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Remembering Netscape and The Birth of the Web

Posted by Zonk on from the back-in-the-day dept.

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."

19 of 280 comments (clear)

  1. How'd it change day to day work? by garcia · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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. :)

    1. Re:How'd it change day to day work? by SgtChaireBourne · · Score: 4, Interesting
      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.

      --
      Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
  2. Cern by Nissyen · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
    1. Re:Cern by cshotton · · Score: 5, Insightful
      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.

      --

      Shut up and eat your vegetables!!!
  3. Good Ole Days by teiresias · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

    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!

    //Although in the "good ole days", there was only dial-up, extremely bad streaming video (if at all), and AOL ruled supreme. Thanks Netscape ;)

    --
    -Teiresias
  4. Not netscape. by jellomizer · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  5. picture a world.... by Sonicboom · · Score: 4, Funny

    "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]
    1. Re:picture a world.... by greed · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

  6. I remember the Netscape release .. by torpor · · Score: 5, Insightful

    .. 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 ...

    --
    ; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
  7. Myopic vision by tedgyz · · Score: 4, Funny

    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
  8. Tim Berners-Lee by an_mo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  9. Imposter Boy by deanj · · Score: 5, Informative
    The world has always gotten this whole myth about how Mosaic was created from the Netscape people themselves. It's just like the myth that eBay was started because someone wanted to sell Pez containers, or any of the rest of the Silicon Valley myths. Marketing it that way makes a good story.


    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://w ww.chrispy.net/marca/gqarticle.html

    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.

  10. Same tired knee-jerk comment... by KingSkippus · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  11. MS not very insightful by Mr.+Underbridge · · Score: 4, Insightful
    How was it going to change your day-to-day work?

    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.

  12. Re:Ahem... Mosaic by deanj · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  13. It's not so hard to picture, really by Weaselmancer · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

    • Method for turning a rounded piece of metal to effect egress from a building.
    • Composition of a food like substance for the purpose of blowing rounded spheres
    • Method for using a cord like structure to hold shoes on human feet
    • Circular structure intended to make the lateral motion of a heavy load subject to less friction
    • ...
    --
    Weaselmancer
    rediculous.
  14. They left out. . . by smooth+wombat · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Picture a world without Google, without eBay or Amazon or broadband,

    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
  15. Re:Remember Lynx and Mosaic? by shokk · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

    --
    "Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
  16. They didn't interview JWZ! by Dammital · · Score: 4, Interesting
    ... whose website has some pretty entertaining stuff.

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