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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."
Do you remember when it was announced that in Netscape were developing their very own OS?
Hosting 20G hd, 1Tb bw! ssh $7.95
Let's not forget Imposter Boy:
w ww.chrispy.net/marca/gqarticle.html ....Unless you want to believe the marketing goons at Netscape.
http://web.archive.org/web/20030212202753/http://
Kinda odd that the guy that was supposed to have written Mosaic single-handedly didn't write ANY code at Netscape.
I was using the Internet way before the commercialization of it...back in the days when "The Internet" consisted mainly of Usenet, IRC and FTP.
Gopher was a new thing also, but not very big and when Mosaic came out with their World Wide Web I said over and over again how it wasn't ever going to catch on, that it was just a fad.
Meh...I never said I was a visionary.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
the netscape dorm
my employer can blow me
resignation and postmortem
netscape and aol
No, gopher died because it was archaic and difficult to use. The Web, with or without graphics was much easier to use, especially once the early portals and search engines started popping up. It's the links from one site to another to another to another that killed gopher, not graphics.
Granted, without graphics, the Web wouldn't have caught on nearly as well, particularly among corporations, but gopher would still have become one of those things that people don't notice on the Internet.
Remember RFC 873!
I remember reading so many Usenet articles by people seeking help to run Mosaic on various kinds of computers. Naturally I was curious, and once I saw and ran it for myself, and later Netscape (aka Netscrape), I thought Wow! For me, a physics grad at the time, being able to get text and data plots easily and quickly was revolutionary. Prior to the rise of easy to use graphical web browsers, you had to be privy to the sacred order of the preprint to get the latest research results. Mosaic changed all of that and in a lot of ways is one of the great pillars of my career today.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
"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.
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
At the time though, I though I was a bit slow to catch on myself. Usenet was where everything was happening (For some categories it still is) and I saw Mosaic, but couldn't ever figure out what it was for or even find a working URL. Then some months later, when I did find one, it linked to a handful of sites all linking to each other and containing only a list of the rest of the handful of sites.
What was the break through for me was that it was similar to Hypercard and I could arrange for material to be put up. Towards the end of 1994, I had arranged for the departmental IT staff to make a web accessible space on one of the departmental unix servers. Then I had HTML versions of previously paper-only tutorials to be posted there. No big deal, I thought. It was for a large class with a few hundred students, but the few that use the tutorials will continue to use the paper copies anyway.
Wrong. With a major exam on a Monday, starting Friday afternoon, it became progressively harder to reach the servers for anything, even e-mail. By the time Sunday night rolled around, there was effectively a denial of service going on. I had set up the documents with internal links and pared the diagrams down to one or two KB. However, the browser kept polling the server even for the internal links and reloading everything. That clogged the 2Mb/s network.
That got the attention of the faculty and put WWW on the map, at least for the department. After that, web versions of tutorials were considered essential and an established part of the administration by 1995.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
My first experience of the WWW was finding the source of Mosaic on an FTP site and spending 2 days trying to compile the bugger under VMS/XTerm on a VaxStation. Finally did it though, and it was totally worth it. Ahhh those were the days. My regret now is that I totally ignored stuff like IRC, and missed on an era when it was actually useful.
-Jar.
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