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."

Comments

Cern

[Nissyen]

How about Cern and Tim Berners-Lee? The initial Netscape release was basically the same as NCSA Mosaic which came before it.

Ahem... Mosaic

[rueger]

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.

Re:Ahem... Mosaic

[bedroll]

Let's not forget Mosaic, upon which Netscape was built.

As was IE. The humor of it is that, as I recall, most of the programmers responsible for Mosaic were the ones to originally create Netscape. So, if IE was started by building off of Mosaic's roots then those programmers helped Microsoft destroy Netscape.

Then there was Mosaic 2.0, which was just a little less horrible than IE 2.0.. but that's another story.

Imposter Boy

[deanj]

The world has always gotten this whole myth about how Mosaic was created from the Netscape people themselves. It's just like the myth that eBay was started because someone wanted to sell Pez containers, or any of the rest of the Silicon Valley myths. Marketing it that way makes a good story.

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://w ww.chrispy.net/marca/gqarticle.html

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.

Same tired knee-jerk comment...

[KingSkippus]

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.

Re:Remember Lynx and Mosaic?

[jellomizer]

While Lynx is cool and all I think it was because of the graphic capacity of the web that made it grow and killed of gopher.

Re:picture a world....

[tedgyz]

Don't you remember the original spammer?

BIFF BIFF BIFF bIff Biff bIFF
BIFF
BIFF BIFF
BIFF BIFF BIFF
BIFF BIFF BIFF BIFF
BIFF BIFF BIFF BIFF BIFF
BIFF BIFF BIFF BIFF BIFF BIFF

I remember seeing his posts all over the newsgroups "back in the day". If nothing else, he was creative.

Re:Good Ole Days

[Takara]

The company that changed it--bringing us into the Internet age--was a brilliant flash in the pan called Netscape

Bastards!

The "Internet age" you're thinking of happened in 1997 along with Windows 98... That's where the noobs came from.

the history of the web from CERN:

[piters]

You may have a look at this:
http://public.web.cern.ch/public/Content/Chapters/ AboutCERN/Achievements/WorldWideWeb/WWW-en.html
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...

Re:picture a world....

[greed]

He and kibo were just spool-greppers, not spammers. Annoying, but easy enough to filter.

Most of my "stupid posting" filtering used to be done by rejecting any message which did not have a lowercase letter in Subject:. Worked great until I got a job at IBM with all those old mono-case mainframe programmers. (You can decide if I'm talking about the mainframes or the programmers being old.)

You want to remember spam, how about Green Card Lottery from Canter & Siegel?

Heck, that was back when people talked about "EMP" (excessive multi-posting) or "ECP" (excessive cross-posting) on USENET, and "UCE" (unsolicited commercial e-mail) for, uh... e-mail I suppose.

Spam originally referred to USENET postings, in honor of those Monty Python vikings who just won't shut up about it--the C&S postings were like that, everywhere you went, there was another damn green card lottery posting....

But that was after the start of Eternal September. (Now that AOL has dropped USENET, is it finally October?) And those of us who complained when Prodigy got 'net access sure looked back fondly when AOL hooked up.

Remember when the worst thing about USENET was a few kooks and badly-configured FIDO BBS doors?

Yeah, me neither, my memory's not what it used to be.

I do remember being shown this neat thing on one of those fancy Sun SPARCStations with the built-in ISDN connection where you could look at a page of text from an information service, and it would be able to have pictures and full-motion video integrated into it! Even over ISDN it took a while to load up, and the video (MPEG 1) got all blurry if there was a lot of movement, and it pretty much swamped the SPARCStation....

It was summer of 1992 and they didn't really have a name for it yet. It was like gopher, but with graphics, too.

They (Northern Telecom's research division) also had a prototype of a new wireless phone from Motorola--it would work with their wireless set-up for private branch exchanges (Meridians). But the cool thing was, it had a flip-down thing like a Star Trek communicator.

Dial-up speeds

[DragonHawk]

"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.

Waht about a link to the actual product?

[houghi]

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.

Re:Remember Lynx and Mosaic?

[kalidasa]

You realize, of course, that Netscape was the commercialization of Mosaic? And that the reason Fortune is focusing upon Netscape and not Mosaic is because they're, well, a business publication?

Re:The web was always GUI

[kalidasa]

Yes, WorldWideWeb displayed graphics in separate windows; Mosaic made the images inline (thus the name, "Mosaic"). Anybody know if 1. the code to WorldWideWeb is still around, 2. if it works on OS X? (Which is based upon NeXTStep.)

Re:Tim Berners-Lee

[barzok]

And the people who keep asking "what about Tim Berners-Lee?" seem to be forgetting Vannevar Bush.

Re:How'd it change day to day work?

[jonadab]

> Didn't Win95 almost ship without a TCP/IP stack?

No, but it shipped with it turned off by default. You had to go into the
Network Neighborhood properties and Add Protocol and all that jazz to get it
turned on. Also, SMB/CIFS didn't bind to TCP/IP by default, only to NetBEUI.

Basically, TCP/IP had the same level of support as IPX/SPX.

Re:Correction

[ImaLamer]

You are right, they applaud Gore's efforts (as all here should):

e-mail from Vint Cerf (vcerf@MCI.NET) and Robert Kahn, September 28, 2000

They did, in fact, interview JWZ.

[Will Sargent]

Reporter interviews JWZ, invited to explore own sexuality.