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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."
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
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.
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.