I know a little something about the history of that URL "hot spots" feature, which has been available for many years now. Yours truly opened the "marketing requirement" for that feature way back in February, 2001, inspired by a particular iSeries customer in Texas. The marketing requirement that I wrote says:
URL "Hot Spots" in the title, with those quotation marks. That was my attempt to signal that I wasn't sure what to call the new feature, but the name stuck.(*) URL hot spots were announced with Host On-Demand Version 7 (Host Access Client Package Version 3) which became available in September, 2002. I don't think the feature made it into any of the HOD Version 6 updates, though. URL hot spots are a very natural fit for Host On-Demand, but they're also quite useful in Personal Communications. PComm picked up the feature fairly quickly, as I recall, but I can't immediately find an announcement for it. Maybe it was with Version 5.7 in 2003. (*) Which reminds me of another story. Sometime around 1998, a particular marketing team solicited feedback on a proposed name for a new software product release. Their proposed name was "IBM PC DOS Version 7.0 (Year 2000 Ready)." I thought that was pretty silly, so I suggested "IBM PC DOS 2000." And so it was. I made some other suggestions, too -- in particular that PC DOS 2000 should include more bundled applications. (By that time PC DOS shipped on CD, and you could create boot diskettes from that if necessary. There was plenty of available space on the CD.) I suggested the then-current release of Lotus 1-2-3 for DOS, some sort of word processor (probably from Lotus), IBM Japan's very clever Web browser for DOS, the IBM DOS LAN Requester (primarily for its memory-efficient TCP/IP network stack to support the browser), Personal Communications for DOS, and IBM Japan's remote desktop control client called Desktop On-Call. That combination would have been a good fit for PC DOS's target market at the time, which was increasingly focused on point of sale and "fixed function" PCs. But unfortunately those extra applications didn't end up in the package. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Timothy Sipples Resident Enterprise Architect (Based in Singapore) E-Mail: [email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
