I woke up this morning to find an interesting bit of Web history posted in a comment in response my post SOA, AJAX and REST: The Software Industry Devolves into the Fashion Industry by Adam Bosworth. He wrote

I actually agree with the post and I could care less what it is called (Ajax or DHTML or ..) but I thought I'd correct a couple of historical points. We (I led the IE MSFT 4.0 team which shipped in the fall of 97) called it DHTML because we introduced the read and writable DOM so that Ecmascript could dynamically modify the page to react to fine grained user actions and asynchronous events. That really was new and inventing this and the term occured simultaneously. Scott Isaac drove this work and worked tirelessly to get it into the W3C. We (MSFT) had a sneak preview for many developers in the fall of 96 actually showing things like pages expanding and collapsing in the gmail style and Tetris running using Javascript and DHTML in the page. Before then, javascript could hide/unhide items and react to some coarse events, but that was about it. We added the XMLHTTPRequest object (Chris Lovett actually did this) in IE 5.0 when we wrote the auction demo to show how XML could be used with IE to build a new interactive client. If there was a pioneer for Ajax, I'd argue that the auction demo was it.

I am surprised by how familiar I am with some of the people he mentions. Chris Lovett is currently an architect on the XML team at Microsoft and was the person who gave me the Extreme XML column on MSDN when I was still fresh out of college in my few months at Microsoft. Scott Isaacs is an architect on the MSN Spaces team who I've been in a few design meetings with so far. Cool.

I also see that Adam is back posting to his blog with his post Tensions on the Web. He mentions our conversation at ETech, specifically

I haven't posted for quite a while because my last posts caused unfair attacks on Google by twisting the words I'd used in my posts and attributing my posts to Google. I want to be really clear about something. The opinions I express in this Blog are my own. They have nothing to do with Google's opinions. Google only asks that I not leak information about future products. Period. But despite that, recent blog posts of mine were used to attack Google and this upset me deeply. Much to my surprise, Dare Obasanjo came up to me and told me, after some fairly vitriolic complaining from me to him about this earlier state of affairs, that he wished I'd continue to post. I thought about this over the weekend and decided that to some degree, you have to take your chances in this environment rather than just hide when you don't like the behavior and that perhaps I was being over sensitive anyway. There are too many interesting things going on right now anyway.

Adam's blog postings have been somewhat inspirational to me and part of the reason I decided to move to MSN (in fact, I'd considered leaving Microsoft). They also led to the most popular entry in my blog, Social Software is the Platform of the Future. It's good to see that he's back to sharing his ideas with us all.

Welcome back to the blogosphere, Adam.