Cyberdog
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Cyberdog | |
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|
 Screenshot of various components of Cyberdog |
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| Developer: | Apple Computer |
|---|---|
| OS: | Mac OS |
| Use: | Internet suite |
| Website: | http://cyberdog.apple.com (no longer available) |
- This article is for the computer application. For the clothing shop, see Cyberdog (shop).
Cyberdog was an internet suite developed by Apple Computer, introduced as a beta in February 1996 [1] and effectively abandoned in March 1997 [2]. It worked with later versions of Mac OS 7 as well as the Mac OS 8 and Mac OS 9 operating systems.
More specifically, Cyberdog was an OpenDoc-based suite of internet applications, including email and news readers, a web browser and address book management components, as well as drag and drop FTP. Used together they produce a single suite similar to those offered at the time by larger "monolithic" applications such as Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer. However the use of OpenDoc allows these components to be reused and embedded in other documents by the user. For instance, a "live" web page could be embedded in a presentation program.
Use of OpenDoc also led to a huge memory footprint, often larger than both the web browser and mail applications in other suites. Moreover the system was slow and documents saved from this software suite were not viewable in applications which did not support OpenDoc's Bento format — that is, practically all of them. Cyberdog's web browser quickly grew outdated as web standards evolved. Cyberdog's Version 2.1 was the final release as Apple began including Microsoft's Internet Explorer on their Mac OS 8.6 System Install Disks. This coincided with Microsoft making a multimillion dollar investment in Apple.
Cyberdog was at one time positioned as a replacement for AOCE, which had failed in the market. Apple also referred to it as a demonstration of OpenDoc.
