20 Network Changing Products

An anonymous reader wrote to mention a Network World piece about products that have changed networking over the last twenty years. From the article: "SendMail 1998 - Sendmail was key to the e-mail revolution because it was how everyone got up and running with e-mail communications over the Internet. Eric Allman wrote the original version of this open source mail-transfer agent while he was at the University of California at Berkeley in 1979. He stopped development on it in 1982, however, and didn't revisit it until 1990. In 1998 he founded SendMail to sell the software's first commercial version, the SendMail switch."

Comments

Re:Ugh

[misleb]

So you could write a better mail system?

-matthew

Re:5 network-screwing products

[cyber-vandal]

A large proportion of adware exists because until XP SP2 IE's default settings allowed any old website to download and install anything in the background. Anyone with half a brain could have seen that as a recipe for disaster.
It's not the install base, it's the incompetence and the monoculture. I haven't had anything worse than a few tracking cookies since I started using FF and that's a fairly big target nowadays.
Had MS not insisted on their own browser and email client in order to tie people to their platform then maybe the history of malware, and the resulting aggravation and expense, could have been different.