Blackbird was the codename for an online content authoring platform developed by Microsoft in the mid-90s. Intended to be the online publishing tool for the first version of MSN (The Microsoft Network), "Blackbird" was born of a Microsoft acquisition of Daily Planet Software, and the tool was first conceived prior to the advent of the Internet and Web as we know it today. At the time, AOL and CompuServe were the primary online venues, and the introduction of the Web to mass consumers was about to begin, even as low-bandwidth, dialup connections dominated. "Blackbird" was based on the concept of an object-based backend file system in Microsoft Data Centers (Microsoft "Cairo"/NT), a low-bandwidth-streaming rendering client with page-based layout (similar to Aldus PageMaker but based on onlin