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AOL to Shut Down Netscape Support/Development
Kelson writes "After years of trying to figure out what to do with it, AOL is officially discontinuing the Netscape browser. In the four and a half years after they dismantled the development team and spun off the Mozilla Foundation as a lost cause, only to see Firefox take off, AOL has tried twice to reinvent Netscape. There was the chimera-like Netscape 8, which used both Mozilla's and IE's rendering engines, and just months ago they released Netscape 9, trying to ride the social networking wave. AOL will release security fixes through February 1, 2008, after which the browser will officially be dead. For the "nostalgic," they suggest using Firefox and installing a Netscape theme."
As long as we're pissing, I used to use Lynx on a direct dumbterm dialup (no PPP or even SLIP) to a Vax machine at a public library from DOS using Telemate for my terminal emulator and modem control.
I had no storage on the library system. The connection was all 8-bit clean though, so I'd use Lynx to open a telnet session to my shell at Concentric Research. I'd run FTP, WAIS, Archie, or Lynx again from there to download to the shell account, then fire up Zmodem from the shell to get files to my PC.
My friends and I were doing this in 1992-1994 before there was commercial net access in our local calling area. A $10 a month shell account was much cheaper than long distance charges for downloads at 2400 or 9000 bps.
I spent $135 for my first fax modem, 2400 bps with 9600 send and 4800 receive fax. Then I went to 28.8k, then 56k (which was supposed to be limited to 53k but was usually more in the 41kto 48k range). My last analog modem was a 56k hardware modem with a real RS232C-compatible link to the PC. It cost all of $55 and was much nicer than waiting an hour per megabyte with the 2400 bps.
Now I'm on 6 Mbps down and 384 kbps up and people bitch about how slow that is. I used to work in the ISP field and had a testing machine with a burner hooked up to a burstable DS3. The truth is, unless there's a particular file I need in a hurry and the other end has enough bandwidth and server power to actually keep up with demand (which is pretty rare for large popular files) then I don't really miss it.
BitTorrent comes in handy sometimes, but I'm usually downloading stuff that's just popular enough to stress the small number of mirrors it's on but not so popular that I find many seeds. I usually end up uploading two or three times what I download, and with such an unbalanced asymmetric plan it's kind of more pain than pleasure. And no, I've never made an illegal download over BitTorrent and certainly never seeded anything illegal over it.