Sadly I can't lay claim to inventing pop-ups...
What happened was that in 1994 I got involved with Microsoft in the UK because I was running the UK's first Internet radio station Cyberville Radio. BBC2 came and did a big piece on us and so Microsoft contacted me because they wanted to push their Explorer browser they said "would I like to come and see some cool new stuff you could do with IE" - so off I went to MS HQ in the UK and they showed me a load of stuff without NDA!
One of these was a way to make a radio station pop-up off the page so that the audio remained playing when you changed web pages. They had only just come up with this but it was part of the spec for html and worked with Netscape too - MS just happened to be the first to use this facility.
So - off I went and created ABC-web - Active Banner Consoles - hence the name Consoles as now used. My 'invention' was to tie the pop-up in with traffic sharing programs. And Consoles were cool then - they just became so over-used it was horrible - we stopped using Consoles as soon as we saw this and moved onto the Eureka newsletter (but that's another story).
And I believe it *was* Timon that did the one thing I wish I had thought of - he beat me to the concept of the Exit Console. That was a brilliant development of the Console and we actually copied him by giving all our webmasters the option to make their ABC-web Consoles Entrance or Exit and about 80% went to Exit.
So, if Jim did that pop-up of his before 1994 then he was first - otherwise I reckon it was Microsoft & me
05-18-2005
Hybrid Mode
