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."

Comments

Ahh, the days..

[Hyppy]

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!

Re:Ahh, the days..

[Hawthorne01]

Oh, and good job, Slashdotters. The page is down already!

Naah, they're just re-creating the experience of websurfing on a 14.4 modem.

HYPE tag.

[thesolo]

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.

Re:HYPE tag.

[Indefinite, Ephemera]

For what it's worth, http://cyberborean.wordpress.com/2006/03/29/the-ancient-tags-museum/ suggests that it was 'for great fun of developers'.

Re:HYPE tag.

[montulli]

I guess it's a little unfair that I answer this question, since I was there when it was created.

The tag played a sound clip of Marca saying "What is Global Hypermedia?"

I'll stay mum about the why. :)

Re:That's not bandwidth throttling

[markjl]

:) Netsite evolved into the Netscape Enterprise Server and I was there at Netscape when the web site cluster served over 100 million hits per day in 1996. Those were amazing times, many server manufacturers would bring in hardware and we would benchmark a portion of www.netscape.com's traffic on them, which usually led to discussions about how to tune or optimize the OS or the IP stack, I know we helped SGI at the time.

The server and software engineering folks helped develop a dynamic DNS server that would help globally load balance web traffic based upon the inquiring IP address. They also helped hack SSL into rsync back in the day, so that is how we securely published web content updates out to the cluster.

Sadly, we also pioneering web advertising at Netscape. My colleague Alan spec'd out the dimensions to the ad banners, in case you wondered where those 460x68 dimensions came from: it allowed a minimal amount of horizontal white space on each side of the web page when the web browser had a vertical scroll bar on a 640x480 laptop display running Navigator, IIRC.

So those ad banners were physically changed on the docroot via a cron script in order to rotate them. The joy of hacks in a funded start up, but it made money! In fact, unlike most corporations today (e.g.: Microsoft), there was a strategic decision *not* to create an advertising server, so we helped create an industry and did not compete in it. Well, didn't complete until TW/AOL acquired Netscape -- but that was the day Netscape really died (it could be argued that bought Netscape solely for our web site traffic and advertising revenue since they didn't know what to do with the browser and server software. Witness the eventual release of the browser software to the mozilla.org project (thanks also to jwz!) and iPlanet/Sun eventually selling the server line to Red Hat, who continues to open source the directory and certificate servers today).

I wrote the plug-in finder, could it have been the most used CGI on the web at the time in 1996 -- who knows? I went on to become a technology evangelist at Netscape.

Good days indeed, thanks for the memories!