Cyberdog was an OpenDoc-based Internet suite of applications, developed by

Apple Computer Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company b ...

for the Mac OS line of operating systems. It was introduced as a

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in February 1996 and abandoned in March 1997. The last version, Cyberdog 2.0, was released on April 28, 1997. It worked with later versions of System 7 as well as the Mac OS 8 and

Mac OS 9 Mac OS 9 is the ninth major release of Apple Inc., Apple's classic Mac OS operating system which was succeeded by macOS, Mac OS X (renamed to OS X in 2011 and macOS in 2016) in 2001. Introduced on October 23, 1999, it was promoted by Apple as "T ...

operating systems. Cyberdog derived its name from a cartoon in '' The New Yorker'' captioned " On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog."

History

Cyberdog 1

* Apple released the first beta version of Cyberdog on February 16, 1996. * Apple released Cyberdog 1.0 on May 13, 1996. * Apple released Cyberdog 1.2 on December 4, 1996.

Cyberdog 2

Apple released a first alpha version on December 21, 1996 with new features such as

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, cookies and animated

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support. Apple also released Cyberdog 2.0 with Mac OS 8.0, allowing Mac Runtime for Java to be utilized and also had minor bugs with OpenDoc fixed.

Overview

Cyberdog included email and

news News is information about current events. This may be provided through many different Media (communication), media: word of mouth, printing, Mail, postal systems, broadcasting, Telecommunications, electronic communication, or through the tes ...

readers, a web browser and address book management components, as well as drag and drop FTP. OpenDoc allowed these components to be reused and embedded in other documents by the user. For instance, a "live" Cyberdog web page could be embedded in a presentation program, one of the common demonstrations of OpenDoc. A serious problem with the OpenDoc project that Cyberdog depended on, was that it was part of a very acrimonious competition between OpenDoc consortium members and Microsoft. The members of the OpenDoc alliance were all trying to obtain traction in a market rapidly being dominated by Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer. At the same time, Microsoft used the synergy between the OS and applications divisions of the company to make it effectively mandatory that developers adopt the competing Microsoft Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) technology. OpenDoc was forced to create an interoperability layer in order to allow developers to use it, and this added a great technical burden to the project. An offspring of Cyberdog called Subwoofer had been developed in parallel and was aimed at providing software developers with a simple library for integrating web communication protocols into applications. The project was completed after the cancellation of Cyberdog and released at the MacHack 1997 conference b
Sari Harrison
and Frédéric Artru. Subwoofer evolved into the URL Access library shipped with Mac OS 8.6.

Cancellation

OpenDoc had several hundred developers signed up, but the timing was poor. Apple Computer was rapidly losing money at the time. Before long, OpenDoc was scrapped, with

Steve Jobs Steven Paul Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was an American entrepreneur, industrial designer, media proprietor, and investor. He was the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Apple; the chairman and majority shareholder of Pixar; a ...

noting that they "put a bullet through (CyberDog's) head", and most of the team was laid off in March 1997. Other sources noted that Microsoft hired away three ClarisWorks developers who were responsible for OpenDoc integration into ClarisWorks. AppleShare IP Manager from versions 5.0 to 6.2 relied on OpenDoc, but AppleShare IP 6.3, the first Mac OS 9 compatible version (released in 1999), eliminated the reliance on OpenDoc. Apple officially relinquished the last trademark on the name OpenDoc on June 11, 2005. OpenDoc had a large memory footprint for the time, and since the OS/2 (Warp 4) versions of OpenDoc were behind schedule, Cyberdog only ran on Macintosh. Moreover, saved documents were not viewable from applications which did not support OpenDoc's Bento format. After Apple terminated Cyberdog along with the rest of OpenDoc, Cyberdog's web browser component grew outdated as web standards evolved. Cyberdog was once positioned as a replacement for the earlier, discontinued, Apple Open Collaboration Environment.

References

External links

*
Cyberdog Installation
{{Internet suites Discontinued internet suites Classic Mac OS-only software made by Apple Inc. Classic Mac OS-only web browsers 1996 software Discontinued software