Microsoft is finally killing off the WebTV service.
Wow. At one time, WebTV was the most common ISP for visitors to this site. What can I say? I was popular with the living room crowd. I suspected it was still around, as a legacy service for the existing WebTV and MSN TV hardware. I wonder how many of the original WebTV set-top units are still around? If there are any, holy cats they are tough little buggers, compared to the lifespans of my last two laptops.
I’m not so sure about the saving paper or ink, but it would have saved me oh, I dunno, a couple of hours spent saying “colon slash slash” and explaining what it meant back in the early days of the Intertubes. On the other hand, it’s a great way to immediately tell if someone isn’t net-savvy when he tells you his email address is ‘http://www@webgurus.com’ or something similar. I also never understood why the more easily pronounceable ‘web’ wasn’t adopted instead of ‘www’, although there is a movement to deprecate ‘www’ now.