I was working for John Ludwig and finishing up my “Diamond” project (See *.CAB files) when John asked me to take over the nascent world wide web browser effort. Thomas Reardon and I had been pestering John for a few months that we needed to move faster, and he finally relented and (with support from his manager Brad Silverberg) asked me to lead up the effort. The next day, the team met, we picked a code name and got started.
O’Hare became Internet Explorer and launched as part of Windows 95 in August, 1995. IE soared to 95% market share by 2004, but Microsoft leadership did not want the web browser to compete with Windows, so 2003 was the last Macintosh version of IE. And Microsoft never ported IE to the iOS or Android mobile operating systems. IE was pronounced dead in 2022.
NOTE: “Chicago” was the code name for what became Windows 95, picked because Chicago was much closer to Redmond (WA) than Cairo, which was the code name for a much more experimental possible future version of Windows. The implication being that Chicago would ship much sooner than Cairo (which never did ship).
From: Ben Slivka Sent: Tuesday, October 4, 1994 5:47 PM To: John Ludwig [johnlu] Cc: Tom Anderson [toma]; Jeremy Stone [jeremys]; Thomas Reardon [thomasre]; Arthur Blume [arthurbl] Subject: O'Hare kickoff meeting We went through code names, and the winner was O'Hare (the onramp to the world from Chicago, get it?). 1st runner up was Midway (another, lesser- known Chicago airport), and 2nd runner up was Apollo (something to do with space exploration). All three appear to be unused in our e-mail system, so unless someone on the team panicks in the next 12 hours, I'm going to send mail to acctreq to create the "ohare" alias. Also, issues and workitem lists are due to me from everyone by EOB on Thursday, so we can compile the full list on Friday. People will start writing specs no later than Monday as a way to work through the issues and formalize what we are doing. --bens