For those who don't remember this long-defunct product, or never had a chance to experience it, PointCast was a multi-media push-technology news feed that took off back in 1996. Allowing the user to select a variety of channels from a number of sources (albeit all aggregated through PointCast central), along with stock tickers and customized weather, PointCast took the stage whenever the screensaver kicked in. It turned idle PCs across the land into customized news terminals, earning revenue for its corporate masters by displaying time-spliced advertisements amongst the news.

PointCast's rich graphics, generous content, and clean aesthetics made it a winner. Corporations were clamouring for PointCast caching servers to offset the 1000s of workstations all polling for updates and overwhelming their networks. Its success led many to proclaim that push technology was where it was at. Microsoft and Netscape immediately engaged in a war of push (both integrating their own technologies - Microsoft created CDF, with Active Desktop as its canvas, while Netscape created a conceptual relative of RSS...called RSS. Both stagnated when the push ferver died down, though of course the modern RSS rose from the ashes several years later).

At the height of it all, in early 1997, PointCast was offered a staggering $450 million dollar buyout. Feeling that they could do better, they held out. Not long after they were sold for a less than $10 million. This was a mini-.COM bubble popping, and should have served as a foreboding warning of the technology market implosion of the early 00s. Imagine how regretful the group who decided against the $450 million offer must have felt (and probably still feel).

I still look back fondly to PointCast. It, along with You Don't Know Jack - The Net Show, seemed to promise such a remarkable new internet world of rich content. And they managed to pull it off when most of us were lucky to have 2 KB/s connection (I now get 600KB/s).

It is amazing how much we have technically achieved, with both PCs and connections 100s of times faster, yet rich content has in many ways wallowed.

* - PointCast wasn't really push. Indeed, neither is client-side RSS. Instead they're both polled/scheduled pulls. Contrast this with SMTP, which actually is push: When ServerA has something for ServerB, it actively connects to and "pushes" the message. Pedantic point for sure, but I thought it worth making.