I was cleaning out some old documents and found an email from 1999 on some changes to Internet Explorer. Most of it is boring, but I found this part interesting:
VRML is being removed from IE5.5 and will only be available on Windows Update. The company that supplied the component cancelled the project¹ (and at that point they were the only VRML viewer supplier, after acquiring everyone else)², and we were not getting any fixes.
(Footnotes mine.)
That’s kind of sad. All of the VRML companies get eaten up by a big fish, and then the big fish gives up on VRML.
Bonus chatter: For many years, I kept a large display board that was presumably created for some industry event. The gist of the message on the board was that Internet Explorer was committed to supporting VRML and the VRML community.³
I printed out a copy of this email and taped it to the display board.
When Internet Explorer announced its commitment to VRML and the VRML community, they hadn’t anticipated that the company that makes the product at the center of the VRML community would itself abandon its commitment to VRML.
¹ VRML looks to open source: “After an internal shake-up, 3D browser and tools owner Platinum Technologies plans to turn over its source code.”
² VRML Consortium changs Name to Web3D Consortium: “Platinum Technology, which now owns a significant slice of the VRML developer community, having acquired InterVista Software and Cosmo Software over the course of the year…”
³ This gives off strong “My ‘not going to abandon VRML’ sign has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my sign” vibes. I can only assume that the sign was created to quash rumors that Internet Explorer was going to abandon VRML. Which it didn’t. VRML abandoned VRML.
Yes, I remember VRML, and of course it was a bit sad to see it disappear at the time.
However, the evolution of open web standards since then has been truly remarkable. For years now, I have been genuinely amazed seeing the maturity of the web platform (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and web APIs). Today, you can fairly easily remake any traditional desktop application as a web application that you can run on essentially any browser. And this even includes GPU-powered 3D graphics. And if you want to make sophisticated animations, it's even easier in declarative HTML+CSS than in standard, imperative GDI!
If...