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

What did happen to Constellation?

[Saiyine]

Do you remember when it was announced that in Netscape were developing their very own OS?

Re:Ahem... Mosaic

[deanj]

Let's not forget Imposter Boy:

http://web.archive.org/web/20030212202753/http://w ww.chrispy.net/marca/gqarticle.html ....Unless you want to believe the marketing goons at Netscape.

Kinda odd that the guy that was supposed to have written Mosaic single-handedly didn't write ANY code at Netscape.

They didn't interview JWZ!

[Dammital]

... whose website has some pretty entertaining stuff.

the netscape dorm
my employer can blow me
resignation and postmortem
netscape and aol

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

[SgtChaireBourne]

Heh. I remember MS apologists going on even in 1998 and 1999 about how the whole Internet / WWW was just a passing fad that would soon blow over. Didn't Win95 almost ship without a TCP/IP stack?

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.