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Q+A with Ben about Web Browser History and More
My friend Todd Warren is co-teaching a class on Web Development at Ashesi University in Ghana right now (Fall 2020). He invited me and my friend Tim Krauskopf to spend 45 minutes on a Zoom video call...
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Before Slack and Teams: The Windows Service (1998)
Slack and Microsoft Teams have both gained prominence (along with Zoom) during this COVID-19 pandemic year of Working From Home. But back in the 20th Century, a small group within Microsoft built a...
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My Start-up Portfolio
[Last Updated on Thursday 1/26/2023]My wife Lisa and I are active “angel” investors and advisers. We have invested in 20 different companies since 2003, and we have 13 active investments in...
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Internet Explorer: A Brief History [6/2022 update]
6/15/2022: Internet Explorer Has Officially Retired In this blog post today, Microsoft confirmed that IE is history. I created the web browser project “O’Hare” within the Windows 95 team in early...
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Should Microsoft Spin Out Windows & Office?
On Monday December 27th, I received a message on my Twitter account from Jordan Novet, a reporter at CNBC. He was writing a story on CellarTracker, had figured out that I was a long-time CellarTracker...
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ChatGPT Generates Error-Laden Biography
12/10/2023 UPDATE: I tried the new Grok service by X (nee Twitter). Only one error and overall a better answer: @BenSlivka: Who is Ben Slivka? @grok: Ben Slivka is a software engineer and entrepreneur...
View ArticleAmazon.com Key Challenges, slivka@, 1999-10-05
I started work at amazon.com on September 7, 1999, reporting to Chief Information Officer Rick Dalzell, but with no job responsibilities. So, I spent my first three weeks interviewing 45 people at...
View ArticleInternet Explorer Team Started 30 Years Ago
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...
View ArticleSurvival of the Fittest Is Best Cyberdefense [unpublished WSJ letter],...
Note: I’ve had three other letters to the editor published by the Wall Street Journal. Sometimes there was a delay of several weeks. It has been 3w3d since I sent my email, so I am self-publishing my...
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I Joined Microsoft 40 Years Ago
Lisa and I bought the first Macintosh [128K RAM, 400K floppy disk] at release in the Spring of 1984 through the Apple University Consortium program at Northwestern University (I was working full-time...
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