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Remembering Netscape and The Birth of the Web
bigdaddyhale writes "Picture a world without Google, without eBay or Amazon or broadband, where few people have even heard of IPOs. That was reality just a decade ago. The company that changed it--bringing us into the Internet age--was a brilliant flash in the pan called Netscape. For the tenth anniversary of its IPO, FORTUNE recruited dozens of players to tell the story of Netscape in their own words."
Picture a world without Google, without eBay or Amazon or broadband, where few people have even heard of IPOs.
Welcome to the demilitarized zone!
I thought it was Al Gore that invented the internet
Sam Jadallah: There was definitely a buzz at Microsoft about the Internet--we were trying to understand why everybody was getting all hyped up. Certainly for us up in the Northwest, we didn't know what to make of it. It seemed pretty cool, pretty exciting, but really what were you going to do with it? How was it going to change your day-to-day work?
:)
By doing this.
Remembr Lynx and mosaic, anyone? I still use Lynx under Windows and linux, though.
Do you remember when it was announced that in Netscape were developing their very own OS?
Hosting 20G hd, 1Tb bw! ssh $7.95
How about Cern and Tim Berners-Lee? The initial Netscape release was basically the same as NCSA Mosaic which came before it.
Idol Star Astronomer
Andreessen: I lined up interviews and took a programming job at a company in Palo Alto. I liked the idea of moving someplace that wasn't so cold. The Valley was kind of dormant then. Apple Computer was the walking dead.
:-)
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Let's not forget Mosaic, upon which Netscape was built.
Still, I havea great fondness for the big, pulsing, waiting for 56K dial up N that was Netscape in the early days.
Three Squirrels
"...where few people have even heard of IPOs." Are you kidding me? I wouldn't say "few people." That might be when you were introduced to IPO's but I think most of the world had heard of IPO's long before. Perhaps since you're a tech guy, the tech IPO's are what brought it to your attention, but I think most other business folks had heard about them long before.
Finance tutorials and more! Understandfinance
I already waste enough time at work reading your hallowed pages. Pointing me to 20 page articles is not helping my productivity one bit. Now I've commented I'll RTFA for a while, maybe comment again in 20 minutes time ;)
I don't read your sig, why do you read mine?
Picture a world without Google, without eBay or Amazon or broadband, where few people have even heard of IPOs. That was reality just a decade ago.
//Although in the "good ole days", there was only dial-up, extremely bad streaming video (if at all), and AOL ruled supreme. Thanks Netscape ;)
No or less newbs. Far less spam. Fewer viruses.
*sniff* The good ole days.
The company that changed it--bringing us into the Internet age--was a brilliant flash in the pan called Netscape
Bastards!
-Teiresias
When I first got online, the Web didn't exist yet. I was in elementary school, and my advanced studies teacher was helping me learn about computers. I remember sending an e-mail over a 300bps modem, from the only internet-capable computer in our school. This was back in the days when I programmed in BASIC on an Apple IIgs (IIe?).
I find it unfortunate that I never got into the BBS scene - moreso, that I didn't know it existed. When I got my first modem-equipped computer, the modem sat unused until we eventually got dial-up internet service. Nowadays I enjoy telnetting into some newer BBSes, but it's just not the same...
I am scientifically inaccurate.
Sometimes we don't even realize what a change 10 years can make to our lives. I can't even not being able to use the internet for news, chat, shoppings, research, etc. The only unfortunate part is that Netscape has been hit by the Microsoft Monopoly and is a shell of it's former glory.
Voice your opinion!
I wouldn't give netscape the credit for the birth of the web. I would give Netscape credit for the .COM bubble, and making the web well known. But it is more of an issue of the right place at the right time. Modems have gotten fast enough to display bitmapped graphics, at a reasionable speed. Most people had 8 bit color at 640x480 displays, and the OS's and Computers were powerful enough to run a multitasking windowed environment. I think if netscape wan't there Mosaic may have stayed the big dog for Browsers untill microsoft wanted a piece of the action. It would be fair to say the Netscape help popularized the web, not threw anything really technical, but because it gave wallstreet a look at what the internet combined with html can promice, thus giving advertising time to the internet.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The company that changed it--bringing us into the Internet age--was a brilliant flash in the pan called Netscape.
How about Mosaic? I admit that Netscape was a big step forward, but it was evolutionary, rather than revolutionary.
Cello predated a lot of what Mozilla/Netscape was doing... I remember it as 'low hassle' 16 bit Windows app.
"Picture a world without Google, without eBay or Amazon or broadband,..."
/.
and I remember a world where I had an email box that had NO spam in it, and a USENET with little to no spam... where porn was in alt.binaries.* and NOT in comp.*.... and posts were ON TOPIC.
OTOH - it was also a world without
I'd like to turn back time.
[Connection closed by foreign host]
Then Mosaic went "Netscape", and suddenly, literally in a matter of one week, it was like 100 signups a day... just so people could get into this new-fangled "GUI"-style info resource they'd heard about in WIRED and Mondo2000 and BoingBoing magazines
Ah, the web. What would the Internets be without you now, eh? A massive landscape of gopher piles and archie bookmarks, no doubt
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
the days prior to Netscape.
13 years old, armed with Commodore 64, tape drive, 9" b&w tv, and armfuls of magazines like these computer classics.
I'll never forget when the Lead Engineer of our team at HP looked at Mosaic / WWW and said, "Who needs that?" This guy was supposed to be the "visionary" for management, but he definitely had his head in the sand.
:-)
If nothing else, you think he would appreciate the ease of getting pr0n. Cobbling together alt.binary... threads was state-of-the-art back then.
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
Why do people talk about Netscape so much and forget that one person only, Tim Berners-Lee, invented the web? He code the first browser, the first web server, invented html, convinced CERN to keep it free and open. And yet, when you tell the average educated guy that there is one person that did all this, they find it hard to believe. I just can't understand why Andreesen is more popular than Berners-Lee.
The only article you can find on what happened with NCSA Mosaic was in a GQ article from 1997. It's called Imposter Boy, and can be found here:
http://web.archive.org/web/20030212202753/http://
Call it sour grapes, or whatever you want, but I defy you to find any other articles about what happened back in those days... you can't. It's all because of the spin that Netscape put on it.
1) The article isn't about the invention of the Internet, it is about the invention of the World Wide Web.
2) How many times do we have to hear the joke about Al Gore claiming to invent the Internet? It's a myth that Al Gore ever claimed to have anything to do with the technical design of the Internet. He did indeed, however, have a large role in providing the environment in which it became the "Information Superhighway" that it is today.
That's what MS has never gotten. Make it part of a person's lifestyle first, then they'll make it part of their work.
And Netscape's practice of openly sharing technology so that other programmers and their companies could build upon its ideas helped give rise to a global technology community, the open-source movement.
Perhaps Netscape did help the open source movement. But did not give rise. People like RMS, ESR, Linus and many others that I can't possibly remember did that. Maybe they mean it was first for a company to open its source ? I don't know about that. Was there no large company before 1995 to give away source?
but they sure made it visible. I was working for my second internet startup [for peanuts and equity] when Netscape's IPO broke into the news. The founder had begged for a year to get enough venture money to open our doors...and the delay cost us a precious first-mover advantage.
But after Netscape, it was raining VC money, more money than good ideas.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
Picture a world without Google, without eBay or Amazon or broadband
Well, it'd make Jeff Bezos patent portfolio look a lot different. That's for sure.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Or one without billions of emails promising V14gr4! on the cheap!, where stealing someones identity involved more than point-and-click. A world where people had to, gasp!, go out and talk to other people face-to-face to buy products or knew how to use a card catalog at the library.
Yeah, those were the days oh so many eons ago. In fact, I distinctly remember my mom and dad having to round up the horses every morning to hook them to the carriage so they could go to work every morning while my brother and I washed our feet so they looked somewhat presentable after we had walked the two miles to school (uphill both ways mind you).
While it's nice to remember how things were and the progress we've made, let's also not forget the things that we don't know how to do anymore. We're so wrapped up (some of us anyway) in what's latest and greatest that we now have less overall free time to do things and spend most of our time trying to figure out how to schedule our days.
No, I'm not a luddite. I'm just one of those who don't see the point in much of what people are gaga over nowadays (a cel phone which can do 20 different things except make a decent call for example). If you're into web pages with Flash simply because Flash is the 'in thing' for web design, more power to ya. Just don't think that everyone else cares.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
My dad got an email from some guy named Marc Andreeson some ten or twelve years ago asking if he wanted to come work for his new company. Naturally, my father being a government employee with a decent pension plan decided to toss the email... :-/
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
Netscape's rise and fall epitomizes the acceleration of the business cycle. The fact that anyone can download anything at low cost and the fact that most people replace their computers every 2 years means a new, small company can quickly grow its customer base. And those same tools meant that MS could, just as quickly distribute its own browser and quickly take Netscape's installbase from the company.
Low distribution costs and PC turnover means that marketshare leadership is not assailable under most conditions -- its too easy for people to replace old software, especially when they get a new computer. Only companies that have an interoperability hook that ties past, present, and future generations of software and systems together have any hope of retaining marketshare.
MS has tried, and succeeded, in creating that hook with IE in that many websites "work best" with Explorer and Windows-specific web functionality (VBscript, ActiveX, MS-extensions to javascript, etc.). To the extent that MS is forced, in the future, to embrace true open standards (not embrace-and-extent forks of those standards) then the OS and app maker will become vulnerable to rapid changes in marketshare.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Because he didn't go on to form some wildly successful .com company, rape an pillage an unwitting stock market, and sellout to a dying behemoth (AOL).
/. wouldn't exist because it would be too costly to read all the comments. :-)
People don't seem to care about you if you don't make an unreasonable amount of money doing something.
Imagine if some greedy pig like MS had "invented" the internet. We'd be paying by the bit.
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
The best bart was using the Netscape browser to watch the Netscape stock quote as the IPO popped.
You're right but to understand more how Netscape's attitude and eventual martyrdom still affects us, watch Revolution OS. It's a bit slow at times and the ending has a terrible open source band playing music but it's quite informative.
My work here is dung.
And before Mosaic, there was Gopher.
Before Google, there was Lycos. I once typed the word "Computer" and got 3000 hits.
Nothing as much fun as getting Mosaic to compile on your Apollo workstation. Took a few nights, but the results were awesome.
And it took revenge too - just click on the About menu option of IE:
Based on NCSA Mosaic. NCSA Mosaic(TM); was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Musicians don't die. They just decompose.
Just because the dot-com boom was the first time that geeks started noticing talk about IPOs, the concept of companies going public and selling stock with Initial Public Offerings wasn't exactly new, not even to the general public. "IPO" was already part of the standard jargon of Wall Street and the countless people who invested in the stock market... more than "a few".
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
You can say what you want, but Netscape was a great company to work for. Everyone was competent and dedicated to being successful. Every company I've worked for since when compared to them, falls short. Not saying I want to go back in time, but I miss working with whip-smart techies- my current company 'thinks' they're a tech company, but they're just an 'integrator' who thinks they know what tech really is....
# nohup
Picture a world where slashdot credited the author of the article, rather than the submitter who simply cuts and pastes the blurb as their own.
Sigh, sorry to complain, but it's a pet peeve of mine.
Download my free songs!
What many people also forget is that Netscape sucked after version 3. I was one of those rabidly anti-Microsoft people who defended Netscape (wrongly) because of Microsoft's monopoly. Firefox and Mozilla proved that Microsoft can be beaten in time without the government.
Let's also not forget that AJAX' XMLHttpRequest object, which powers many of Google's new services, was invented by Microsoft with IE 5. I remember Netscape 4 sucking so bad that when IE 4 was about to go gold that there were people lining up in the chat room that I was in on Westwood Studios' chat service for C&C players to get as they ranted about Communicator.
And my God was it a POS. The thing was horribly bloated, ugly, not standards compliant and a spectacular mess to maintain, hence the mozilla guys practically starting over from scratch. Let's not forget something here, which Google has not. Netscape lost not because IE went free, but because Netscape 4 was such a bloat POS that it was agonizing to use it compared to IE 4. Netscape lost because when Microsoft got their act together, Netscape went from the elite of browser design to rank amateurs at best.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
the netscape dorm
my employer can blow me
resignation and postmortem
netscape and aol
The common mode for many Silicon Valley companies of the time like Netscape and SGI was simply pure arrogance. Ever try dealing with these people?
Netscape was unbelieveable. While they might have been the first to come up with an ISP agreement, wanting a percentage of the ISP's revenue for a package they GAVE AWAY online was asking way too much. Their other products, like their Collabra server, were WinNT ports of open source products like INN. And they worked like magic; it took a lot of hocus pokus to keep it running more than twelve hours. And forget actually interfacing it to Usenet, it simply couldn't handle the load.
If you called and complained, you were basically told "it is what it is, but the new version fixes it so send us more money". And that was just one software product.
Marc Andressen was not the golden boy he likes to make himself out to be. He was in the right place at the right time, and fortunately for him, made out pretty well. But he's a one trick pony.
Netscape didn't die because of Microsoft, Netscape died because of their own arrogance and they believed their own marketing. Good riddance. At least what was left was turned into something decent.
A text-only web is perfectly usable at 2400bps, but uninteresting to most of the general public.
The 14.4kbps modem and jpeg image compression made it possible for the average person to say "pretty pictures from 3000 miles away. Neat!"
In my judgement, these technologies were more more difficult to develop and more important than adding graphics to the web browser.
He coded the first Graphical Browser, not 'the' first browser. Also, he didn't invent HTML
I just can't understand why Andreesen is more popular than Berners-Lee.
Andreesen was a narcissistic sports jock working in Sillicon Valley, Berners-Lee a humble physics geek living in Switzerland.
Which realm do you think provides for the overt promotion required to get the attention of your average non-computer-savvy person and media pimps?
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
No far from it, MS half inched Mosaic and turned it into IE.
:)
Anybody who uses IE probably still has some of the original Mosic bugs in the code they use
Why, when I was a young programmer we had to write the code in the snow with our pee, and a compiler was just a word for the pilot of the hovering dirigible that read the instructions and passed them to the ALU, which was another fellow with an abacus. They would wrap the results around a rock, and drop it on my house when the program would exit. We had to walk uphill...
I love these good ol' days stories :)
Content Management System: A pretentious way of saying "text editor."
Look in the Help->About Internet Explorer and you'll find IE's humble beginnings as well:
"Based on NCSA Mosaic. NCSA Mosaic(TM); was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign."
You may have a look at this:/ AboutCERN/Achievements/WorldWideWeb/WWW-en.html
http://public.web.cern.ch/public/Content/Chapters
among others, includes the link to the proposal of the WWW made at CERN by Tim in 1989:
http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html
and refined by Robert Cailliau in 1990:
http://www.w3.org/Proposal.html
BTW, noone seems to remember about Robert Cailliau, the co-author of the thing...
I'm still hoping my investments in Gopherspace will pay off!
The CNN record of Gore's actual interview is more enlightening. He said he "took the initiative in creating" the Internet while he was in Congress.
Yesterday was DIY Marathon Day. Is today going to be Nostalgia Marathon Day?
What about tomorrow?
The article doesn't matter because MS says that they are the only ones who have been innovative in the last 452 years. In fact if Al Gore says he invented the idea of the Internet then MS will say that they invented Al Gore (it could happen you know!)
News Reporters Make Tasty Polar Bear Treats!
"Of course, it took a GUI (thanks to Mosaic) for hypertext to catch on..."
Um, the original web browser, called "WorldWideWeb", was GUI. On NextSTEP, even, which is known to be very GUI. The big thing that Mosaic introduced, I believe, was the ability to display graphics (GIFs and JPGs) and text together. It turned the web into multimedia.
Another interesting bit is that WorldWideWeb allowed interactive, real-time editing from early on. To edit a page, you just clicked in and started typing. Wiki is old news.
(DISCLAIMER: I've never actually used WorldWideWeb, only read about it. I could be even more wrong then usual.)
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Obviously, Netscape also built Wall Street.
Hagrin.com
"On a real note, who gets 56k dialup?"
Nobody (on the US PSTN) gets 56 Kbit, as that would exceed some obscure FCC limit. You're limited to 53 Kbit. I have seen that in practice, but it's pretty rare, and I expect you have to be right next to the CO on brand new wires to get it.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Remember Gopher? If not for the Netscape browser revolution, we might be still using Gopher to this day (and Google would be the top-of-the-line Archie site). Somewhere along the way, someone would have found a way to crap up Gopher with popups and scripts, no doubt.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I was working as a student support tech at the University of Illinois. My boss, who had been in Marc Andreesen's department, said he was having trouble with some Unix thing. Being the only approachable Unix type around, she asked me to help him. I called or emailed him, and agreed to come take a look at his workstation.
In my august wizardness I never found the building, so I never got to meet Marc or solve his problem.
I can't believe they didn't even mention my central role in Netscape's development.
sigs, as if you care.
Because he resisted the future. He didn't want pictures on the web, and certainly not all the plugin based stuff we have today. You get the impression he wanted to keep it academic. If TBL had run the show the web would be just another cool research toy.
I am trolling
"As I recall, you had the option of either using a standard phone line or getting 'data' phone lines in those days at a slightly higher cost from the phone companies. Might've been a scam most places, but who knows."
That's pretty much a scam, yah. At least it is in the US.
With standard analog modems at both ends, government mandated line quality is good enough for the 33 Kbit symetric max you see. Paying extra for what you're already entitled to is silly.
For 53 Kbit connects (which rely on having a digital telco switch at one end), I'm pretty sure the same standards apply, but I'm not positve.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
You bet! I remember the good old days when you had to rip someone's face from their skull and replace yours with it.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Hey could somebody please give CERN credit? They were the ones who gave birth to the technology, Marc Andreesen, Eric Bina, and Tim Berners-Lee only continued research and ended up releasing a commercial development of Mosaic and Netscape. Duh!
MM
That's Sir Tim Berners-Lee to you!
Technological singularity arriving, baby...
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
http://houghi.org/script/Netscape.zip
It is the Windows 3.1 Netscape 1 file. I hope it works, because I got it from a floppy that also included the dialupconnection, trupet winsock, emailclient and some other stuff and all that on 1 (one) floppy. Could be that I did not include enough files and I have no option to test it.
That was my first internetconnection and it worked like a charm.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I distinctly remember when the first Netscape Beta came out... If I recall correctly, I believe it was NCSA Mosaic that really dazzled us with the first streaming video, and really got the web moving, although we'd been using lynx for sometime before that... *sniff* People can't even conceive of a non-netscape world! Sad!
Mosaic had two children, Netscape and IE.
IE lives on, while Netscape died in an "accident" but is survived by more-or-less bastard children of many names- mozilla/firefox, Opera, etc.
So now, 10 years later, do we know for sure: did IE murder Netscape, was it truly an accident of circumstance, or was it semi-suicide?
I'd genuinely like to know.
-Styopa
How's that for inviting flames?
If you followed the scene through those last turbulent years you will recall that Netscape tried to pull a 'Microsoft' on the internet, introducing a waft of proprietary extensions to their popular browser. At that point it was Microsoft who suddenly took an interest in the W3C and standards based browsing.
Ironically it may be a fortunate thing for the internet and the global community that Netscape's monopoly was broken. Now it is imperative we do the same to Microsoft.
Longhorn Avalon looks great but unless my eyes deceive me I believe it is an attempt to make the browser irrelevant. Once web apps communicate directly with the OS instead of the browser the monopoly is complete, no?
"And the first release of the Netscape browser (the "Navigator" name didn't come until a couple years later, IIRC, but someone please tell me if I'm wrong)"
Not so much wrong as incomplete.
The original name for the company was "Mosaic Communications". The domain name they registered for this, http://www.mcom.com/, still takes you to the Netscape website. The name for the product was going to be "Mosaic NetScape". It turned out they couldn't use the Mosaic name (I forget why, prolly a trademark), so they changed the name of the company to "NetScape" and the name of the product to "Navigator".
And for those who don't know: The original "working title" for the program was "Mozilla", a combination of "Mosaic" and "Godzilla". That's where that name comes from.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
He must be pissed, he can't shutup about his coding exploits there.
My 20% stake in Netscape was worth $663 million on the day of the IPO. I remember because later I needed to come up with a tail number for an airplane I bought.
Best quote of the entire article
"Ask the non-geeks around you if they know what Mosaic is. Then ask them when they started using "Netscape"."
Most of the non-geeks around me think "the Internet" is a big blue E that sits on their desktop. If I say "browser" they think I'm talking about a customer that doesn't buy anything.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
It's called marketing oneself.
And the people who keep asking "what about Tim Berners-Lee?" seem to be forgetting Vannevar Bush.
If Netscape is responsible for the birth of the 'World Wide Web' can I then blame them for the resulting 'Dot Com' crash that cost me so much money and lowerred my income? If they hadn't invented it in the first place, all of this crap never would have happened. (?) I worked happily in the tech arena prior to Netscape and was well paid, very well paid. Now no one wants to risk their dollars on technology unless there is a proven return. Not a bad thing, but it certainly stifels innovation. ;)
"How about Cern and Tim Berners-Lee? The initial Netscape release was basically the same as NCSA Mosaic which came before it."
Just to clarify:
CERN is the European Organization for Nuclear Research (the acroynm isn't English-language). Tim Berners-Lee "created" the original web browser, WorldWideWeb, while he was working there.
Mosaic was developed at NCSA, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.
Marc Andreesen and Eric Bina were the original creators of Mosaic while they were students working at NCSA. Andreesen later founded Netscape Communications (originally Mosaic Communications) to try and build a company around the success of Mosaic.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I was doing tech support at Prodigy (remember them?) in 93'-94'. At the time Compuserve, Prodigy and an upstart called AOL were the big online players, each with their own 'world' that paying users could venture into.
Then in early 94' there was a portal added to Prodigy allowing (some) users to access something called the "World Wide Web". I was a beta tester at Prodigy and thus was allowed early access into this new feature.
If I remember correctly, it was essentially a 'door way' out of the Prodigy gui into the Prodigy browser which I think was Mozilla or some variant. It was very exciting at the time and it seemed from that point on, most Prodigy users could give a crap about Prodigy's carefully groomed and manicured little world. They just headed in droves for that button that said "Click here for the World Wide Web"!
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
"Anybody know if 1. the code to WorldWideWeb is still around..."
a tion/
http://www.w3.org/History/1991-WWW-NeXT/Implement
"if it works on OS X?"
This says no.
"Which is based upon NeXTStep."
My understanding is that MacOS X isn't really so-much "based on" NeXTStep (in terms of re-using the same implementation pieces), but rather makes use of many of the same ideas and interfaces. So "inspired by" might be a better term.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
While it's all well and good that Tim B-L gets all that publicity, please don't forget Robert Cailliau, who worked with TBL on the WWW at CERN (and who is - by the way - a very decent chap!). He's also been awarded the 1995 ACM Software System Award by the ACM for his work on the WWW - see http://www.acm.org/awards/ss_citations/1995A.htmlt ml for more details. Or read http://www.oup.co.uk/isbn/0-19-286207-3
See http://robert.cailliau.free.fr/ByLetter/M/Me/CV.h
Dan.
Though Netscape was free, you could buy it to show support, etc., so I did. I still have the 2 floppy disks that it came on. I think it was version 1.1, but don't feel like pulling them out to look and see.
Even back then, Microsoft was Evil(tm) and Netscape showed a glimmer of hope against them. Oh well.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
I posted about this before, but fortune.com has never changed their favicon.ico from the default that comes with Netscape Enterprise server. When do you suppose they'll figure it out?
Forgive me but I think I meant Mosaic, not Mozilla...
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Well, I guess I can see it. He was released in beta, he crashed on his debut, and now he is a bloated, hairy, artificial construct with a proclivity for helping the Communists. Yup, he's legit!
---
Aw, geez, it's a MS joke. It's an Algore joke. Get over it.
Don't trust anyone under thirty.
I just built version 1.2 from 1993 and its pretty quick.
:(
It won't render slashdot, though
Now I'm off to build 2.6!
How the memories come rushing back. Windows 3.1/3.11. Trumpet Winsock running in the lower corner. Netscape version 1 with a crappy looking "N" as the loading symbol.
This was 4/5 years ago so sadly I don't remember hardly anything that was said. The only thing that sticks out in my mind someone asked him a question similar "if could change something, what would it be" and he responded "getting rid of having to type on htt:// beore every address". It was a funny moment.
No real point to this. Guess I'm just acknowledging that I knew Tim Berners-Lee invented the web though I will admit hadn't it been for this interview, I would have no clue who he was or who invented the web.
Berners-Lee gave us a system for sharing dry academic documents, one that wasn't substantially better or worse than Gopher and Archie and WAIS and all the other networked hypertext systems of the time.
Andreesen gave us pretty pictures to look at.
And that is why he is the one who is celebrated.
Recently, I got myself a membership on sdf.lonestar.org. Originally, I just wanted a truly external site from which to ping & probe back into my network (was studying for CCNA, got it!). But I went ahead and paid for the membership (there is a free version which is still satisfying). So now, I'm typing this from a hp laptop (which is yes on my lap) and still checking newsgroups using trn on the G4 iMac occupying the desk. I have pimped out my terminal emulator so that it shows bright green text on a green-black background, then made the whole thing largely transparent (the emulator, not the iMac) so I can keep an eye on my little Forex venture behind the terminal. It's all vaguely unsettling.
Anyhoo, does anybody remember a column/website/mailing list called "Outgoing Mail" from the early 1990's? This was when I first got online, at UNM. 2400, Lynx, trn, etc... Imagine my horror when I was ordered to "upgrade" all of those beautiful WFW 486s to Win95! We slapped in 14.4 modems, and might just as well have started using smoke signals. But eventually, we were MOSAIC and Netscape and happy.
Then, as others have pointed out, NS4 (Collabra, etc) came out and it sucked, and it was time to leave school, anyway...
And for those who missed it, let me just throw that little plug in there again: http://sdf.lonestar.org/. Hopefully, I'll see you there.
Don't trust anyone under thirty.
Besides, it's not like Tim Berners-Lee has gone forgotten on slashdot... Or Mosaic.
And wasn't Marc Andresson, the creator of Mosaic, also Vice-President of Netscape? So let's not fly off the handle with our evil-corporation theories here.
Or Jughead and Veronica?
I wonder how many people on the web even heard of those servers/services, much less remember them.
But you're right about one thing, Mosaic -was- first.
I'd like to add my voice to those advocating Tim Berners-Lee's unsung role in all of this. And perhaps, NeXT's as well.
NeXT seems to have really given the framework which allowed for this sort of thing to happen. Rapid development times (in that era) easy-to-build GUIs, object oriented centric focus.
(I designed HTML by simply sub-classing the text object.)
Anyways, could Steve Jobs . . . in a way, be an unsung hero of the web, too?
What I'd like to see is a similar story, but interview the trench workers. I'd probably find that more interesting...
I love the Grateful Dead. In 1994 I was using AOL. I was 16 at the time. AOL had (has?) a "Grateful Dead Forum", it was a small community of people much like a micro-environment of the "lot". It was wonderful. In 1994 I used AOL to read the newsgroups, chat about the grateful dead in "710 Ashbury", visit dead.net, visit deadnetcentral.com grateful dead hotline etc.
/., pr0n and BT. The world and the internet have been becoming worse and worse "places" to be.
On August 9, 1995, Jerry died. On August 9, 1995, Netscape had it's IPO.
At the time I wasn't into any tech. Sometime after that I learned to write html, then javascript, then css, then started learning about computer hardware, installing and configuring certain OS's, then A+, then Net+.
Nowadays, my mailbox is full of spam, websites are full of annoying flash and ads, windows has barely changed in the larger sense.
Save for Linux, Google,
Picture a world...Talking about "pictures" and the beginning of it all, here's the first picture ever to be clicked on in a web browser...
Uncopyrightable: The longest word you can write without repeating a letter.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You talk about 10 years ago like it's some far off mythical land with hobbits and trolls and shit.
I believe his browser was the first, and was *NOT* graphical. The first graphical browser was probably mosaic.
I am not sure I agree. TBL invented a system that was flexible enough to add pictures and other media to it. He was the one with the intuition of combining internet+hypertext; I find it amusing that he even went to an hypertext conference to present his idea of putting their stuff on the internet and they just didn't get why it would be useful.
The NCSA mosaic people (not just andreesen, btw) just built on that idea.
I was foolish enough to install NC4 right after it went gold. What a slow, unstable POS. I kept with it until about 4.04, then tried Opera 3.1. What a difference on a 486DX2-66 with 12MB of RAM and W95 (in early 1998). I quickly bought a student license and used it as my primary browser until about Mozilla 0.9.
A small browser like Opera was a godsend on that little box. It had some rendering bugs, but I could most certainly live with that.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Google
I am tired of people STILL acting like Google is a good company. It is NOT. It holds the most websites/links, but that where its uniqueness ends.
Everytime I type in "quotes" to search, googles sez to take the quotes off. The result then is usually ten's of thousands of links, with the first several nothing but adds or totaly unrelated information (junk).
10 years ago there was the Yahoos, AltaVistas, which I feel were just as good (bad).
Amazon.com
A company who after alllll these years (nearly 10) still has NOT made an *overall* profit, and treats their workers to low wages and abusive harassment?
Broadband
We HAD broadband 'back-then' tooo. It was called ISDN and you were able to get it even out in the sticks usually! Besides you didn't NEED broadband back then because there weren't any bittorent programs because there was NO content being published!
IPO's?
HAA! Most people STILL don't know (or care) about them, unless they are the few who are either looosing tons of money on them, or government workers (prosecutors & judges) who make a living off the fraudulent activities of these 'Endruns' of the Nazdec!!
I'm sorry... give me the 'good-ole' daze..when things like Netscape where sooooo refreshing, in that they had the gaul to 'take-on' the Evil Dragoon' Ms (pronounced mizz), before even the big-bad-us-government did.
But not to fret..those days are comming back-- I can feel it in my WinBind!! :)
I will gladly loose all of life's battles.. in order to win the war..
Kinda like "Mission Accomplished!"?
... stop! What MS apologists? MS cought the thing pretty quickly and (unfotunately... or maybe not) back in 95 it was already a WWW leader with their Explorer. Back when the Web was evolving, it was Microsoft that kept adding innovations that are now standards. Sure, Mosaic was the first browser, than there was (is?) Navigator with their frames and the blink (wink ;) tag, but it was MS who was pioneering with the new technologies.
It was really sad to see Explorer and the 'whole interweb thingy' got aquired by marketing people focused on profits and spreading the MS monpoly. In my opinion IE used to be a great piece of software, probably the only good one that MS had to offer since MS Word 5.1 for Macintosh.
Anyways, back to the subject. I think you got carried away. You're trying to compress whole 10 years of innovation and progress into a couple of sentences. Let me tell you, it's just disrespect for those who were behind the concepts, the technology and the software during that time. That was progress! What we experiance now is stagnation with all this paranoid focus on security. Developement of new ideas has seized.
I remember when the "internet", for regular joes and janes, was essentially bulletin boards. All text-based. I then remember BEFORE Netscape. A real cool app for doing the (modern-style) internet. Let's see...called Mosaic. Yeah, THAT was way cool.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
by quite a few years.
Just because you never surfed CERN in the good old days, doesn't mean it didn't exist.
We use LYNX and we LIKED it.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I was out in silicon valley (working on interactive TV at the time), and I call BS on a couple of little "facts" from the article:
... The Valley was kind of dormant then. Apple Computer was the walking dead.
... Rob McCool, basically dropped out of college, and he would show up for work in shorts and tube socks and a Megadeth T-shirt. We all think of it as just the way the Valley is now. But I'd been in the Valley for a while, and I hadn't seen that.
Clark: I viewed the IPO as a marketing event.
The reason netscape whent public when it did was plain and simple. Clark wanted a bigger boat. Some BSD (big swinging dick), i forget who, had purchased a boat larger than clark's, and clark had to outdo him.
Giannandrea: The concept that was unusual was doing a beta
you have got to be freaking kidding me. netscape invented the beta? wrong. a publicly available (ie not a controlled) beta, yes.
Andreessen:
wtf are you talking about, marc? interactive television was something *everyone* was looking at. and the set top boxes were diskless power macs running some obscure new software named quicktime. i'm not a mac guy, but even i had a power mac. oh, and it had this little thing called a tcp/ip stack (which you had to buy from trumpet for windows since WfW was what was out at the time).
Treuhaft:
what? netscape invented the dressed down silicon valley dress code too? at oracle we had people in ripped jeans and/or shorts and tie dyes (the reference to jerry garcia's death the day of the netscape IPO reminded me of this).
the real big deal about netscape was that it had rsa security, so you could do things like bank online (wells fargo was one of the first to use secure sockets for financial transactions).
and then there's all the previously mentioned stuff about mosaic being in existence, as well as the CERN webserver.
I don't want to be too negative about this but I have to say that I rue the day when I decided to recommend Netscape Navigator over NCSA Mosaic to end users. Mosaic was open source but I didn't understand the importance of that back then. The Netscape experience has a lot to do with why many of us are so militant in the Free/Open Software movement today.
Here's my (bitter) memory of the events. Netscape released their software and it lowered the bar for what level of quality was considered OK to release to the public. Lots of companies started releasing buggy software after that. It was a fad. You felt like you were on the bleeding edge of technology if the thing crashed every few minutes. For Mac users, that was the time we started having to run Norton Utilities on a regular basis. It seemed like every day for a while.
Then, Microsoft decided to compete (or anitcompete) with Netscape and Netscape decided to try and beat Microsoft at their own game. They tried to keep ahead of standards so that web pages written for Netscape Navigator would not work with Internet Explorer. They made Microsoft look like a standards advocate by comparison. We are still cleaning up the mess this made of the WWW.
Yeah i agree. i was working at usyd when mosaic and netscape came out. i thought mosaic was better than the early versions (probably beta) of netscape anyway. The feeling i had at the time, and looking back about the technology was how totally obvious it was, how simple; it hardly seemed like an innovation at all - just something that had always been there just waiting to be used.
As for netscape, i never really got it, it was a good product but hardly revolutionary or brilliant in a tech sense. It was a great get_rich_quick scheme tho....
That honor goes to the company which provided sockets for windows. Trumpet? Netscape was just repackaging Mosaic for windows, and while it was the better browser for windows for time, it never kept parity with the original NSF project that spawned the company (which is actually pretty surprising), and was a pretty distant third in browser quality by the time Mosaic closed up shop.
The content generated the interest, and Trumpet Winsock was far more intrumental in getting the people and the content together than Netscape ever was. They were a company with all the money, the vision, in position with an enourmous time advantage in a brand new market, and they still managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. I look back at Netscape and still can't believe they managed to implode so brilliantly.
If you still think that Netscape "walked away with others ideas", just look at who made up the founding team. Virtually every Mosaic contributer, Marc A, Eric Bina, Aleks Totic, Jon Mittlehouser and Mike McCool who wrote the NCSA httpd and invented CGI, Ari Lutonen from CERN and myself who wrote Lynx. We also extended invitations to other significant members of the Web community, including Tim Berners-Lee, to join us when we started. Together the founding team had more programing hours invested in the Web than everyone else combined, by a very large margin.
I am having a difficult time finding a copy of Code Rush, a documentry released and presented by PBS in 2000. It was a neat documentry on how Mozilla came to be and the struggles the team at Netscape had.
Reporter interviews JWZ, invited to explore own sexuality.
I created something I call CookieRequest:
http://jameswilson.name/files/creq/index.html
Very cross browser friendly. Limited to RFC size of cookie, which IE doesn't honor (goes higher).
Let me know what you guys think.
Yes I know the site looks like crap.
OH yeah, its GPL.
Of course I remember the birth of the web. After all, I have it on tape.
I lost my karma, last april fools...
For a long while the future of the Web wasn't assured. After the launch of the Microsoft Network I remember seeing the cover of a tech magazine with the words in big block letters: MSN: INTERNET KILLER? Lots of companies hedged their bets by building dual sites WWW and MSN sites. Only after WWW's survival seemed assured were the MSN sites (access via Windows systems only) retired.
Oh, and remember WAIS? That survived even longer.
It was August 1995 when my tiny little company joined the Internet... The first edition of "The Road Ahead" did not have much to say about Internet, BIND still had not been ported to NT 3.51 yet, you could find a 1GB SCSI drive for around $800 and you did not need to worry all that much about leaving your router wide open.
According to that brand new Netcraft survey we were one of the nearly 19,000 web sites online back then.
In 2005 we are still tiny, but by grace we are also still here and remain a member of the 676 club (points if you get that reference). It has been quite a ride and it is only just beginning.
BRING BACK THE TAG!!!