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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."
Sam Jadallah: There was definitely a buzz at Microsoft about the Internet--we were trying to understand why everybody was getting all hyped up. Certainly for us up in the Northwest, we didn't know what to make of it. It seemed pretty cool, pretty exciting, but really what were you going to do with it? How was it going to change your day-to-day work?
:)
By doing this.
Remembr Lynx and mosaic, anyone? I still use Lynx under Windows and linux, though.
Do you remember when it was announced that in Netscape were developing their very own OS?
Hosting 20G hd, 1Tb bw! ssh $7.95
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
Andreessen: I lined up interviews and took a programming job at a company in Palo Alto. I liked the idea of moving someplace that wasn't so cold. The Valley was kind of dormant then. Apple Computer was the walking dead.
:-)
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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.
Three Squirrels
Nobody said Netscape invented the internet. However, one could argue that Netscape invented public interest in the internet.
All the while i thought it was Bill Gates....
I already waste enough time at work reading your hallowed pages. Pointing me to 20 page articles is not helping my productivity one bit. Now I've commented I'll RTFA for a while, maybe comment again in 20 minutes time ;)
I don't read your sig, why do you read mine?
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.
//Although in the "good ole days", there was only dial-up, extremely bad streaming video (if at all), and AOL ruled supreme. Thanks Netscape ;)
No or less newbs. Far less spam. Fewer viruses.
*sniff* The good ole days.
The company that changed it--bringing us into the Internet age--was a brilliant flash in the pan called Netscape
Bastards!
-Teiresias
Sometimes we don't even realize what a change 10 years can make to our lives. I can't even not being able to use the internet for news, chat, shoppings, research, etc. The only unfortunate part is that Netscape has been hit by the Microsoft Monopoly and is a shell of it's former glory.
Voice your opinion!
I wouldn't give netscape the credit for the birth of the web. I would give Netscape credit for the .COM bubble, and making the web well known. But it is more of an issue of the right place at the right time. Modems have gotten fast enough to display bitmapped graphics, at a reasionable speed. Most people had 8 bit color at 640x480 displays, and the OS's and Computers were powerful enough to run a multitasking windowed environment. I think if netscape wan't there Mosaic may have stayed the big dog for Browsers untill microsoft wanted a piece of the action. It would be fair to say the Netscape help popularized the web, not threw anything really technical, but because it gave wallstreet a look at what the internet combined with html can promice, thus giving advertising time to the internet.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The company that changed it--bringing us into the Internet age--was a brilliant flash in the pan called Netscape.
How about Mosaic? I admit that Netscape was a big step forward, but it was evolutionary, rather than revolutionary.
"Picture a world without Google, without eBay or Amazon or broadband,..."
/.
and I remember a world where I had an email box that had NO spam in it, and a USENET with little to no spam... where porn was in alt.binaries.* and NOT in comp.*.... and posts were ON TOPIC.
OTOH - it was also a world without
I'd like to turn back time.
[Connection closed by foreign host]
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
Ah, the web. What would the Internets be without you now, eh? A massive landscape of gopher piles and archie bookmarks, no doubt
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
you mean that mythical internet that had nothing but information that was solid and believeable and had a signal to noise ratio that was so low that many usually did not question a post on usenet?
Gopher was my friend, email was useable, usenet was great and IRC was the new kid on the block.
gimmie!
I'll never forget when the Lead Engineer of our team at HP looked at Mosaic / WWW and said, "Who needs that?" This guy was supposed to be the "visionary" for management, but he definitely had his head in the sand.
:-)
If nothing else, you think he would appreciate the ease of getting pr0n. Cobbling together alt.binary... threads was state-of-the-art back then.
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
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.
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.
That's what MS has never gotten. Make it part of a person's lifestyle first, then they'll make it part of their work.
Picture a world without Google, without eBay or Amazon or broadband
Well, it'd make Jeff Bezos patent portfolio look a lot different. That's for sure.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Or one without billions of emails promising V14gr4! on the cheap!, where stealing someones identity involved more than point-and-click. A world where people had to, gasp!, go out and talk to other people face-to-face to buy products or knew how to use a card catalog at the library.
Yeah, those were the days oh so many eons ago. In fact, I distinctly remember my mom and dad having to round up the horses every morning to hook them to the carriage so they could go to work every morning while my brother and I washed our feet so they looked somewhat presentable after we had walked the two miles to school (uphill both ways mind you).
While it's nice to remember how things were and the progress we've made, let's also not forget the things that we don't know how to do anymore. We're so wrapped up (some of us anyway) in what's latest and greatest that we now have less overall free time to do things and spend most of our time trying to figure out how to schedule our days.
No, I'm not a luddite. I'm just one of those who don't see the point in much of what people are gaga over nowadays (a cel phone which can do 20 different things except make a decent call for example). If you're into web pages with Flash simply because Flash is the 'in thing' for web design, more power to ya. Just don't think that everyone else cares.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
My dad got an email from some guy named Marc Andreeson some ten or twelve years ago asking if he wanted to come work for his new company. Naturally, my father being a government employee with a decent pension plan decided to toss the email... :-/
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
Netscape's rise and fall epitomizes the acceleration of the business cycle. The fact that anyone can download anything at low cost and the fact that most people replace their computers every 2 years means a new, small company can quickly grow its customer base. And those same tools meant that MS could, just as quickly distribute its own browser and quickly take Netscape's installbase from the company.
Low distribution costs and PC turnover means that marketshare leadership is not assailable under most conditions -- its too easy for people to replace old software, especially when they get a new computer. Only companies that have an interoperability hook that ties past, present, and future generations of software and systems together have any hope of retaining marketshare.
MS has tried, and succeeded, in creating that hook with IE in that many websites "work best" with Explorer and Windows-specific web functionality (VBscript, ActiveX, MS-extensions to javascript, etc.). To the extent that MS is forced, in the future, to embrace true open standards (not embrace-and-extent forks of those standards) then the OS and app maker will become vulnerable to rapid changes in marketshare.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
What many people also forget is that Netscape sucked after version 3. I was one of those rabidly anti-Microsoft people who defended Netscape (wrongly) because of Microsoft's monopoly. Firefox and Mozilla proved that Microsoft can be beaten in time without the government.
Let's also not forget that AJAX' XMLHttpRequest object, which powers many of Google's new services, was invented by Microsoft with IE 5. I remember Netscape 4 sucking so bad that when IE 4 was about to go gold that there were people lining up in the chat room that I was in on Westwood Studios' chat service for C&C players to get as they ranted about Communicator.
And my God was it a POS. The thing was horribly bloated, ugly, not standards compliant and a spectacular mess to maintain, hence the mozilla guys practically starting over from scratch. Let's not forget something here, which Google has not. Netscape lost not because IE went free, but because Netscape 4 was such a bloat POS that it was agonizing to use it compared to IE 4. Netscape lost because when Microsoft got their act together, Netscape went from the elite of browser design to rank amateurs at best.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
the netscape dorm
my employer can blow me
resignation and postmortem
netscape and aol
The common mode for many Silicon Valley companies of the time like Netscape and SGI was simply pure arrogance. Ever try dealing with these people?
Netscape was unbelieveable. While they might have been the first to come up with an ISP agreement, wanting a percentage of the ISP's revenue for a package they GAVE AWAY online was asking way too much. Their other products, like their Collabra server, were WinNT ports of open source products like INN. And they worked like magic; it took a lot of hocus pokus to keep it running more than twelve hours. And forget actually interfacing it to Usenet, it simply couldn't handle the load.
If you called and complained, you were basically told "it is what it is, but the new version fixes it so send us more money". And that was just one software product.
Marc Andressen was not the golden boy he likes to make himself out to be. He was in the right place at the right time, and fortunately for him, made out pretty well. But he's a one trick pony.
Netscape didn't die because of Microsoft, Netscape died because of their own arrogance and they believed their own marketing. Good riddance. At least what was left was turned into something decent.
No far from it, MS half inched Mosaic and turned it into IE.
:)
Anybody who uses IE probably still has some of the original Mosic bugs in the code they use
Why, when I was a young programmer we had to write the code in the snow with our pee, and a compiler was just a word for the pilot of the hovering dirigible that read the instructions and passed them to the ALU, which was another fellow with an abacus. They would wrap the results around a rock, and drop it on my house when the program would exit. We had to walk uphill...
I love these good ol' days stories :)
Content Management System: A pretentious way of saying "text editor."
You may have a look at this:/ AboutCERN/Achievements/WorldWideWeb/WWW-en.html
http://public.web.cern.ch/public/Content/Chapters
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...
I'm still hoping my investments in Gopherspace will pay off!
Yesterday was DIY Marathon Day. Is today going to be Nostalgia Marathon Day?
What about tomorrow?
"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.
"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.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I was working as a student support tech at the University of Illinois. My boss, who had been in Marc Andreesen's department, said he was having trouble with some Unix thing. Being the only approachable Unix type around, she asked me to help him. I called or emailed him, and agreed to come take a look at his workstation.
In my august wizardness I never found the building, so I never got to meet Marc or solve his problem.
I can't believe they didn't even mention my central role in Netscape's development.
sigs, as if you care.
Because he resisted the future. He didn't want pictures on the web, and certainly not all the plugin based stuff we have today. You get the impression he wanted to keep it academic. If TBL had run the show the web would be just another cool research toy.
I am trolling
It would have worked at that speed. The page designers and web app programmers would have been forced to come up with ingenious compression routines and efficient transfer protocols. You would have ended up with a Web that would have had enough useful color graphics and "Pizzazz" to have been extremel popular with the public, even if the ability to download large files and stream intense media would have never been comparable.
With high-speed modems and broadband, it matters a lot less if the 'Net apps are kludgey and the pages are huge and sloppy.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
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
Al Gore was the congressional patron of the old bearded guys that did the actual work. None of them take exception to the idea that Gore created the internet.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Mosaic had two children, Netscape and IE.
IE lives on, while Netscape died in an "accident" but is survived by more-or-less bastard children of many names- mozilla/firefox, Opera, etc.
So now, 10 years later, do we know for sure: did IE murder Netscape, was it truly an accident of circumstance, or was it semi-suicide?
I'd genuinely like to know.
-Styopa
"Ask the non-geeks around you if they know what Mosaic is. Then ask them when they started using "Netscape"."
Most of the non-geeks around me think "the Internet" is a big blue E that sits on their desktop. If I say "browser" they think I'm talking about a customer that doesn't buy anything.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
And the people who keep asking "what about Tim Berners-Lee?" seem to be forgetting Vannevar Bush.
I just built version 1.2 from 1993 and its pretty quick.
:(
It won't render slashdot, though
Now I'm off to build 2.6!
You talk about 10 years ago like it's some far off mythical land with hobbits and trolls and shit.
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
Get your Unix fortune now!
Reporter interviews JWZ, invited to explore own sexuality.