing. I just watched your video.

Back in the early 2000s our university was also still running
Solaris with UltraSparc workstations. The Sysadmin would
have probably killed me if I tried to install IE though, lol.
Probably wouldn't run inside a user's home anyways considering
it's MS.

Cheers,
Joe