they sure had access… and the jet red/blue thing was happening at that time wasn’t it jet red with exchange 4, and jet blue with exchange 5 onwards? I really forget now. No doubt further investigation is needed.

Doesn’t MS has MS Access and MS Jet in that time?

well sqlilte didn’t exist back in 1997… And Watcom’s SQL offering eventually became the reason why Powersoft/Sybase bought them out, and killed off the excellent C/Fortran compilers.

The rise and fall of Watcom alone is pretty sad. Not to mention it’s impossible to find Watcom Basic for the mainframe (or it’s other languages) or any of the other non PC stuff they did.

Oh and I recently came across some NT 5.0 beta’s so I probably will do something about Cairo…

and you should really write about Cairo and the what the hell it would have been-ness of it!

The independent clients in 1.0 can just log to disk, although the local site and enterprise servers need SQL. The SQL requirement was removed in 2.0 and higher, and 3.0 should work with HTTP (no doubt another RCP over HTTP, much like the killer feature of Exchange 2003).

Alert messaging is a good fit for MSMQ, as I’m amazed people rely on 1970’s syslog.. Especially people that have absolutely insane volumes of syslog messages in their network.

Deployment on end user machines was a PITA. Installing the MSMQ client required quite a bit of fiddling with firewalls, and the client machine needed SQL Server installed to handle the message store! A great way to slow a system down to a crawl!

It worked great once it was setup though.