Internet OS  An Internet operating system, or Internet OS, is any type of operating system designed to run all of its applications and services through an Internet client, generally a web browser. The advantages of such an OS would be that it would run on a "thin client", allowing cheaper, more easily manageable computer systems; it would require all applications to be designed on cross-platform, open standards; and would not tie a user's applications, documents, and preferences to a single computer, but rather place them in the Internet cloud. The Internet OS has also been promoted as the perfect type of platform for software as a service. Talk of an Internet OS began to surface in 1995 as the browser war started heating up between Microsoft and Netscape. In response to the limited capabilities of HTML at the time, Microsoft began developing an online content authoring platform that would be based on distributed OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) which it codenamed Blackbird. Using OLE, applications put on the web would contain their own processing logic, so would act similar to applications in a typical desktop environment. Immediately, there were concerns that this would tie the web to proprietary Microsoft technology that wouldn't be guaranteed to run across different systems. As a challenge, Marc Andreessen of Netscape announced a set of new products that would help transform their browser into what he called an "Internet OS" that would provide the tools and programming interfaces for a new generation of Internet-based applications. The so-called "Internet OS" would still run on top of a regular OS – being based around Netscape Navigator – but he dismissed desktop operating systems like Windows as simply "bag[s] of drivers", reiterating that the goal would be to "turn Windows into a mundane collection of not entirely debugged device drivers". Andreessen explained that the newest versions of Navigator were not just web browsers, but suites of Internet applications, including programs for mail, FTP, news, and more, and would come with viewers for a variety of document types, like Adobe Acrobat, Apple QuickTime, and Sun Java applets, which would give it programming interfaces and publishing tools for developers. Netscape also would continue to sell its server software, and Java applets would run cross-platform on both its clients and its servers, and as a scripting language in the form of JavaScript. They would also provide facilities for backend transaction processing, elaborating the client/server model with navigating clients and application servers and database servers. He pointed out – because of the broad capabilities that all of this gave their browser – the only difference technically between Netscape Navigator and a traditional operating system is that Navigator didn't include device drivers.