Microsoft Sunsets Amiga’s Killer App: Internet Explorer

It’s been nearly 27 years but, as life teaches us, all good things must come to an end. On June 15th, Microsoft ended support for Internet Explorer on all desktop systems, including its launch platform, the Commodore Amiga.

Or, so it would seem.

Microsoft tweeted the news yesterday from its official @MicrosoftEdge account. In the poignant tweet, the Redmond software giant bade farewell to its venerable web browser, stating with some sadness, “Now, it’s time to surf the big web in the sky,” while marking the woeful moment with an animated image of IE’s orbited-“e” logo, centered on a glowing blue screen which fades out to darkness on an Amiga 1000 computer.

As someone whose 23 year web development career has been made rather “challenging” on many occasions thanks to Internet Explorer and its many unfortunate virtues, this seems its perfect epitaph: A browser released in 1995 for Microsoft’s new, preemptive multitasking OS, Windows 95, memorialized on the screen of an Amiga, a graphics computer released by Commodore in 1985 that brought the first preemptive multitasking OS to the consumer market — ten years earlier. It wasn’t a DOS machine, it didn’t run Windows, and it never ran Internet Explorer.

RIP and good riddance, IE.