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The Original mcom.com Revived
saccade.com writes "For those of you that missed the emergence of the the World
Wide Web the first time around, Mozilla co-founder JWZ
has recreated it for you. In honor of Mozilla's tenth anniversary, he's recreated
the original home.mcom.com
sites in all their 1994 glory. He even has vintage
browsers to go with them."
You're 10 years ahead, trolling 10 years ago was punching monkeys..
Ahh, the days when changing your browser's "background" color to anything other than (off-)white meant most pages became unreadable.
Oh, and good job, Slashdotters. The page is down already!
this april fools day is lame.
One of Jamie's trivia questions is the origin of the HYPE tag. I remember the tag well, it was an easter egg that played a sound when it was used (only in certain versions of Mosaic/Netscape), however, I haven't a clue as to when or why it was implemented.
Does anyone know? Google reveals nothing on the subject.
The best part is the bandwidth throttling, back to 1994 dial-up speeds. I was looking at this yesterday, and it was weird to watch the interlaced GIFs load line by line. (Remember how Netscape used to have a LOWSRC attribute for images, so you could specify a low-res version that could be loaded quickly and displayed while it tried to download the massive, whopping 50K full image?)
A flashback to the way I first encountered the web.
Of course, it's probably even slower today, now that it's linked here.
Can our modern browsers pass the 1994 test?
Proud member of the American Non Sequitur Society. We might not make much sense, but boy do we love pizza!
Unfortunately, it seems to be running on Netsite.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
revive gopher and geocities
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
Be sure to use this link to have the "Resolution Controller" switched to L to "reduce download time" and give the server a little breathing room.
Welcome back to 1994, for real.
That looked like a clean myspace page to me.
... the site loads instantly. It's easy to navigate. There's just enough information near the top of each page so you know immediately what the page is for. The text is easily readable with default browser settings, even on a small screen.
Modern web developers could take a lesson from this.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Well boys, we sure killed that connection fast.... feels just like the old days!
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
If you're going to pull an April Fool's joke like this, at least roll out servers that can handle the load. Or maybe it's the pipe, It's not like serving static web pages is hard, even on that era of equipment.
That which is done from love exists beyond good and evil
Hmmm...apparently they have it hosted on vintage servers too!
You're using her as bait, Master!
It figures some duschebag media mogul would sell off a historic domain name to the highest bidder than to give it to someone who actually would be willing to maintain the historic content.
Time to fire up Mosaic and OmniWeb on the Next Cube at home!
The site is obviously pretty Slashdotted at this point, so I was not able to download some of the Mosaic versions he links to.
.gif files on the page. I am not sure if that is de to the client or if the transfer timed out from the load.
Since I already have a copy of NCSA Mosaic copyrighted 1-27-1994, I decided to fire that up and load the page.
A screenshot of mosaic.mcom.com that I was finally able to load. It had issues with some of the
This is Mosaic v1.0.3 under System 7.6.1, running in BasiliskII.
Strange timing. Just last night I started playing around with some gopher servers, so I fired up Basilisk and downloaded TurboGopher. I got my first access to Usenet feeds in about 1992, and was able to get more online in the fall of 1993. Gopher, FTP, and email were huge. I remember downloading Mosaic sometime in early spring of 1994 and playing around with it.
Ahh, the memories...
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
We managed to /. the original interwebs. The circle is now complete.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Try a modern lightweight browser, like Dillo or Links2. I like Links2, myself.
They are both amazingly fast.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Apparently it's running on 1994 hardware, too....
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
> duschebag
Try to refrain from spelling words you've only ever heard? It tends to indicate you don't even know what they mean.
I tried the earliest windows version (mosaic04.exe). It runs on wine without problem. Unfortunately it is impossible to load any page. I tried a variety of sites (google, yahoo, slashdot,
- infinite chains of 302
- no viewer for text/html
- bad request
Next I tried the earliest linux version (netscape.i486-unknown-linux.B093). You cannot even run it on a modern distro:A current linux distro has thus more chance to run a windows app from 1994 than a linux app from the same period. As a side note, my copy of Blockout (1989) runs on Windows XP (2001) without a glitch. We also see that the web of 2008 is completely unusable by a browser of 1994. It is a shame that linux distributors and the W3C do not have the same focus on backward compatibility than Microsoft and Intel.
Way back when, SGI sent out a CD-ROM that contained a product catalog as a collection of HTML files. The CD also included all of the binaries for Mozilla 0.9 listed at http://www.mcom.com/archives/. For several years thereafter (until browsers became a standard part of software distributions) I kept that CD close at hand; whenever I had to work on a particular workstation or PC, I used it to install a browser (and usually then bootstrap a more recent version).
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
The funny thing is the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) NCSA lawyers made Mosaic Communications change their name (eventually Netscape), because Mosaic was a trademark of the UIUC.
It isn't slashdotted, it is merely providing you with the classic, 9600 baud experience.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
The "ancient browser" I want to try giving a whirl is IE5 on Solaris. (Pathetic, I know, but this has to be one of the strangest MS creations after Bob.) Unfortunately, the archived installer binaries don't run on Solaris 10, so it looks like I'm stuck. If only it had been packaged as a simple tarball...
Constitutionally Correct
I know the pace of change only ever increases, but looking back at those 1993/4 pages is just weird. I remember 1994. I was 15 years old, Jurassic Park was the hot VHS cassette release at Blockbuster, Sheryl Crow and Madonna were topping the pop charts.. I tasted the internet for the first time in my school computer lab.. I used the brand new Yahoo search engine to search for "three valleys water" for a school project and it got 3 results (yes, really, three.. and none of them were the one I wanted) ....... and I never thought I'd feel old until now I'm forced to remember that.
Oh poo. I've become middle-aged
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Amazing how much nicer and easier it is to read then many current webpages.
Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen did.
It just dumps out perl:
http://home.mcom.com/MCOM/search_docs/index.html
... a copy of mozock.dll. So I can review a local copy -- in my browser!
http://noscript.net
:)
No more!
Found this on the mcom links page: gopher://sipb.mit.edu/
A LOT more, and for systems like the Amiga, DOS, etc. Unfortunately, it looks as though the site is obsolete, at least for current content.
Dark Reflection
Even these primitive webpages look better than most on myspace.
You want fun, go home and buy a monkey!
Readable. Restrained graphics. Actual information amongst the sales talk. Decent navigation.
Oh Internet, I weep for thee! What happened?
Try downloading from FTP, read and post to newsgroups, and surf the web using just your text-only e-mail account. Back in the day some universities set up e-mail bots that would let you do just that. You e-mail them the properly formatted e-mail, they shoot you back a whole mess of text - uu-encoded in the case of files (life before MIME). For free!! If all you had was e-mail this was a veritable boon.
To surf the web, you e-mail them a URL, they'd shoot back a LYNX-style copy of the page, with numbers next the links. Send back the number, they send back that page. And so on. Another service sent you back the entire web page - graphics and all! But by fax.
True story - I wanted to use the FTP e-mail servers but of course everything was coming back uu-encoded. Where to get a uu-decoder? I posted my dilemma to a newsgroup (using e-mail!) and a very kind person snail-mailed me a floppy, along with a bunch of other EXEs and manuals he was able to fit. Nice.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
I think I first ran into The OffByOne browser from a /. post or perhaps from TinyApps.org. I, like you, used Netscape almost exclusively, starting with version 1.22 or so. I agree that the 3.x series was among the best, with its quick ability to disable images and other things. Version 4 added the nice ability to disable cookies (although I was already learning to set cookies.txt to read-only in the 3.x era.)
:)
Anyway, back to the point, OffByOne is self-executable, does not require an installer, and fits on a floppy. Most importantly, it does not rely on any other browser, so it will work just fine out of the box, even if you want to run it on old versions of Windows that did not bundle a browser, like NT 3.51 or 95a. OffByOne maintains that simplified, no-frills approach, so you do not have to worry about Java / Javascript / shockwave flash / etc. getting in your way. It's perfect for forums like this, when you're mostly interested in just reading.
Oh, and it has tabbed browsing too. It's even faster than Opera 6.
I know it won't completely replace Netscape 3, as there are some things it lacks (I'm picky too), but I think you'll find it to be a very nice supplement for your browsing needs. Caching everything to RAM not only keeps your disk from fragmenting, but it also cleans up all traces of your history when you're done with it.
An AC recommends the "Off By One" browser (http://offbyone.com/offbyone/)
Yes, it has its virtues, among them that it operates entirely in RAM, leaving no traces behind when you close it, and it will run from a floppy. Nice to carry in your pocket.
But I use it very seldom, as the interface fails me in numerous ways, not least of which is the inability to parse anything but fully qualified URLs. Way too many little irritations like that to be usable except as a last resort. Tho it does sometimes handle ugly HTML/JS better than the namebrand browsers!
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
But I use it very seldom, as the interface fails me in numerous ways, not least of which is the inability to parse anything but fully qualified URLs.
I'll grant you that the interface is somewhat reminiscent of NCSA Mosaic and IE 2.0, but can you give an example where this URL parsing fails? I'm curious about this. I know the http:// part is optional, and has been for several versions. Perhaps you were using an old version, like 3.2? With 3.5d, they fixed / enhanced / added several things, like some newer keyboard shortcuts and other options. If you mean that it doesn't do ftp:// URLs, then yeah, that is one of its drawbacks. Now if you were referring to the default Netscape 3 behavior of just typing google to go to www.google.com, then yeah I understand, as Off By One lacks this, although Lynx does it right.
I know some quirks can be annoying, but fortunately, some of them can be circumvented. The scrolling is rather rigid, but I often get around that by highlighting text to scroll when I just want to move the page in tiny increments. Thankfully they added scroll wheel support too, which Navigator 3 unfortunately lacks. I like how the first form field is automatically selected (very handy for sites like google.) Many mainstream browsers require Javascript just to do this. I can see how it gets in the way at times though, especially if you like navigating partially with the keyboard (e.g. I like OB1's z/x shortcuts for Back/Forward, borrowed from Opera.) A quick Control-W then Escape will unselect the field if I don't feel like reaching the mouse.
It's too bad we can't get a browser that puts together all the best features of Off By One, Lynx, Netscape 3.x/4.x, Opera, Dillo, and Firefox, while taking out the annoying and/or bloated parts. *sigh*