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

I remember the Netscape release ..

[torpor]

.. I'd just helped start up a (what is now very large) ISP in Los Angeles, and we were having a blast (i kid) helping people get the Trumpet Winsock Dialler and some 3rd-party TCP/IP stack installed on their Windows 3.0 and 3.1/WFW machines .. 'real TCP/IP access' was one of the major draws to us as an ISP, and for the first few weeks we had about 15 new signups a day.

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 ... phew. We nearly melted down, but I'm glad to say I really had a unique opportunity to see this turning point from the perspective of a major ISP .. which is still around, and has grown a lot since those humble days with 20 14.4k modems and 10 28.8k modems, sitting on a Livingston rack, hanging off a single 56k line ..

Ah, the web. What would the Internets be without you now, eh? A massive landscape of gopher piles and archie bookmarks, no doubt .. no doubt .. /pours one on the ground for the poor suckers still in the ISP business ...

Tim Berners-Lee

[an_mo]

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.

Re:Remember Lynx and Mosaic?

[shokk]

I remember Mosaic being the revolutionary web app, not Netscape! What's this crap? Selective memory, or purposeful revisionism to get AOL sponsorship $$$ for OSTG?

Re:Cern

[cshotton]

Yeah, this Fortune article is definitely revisionist history, drawn up by some of the people that capitalized on a lot of hard work by others. I know, I was there. I spent a LOT of time in late '91 and most of 1992 corresponding with Robert Cailliau, who was responsible for much of the work on the CERN server/browser combo that predated anything done at NCSA. We at Univ. of Texas were interested in getting scientific papers on-line and had found Gopher to be a train wreck when it came to managing scientific notations, footnotes, and bibliographic references. The guys at CERN had solved the problem for text with the work Tim Berners-Lee had done with HTML and the networking code others at CERN had created for HTTP.

I originally contacted Robert and TB-L about writing a browser for the Mac. They said they'd rather see a server, which is how MacHTTP was born. Once the Mac server was running, I started working with Aleks Totic at NCSA to get the early versions of Mosaic on the Mac to work with the same server. Another prominent figure at NCSA at the time was Tom Redman, who if I recall correctly, was leading the Mosaic effort. At the time, Andressen was just another programmer on the Mosaic effort who had some glory because he hacked up the first working image tag in HTML. Until that time, everything had been text and hyperlinks

Long story short, everyone knew that Andressen snuck out of town with the Mosaic source code, and a few weeks later lured several of the developers like Aleks to go with him. There was a lot of ill-will engendered by that move and it wasn't all sweetness and light as the Fortune article would have you believe.

I remember speaking to the NCSA team (and then the SpyGlass team) many times afterwards, and no one ever really got over the fact that a junior programmer walked out the door with the IP created by dozens of other people and got filthy rich out of it while many of the people who built the original World Wide Web labored on in obscurity. At the time, the Internet culture wasn't about getting rich. It was about creating cool technology and sharing it with others, and almost all of the innovative stuff was still coming out of academia.

If anything, Netscape was the prototypical example of how to swipe someone elses' good ideas, rebrand them, and get rich. That was the company's real legacy to the Internet and the subsequent DotCom lunacy.