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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."
I thought it was Al Gore that invented the internet
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
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
"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]
you mean that mythical internet that had nothing but information that was solid and believeable and had a signal to noise ratio that was so low that many usually did not question a post on usenet?
Gopher was my friend, email was useable, usenet was great and IRC was the new kid on the block.
gimmie!
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
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.
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.
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."
I'm still hoping my investments in Gopherspace will pay off!
Yesterday was DIY Marathon Day. Is today going to be Nostalgia Marathon Day?
What about tomorrow?
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.
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
You'll have to forgive him. He can't help his grossly inaccurate views. He watches Fox News.
"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.
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!
You talk about 10 years ago like it's some far off mythical land with hobbits and trolls and shit.