AMSD Ariadna

» see ariadna.ru as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

AMSD started writing a web browser in 1994, which was early enough that there was barely a Russian web to browse. The company was a Moscow software house founded in 1993 out of a team from the Russian Academy of Sciences, and it had spent the early nineties doing contract work for DEC and a handful of American firms. Ariadna shipped in 1995 for Windows and, unusually, for DEC Alpha as well. It was paid software with a price list.

The headline feature was encodings. Russian text in that decade could arrive as Windows-1251 or KOI-8 or DOS CP866 or the Macintosh variant or ISO, and nothing in the page reliably told you which. Ariadna supported all five, and by version 1.2 beta 3 it would work the answer out from the content itself rather than trusting a declaration that was usually absent and sometimes wrong. The interface was in Russian too, menus and buttons, which AMSD pitched squarely at people who did not read English. A fifty thousand entry English to Russian dictionary came built in, along with a mail client.

What it never had was almost as telling. There were no frames and no cookies, and JavaScript never arrived at all. It spoke HTTP and FTP and Gopher and WAIS, it rendered nested tables and transparent PNGs, and it would open as many windows at once as you asked it to, which the marketing made a point of because the competition would not.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the encoding problem ~

This is the part I understand from the inside. Turkish has six letters that Latin-1 does not carry, and through the whole first stretch of my time online they broke constantly. The same page could be ISO-8859-9 or Windows-1254 or DOS CP857 depending on who wrote it and what they wrote it in, and getting it wrong turned every ş and ğ into a box or a question mark. We learned to read around the damage. A lot of people simply wrote without the accents to be safe, which is its own kind of loss.

So a browser whose central claim was sniffing the character set out of the bytes is not an obscure engineering detail to me. It was the thing that decided whether the web was usable at all if your language sat outside the American default. Netscape and Internet Explorer both got there in the end, and by the time they did, the argument was no longer about features.

~ the price of free ~

Version 1.3 shipped some time between June and October 1997 and was the last one. The news page on ariadna.ru was still headed "What's new in AMSD Ariadna 1.3" that October. By the December 1998 capture the same URL carries the notice instead: the firm suspends its work on improving the browser, and gives you the opportunity to download 1.3 free from the server. Nobody ever used the word discontinued. The notice said suspended, and it stayed up unchanged for years.

AMSD named the cause in that notice and did not soften it. "In pursuit of domination on the market of Internet-technologies the leaders used 'super-dumping' tactics: these companies are distributing Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer practically free." A retrospective the company posted years later was blunter still: once both rivals had been localized into Russian and handed out at no charge, an Ariadna upgrade "would take too many efforts to be profitable for such a small company as AMSD."

AMSD kept trading. It built child-safety content filters and access controls, and it built them on top of Internet Explorer, which is to say it spent its next decade inside the product that had taken its market. The domain went too, eventually. ariadna.ru belongs to a chain of spine and joint clinics now, and amsd.ru is a parking page with a Russian line underneath saying the domain may be for sale.

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