McCue left IBM in 1989 to found his first company, Paper Software, which produced a launch-pad style toolbar, called SideBar, for Microsoft Windows 3.1. In 1994, SideBar was sold to Quarterdeck, the company best known for its QEMM memory management software. Microsoft later added similar application-launching features to its Office and Windows products and SideBar faded into computer history. As McCue points out, however, the current Google Desktop Sidebar is a descendent of the ideas first introduced by Paper Software's application. Paper Software's next product was WebFX, a plug-in for Netscape's web browser that provided a 3-dimensional interface for the worldwide web using a superset of HTML known as VRML -- "virtual reality modeling language." Netscape was so impressed that it acquired Paper Software in 1996 and integrated the WebFX technology into Netscape's Live3D product. But the 3-D web never caught on the way many in the 1990s predicted, although it can be argued that these ideas have resurfaced in the current generation of multi-user virtual environments such as Second Life.
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