Slashdot Mirror
Netscape 1994 Time Capsule
jenkin sear writes "Netscape Time capsule site- original splash screens, and much of the original netscape site, including the release notes for version 0.9. Definitely a trip down memory lane....
I saw this link on scripting news" Warm fuzzies. Sure was simpler then. An interesting similiar and unrelated article also popped out recently, a
history of microsoft.com.
Look at this page in the MS timeline:
.com/misc/features/features_flshbk_hp2.htm
http://www.microsoft
It describes their "Collage" design from August of 1995. Take a look at one of the most prominent links on the graphic. Yes, your eyes don't deceive you; it does say "Microsoft Reacts to the DOJ". Like I said, some things never change.
A little heads up:
"I'm stunned Microsoft, et. al., aren't trying to add their own proprietary extensions to the English language and wrestly the whole thing under their proprietary control."
Ummm, Microsoft Encarta Dictionary. You can buy it at any bookstore in paper or computer form....
"At least Mosaid waits for the dust to settle before adopting new features. Is mosaic still developping its browser? "
Mosaic became Netscape. Same people, new code. Mosaic died shortly after Netscape.
Joseph Elwell.
For those of you that keep posting "The code is available already" Why don't you download the code that Malda puts out and see for yourselves whether that code is for real. That code is version 0.3 which is way outdated. For some reason slashdot won't cvs their code. Probably because Malda prefers security through obscurity over peer review.
:)
Anyways, both code bases are based on flawed licenses. (Assuming the writers wanted the code to be free)
Cheers.
Joseph Elwell.
Some "time capsule"
I distinctly remember the original Microsoft website used a single image logo from the early 1980's (Circa 1981, IIRC). It was far cheesier than the "original" they posted in the story.
When Mosaic Communications Corp (AKA Netscape) first went public, they outsourced their support to a company called Corporate Software (now known as "Stream" (as in "What end of the Stream are you one?").
There were six of us back then, supporting the PC, Mac and about 9 flavors of Unix. I lasted the longest, until the 2.0 betas. (In fact, I still have my Mosaic Communications t-shirt (with the angry Mozilla) and a brochure from the first few months.)
There were some good times and alot of bad. Since we were in Oregon and they were in California, they were willing to ignore us at times. It took a bit to get them to deal with the bugs we and our customers uncovered. (Leading to some very strange calls.)
And then there were the staffing issues. Because many of the original team left for other jobs, we were whittled down to TWO people at one point. (Doing 70 calls a day for a while.) When 1.2 was released to Egghead stores, we had FOUR people on the phones. (And the typos and bugs were bad enough that we got lots and lots of calls.) The staffing problems were not all Netscape's fault though. Corporate Software did not staff for the load that they expected out of a weird power play trying to keep Netscape current on their bills. (Which they were holding back on because Corporate Software was playing these games.)
There are a whole lot more stories I could tell. It was an interesting time in my life. Not certain if I would want to do it again...
And, yes, as far as I know, Stream is still doing support for Netscape. (At least since I talked to any Stream employees, but it has been a while.)
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
Unless the Slashdot Kommisarriat has managed to erase all my memories of someone going by a subtly differently spelled name:
http://slashdot.org/search.pl?query=sengan yields plenty of his stories. You just had an extra 'e' in there.
Sengan kicked off one of the bloodiest wars of the time on Slashdot with his classic US and UK unilaterally attack Iraq. It garnered 748 comments and earned Sengan a special fan club of his very own.
------------
Michael Hall
mphall@cstone.nospam.net
Michael Hall
mph.puddingbowl.org
http://scribers.midwest.net/dsmith42 /ns094.zip is where it is now -- mirrors are welcome. :)
Nobody likes a smart ass! :P
Does the search engine in "older stuff" really stop after a few months? I haven't tested it in any depth, but it would suprise me if it didn't go back all the way; and a quick search just now took me back to May this year. I know that one can get back to the beginning of this year at least, if one knows the URL: e.g. here's one I saved. Another quick test: searching for "UnixWorld" gives two stories, that one and one from April 98. Wouldn't it be nice if a member of slashdot staff were to pop up now and tell us whether or not the archives do in fact extend back to the beginning?
Dragging myself manfully back on-topic, I loved the phrase in the announcement of Netscape 0.9 about it being "optimised for 14.4 modems". Those were the days.
There's an effort getting started to bring the current Slash code up to snuff. The homepage is here.
The 0.3 code that code.shtml links to has many known bugs. A lot of those have been fixed in 0.3-3.7, available here. There is a mailing list, slash-help, for help with Slash problems.
Here is the oldest article from March 23 1999 (pre Chips and Dip stuff):m l
m l m l
m l
m l
m l
m l
m l
m l
m l
:-) m l
m l
:-( m l
http://slashdot.org/articles/older/00000001.sht
And it was actually articles
http://slashdot.org/articles/older/00000005.sht
and
http://slashdot.org/articles/older/00000004.sht
that were funny.
First non Malda comment:
http://slashdot.org/articles/older/00000017.sht
First post by Hemos, Chips and Dips lives!:
http://slashdot.org/articles/older/00000018.sht
Mandrake says Xfree 4.0 out soon (this in Oct-1997!)
http://slashdot.org/articles/older/00000028.sht
Who new KDE and Gnome were so old (Oct-97 again)
http://slashdot.org/articles/older/00000048.sht
First flame war, things were pretty civilized then
http://slashdot.org/articles/older/00000054.sht
First fan?
http://slashdot.org/articles/older/00000072.sht
Not just XFree can fall behind schedule, NT5 Ship Date Delayed, probably won't ship until 1999.
http://slashdot.org/articles/older/00000114.sht
Wow it's a good thing these things tags aren't allowed in comments anymore
http://slashdot.org/articles/older/00000137.sht
Slashdot has been renamed to Slashdot, "5000 hits per day, and that isn't slowing down yet" it's unstoppable:
http://slashdot.org/articles/older/00000150.sht
Last of the old posts, then the format changes to yy/mm/dd/millsec and becomes untrackable
http://slashdot.org/articles/older/00001079.sht
I seem to remember that at some point MS was using Xenix as its internet presence, but this article basically says that it began with NT (which I am sure in the greater sense they would have you believe). Am I totally off my rocker here or is that the way it really was?
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
Man those were heady days. I had been running linux at home for a few months, and had seen Mosaic at school in the lab a few months before. When I got Linux, X (of course) and Netscape finally running on my home machine, I swore I'dnever use Windows (or DOS, back then!) as my front end ever again!
:)
Truly those were the founding days that solidified the potential in my and many of my fellow students' minds of OSS software, and of Linux in particular as a competitor to Window.
Since netscape is really the only true big browser available for Linux, it history is very closely tied to Linux's. Netscape helped linux along back then and we should pay hommage to them!
I hope everyone's tried the new Mozilla milestones!
Math
Yes, his whole argument was silly. He had "facts", but those facts didn't have anything to do with his conclusion. It's like me saying that the sun will go down Dec 31, it'll be dark, and people will drive with their headlights on. Because of that, there will be no Y2K problems. All of those were facts, and all will be true, but they have nothing to do with Y2K.
So, if anything, this should be marked up as "Funny", but having a few facts in a post that has nothing to do with the facts presented, is *not* "Informative".
-BrentYeah, they're *still* rebooting. You just can't tell it anymore because they've added enough servers so they aren't all rebooting at the same time :)
-Brent"The predecessor to MSNBC, known then as MSN News, was first published prematurely when a member of the production team, sitting up on a desk to study a schematic, clicked a mouse button with his derriere. The team watched in horror as the content went live to a public server before it was ready."
"Mark Ingalls recalls how he mistakenly deleted the live default.htm file that served as the microsoft.com home page, in the days before staging servers. While home page visitors were receiving File Not Found errors, Ingalls rooted around in his browser cache - where the cache filenames did NOT map to their real names - to find and restore the page to active duty."
i'm really kind of fascinated by this kind of thing..there's just something really cool about seeing something now commonplace in its early stages. Which is why i have a copy of the linux 0.01 source on my hard drive..just to look through, even though i don't understand 99% of it and i sure as heck can't compile it on my mac.
one thing i'd REALLY like to know about is the changing layout of suck.com. they seem purposefully quiet about this, and the only reference they have to the fact their logo originally looked totally different is hidden deep in the contributor profiles.. even teh back issues hae the new header image plastered on. yes, i realize the layout was never more than marginally tooled; i'm still really curious for some unknown reason.
oh, and real quick, cuz i haven't seen any other posters mention this: that "netscape time capsule" site is BEAUTIFUL from a layout standpoint. Whoever is responsible for the web design there is amazing.
but good LORD.. look at that clean, usable, uncluttered NSCA mosaic layout. i had no IDEA. i am amazed by what a gigantic step backward netscapes 0.97-4.7 are.. i mean a "stop" button is nice but not worth 12 other buttons that are never used.. esp. if the one ("security") next to "stop", the one you constantly hit by accident, opens up a slow-to-open dialog with a nonfunctional close box an.. sorry, i'm ranting again
-mcc-baka
listen to your heartbeat delete beep beep BEEP.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Error 403: Access Forbidden
The URL you requested:
http://www.eng.buffalo.edu/~clau/mozilla
is restricted, and cannot be accessed. Please do not repeat the request.
The Slashdot effect is truly a sight to behold. I hope the Slashdot effect is always used "for niceness instead of evil" (as Maxwell Smart would have put it). There's not much difference between it and a distributed denial-of-service attack - and let's hope the lawyers of affected sites don't notice the similarity.
For some reason, "please do not repeat the request" reminds me a lot of the "French person" in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where he says "now go away, or I shall taunt you a second time."
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
As much fun as it is to rip apart Microsoft, I found their history article a good thing. I honestly never thought I'd live to hear:
"[Engineers] were literally in front of the FTP and download servers for an entire day rebooting them to keep them up because there were too many users for what the boxes could handle."
come from a Microsoft spokesperson.
No, this isn't a new story to laugh at Microsoft with. Having them admit to being mortal is an important step in becoming less of the conceived monster that they appear to be.
In case you're missing the big deal: Microsoft admitted that something they made didn't work. Perhaps this is just a fluke, or this article didn't get cleared by their PR people, but maybe this is a sign that they're going to start being more forthright when it comes to bugs?
Or am I reading too much into this?
;)
I quote:
"Steve Heaney and Mark Ingalls were literally in front of the FTP and download servers for an entire day
rebooting them to keep them up because there were too many users for what the boxes could handle," said
Todd Weeks, now microsoft.com's systems operations manager. "Two weeks later, they hired a capacity
planner for the download program so we wouldn't have the same fiasco for Internet Explorer 4.0."
Another time capsule I very much like: go to ftp://ftp.digital.com/pub/DEC/sim/ and download the PDP emulator from the sources/ subdirectory. Then download the files from the software/ directory: uv5swre.tar.Z is an image of a PDP-11 disk running Unix version 5. That's really something worth trying out. You can also download Unix versions 6 and 7, and some old version of RSTS/E, and a few other dusty programs of the kind. Including a copy of the Lisp interpreter (with source), by L. Peter Deutsch, for the PDP-1.
One thing I would also very much like is to be able to run ITS, the fabled hackers' operating system that ran on the PDP-10. I found the sources, but I don't have a PDP-10 emulator capable of running that thing.
From the "well-articulated view":
I correctly predicted Mozilla source would lack SSL and lack JAVA when shipped.
Wow! He predicted something that has been known by anyone interested in Mozilla since the openning of the source code... (And if you don't know the reasons for the lack of SSL and how Java is supported in Mozilla, then find out.)
...sitting on my shelf. Back in the 1.1 kernel days, or maybe the early 1.2, my Quantum Empire 1 Gb SCSI disk died. It certainly still contain lots of historically valuable data in the netscape cache. Who remembers freshmeat.unreal.org? :)
For example, the sid=moderation might not be archived, and there used to be some really interesting stuff in there (like roblimo talking about slashdot's quiet period).
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
While reading Microsoft's history of www.microsoft.com...
Did you notice that Microsoft's picture of the first Microsoft web server ever also shows the first pioneering implementation of Microsoft's proven PTKAMRFA remote administration tool, still the only remote administration option to ship with Windows NT to this day?
(PTKAMRFA: Put The Keyboard And Monitor Really Far Away (tm) (c) )
Some linux people seem to think that telnet or ssh is superior but they're just stupid longhairs.
--
What happens when you outlaw guns
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/mozilla/
Did anyone notice how one of the headlines on the 1995 page screenshot is "Microsoft responds to the DOJ" ?
Hehe... This has been going on for quite some time, it would seem.
1995: Msft responds to the DOJ
1999-2000: The DOJ has lain dormant for too long...
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
There is a superb documentary produced by Canadian Broadcasting Corporation called 'The Archaeology of the Internet'. The show includes interviews with some of the Netscape crew as well as many others. The CBC has generously posted the show on thier site. (RealAudio). So hunker down with some popcorn for an hour and take a great trip down memory lane. It can be found at: http://radio.cbc.ca/programs/ideas/shows/internet/ internet.ram (running time 54 mins.) mitd
mitd -- Made in the Dark
"One good thing about spam... You don't gotta answer it"
When are we going to see a Slashdot time capsule?
The mirroring script had some problems, and I've removed the mirror instead of leaving it wrong/incomplete. Sorry for the confusion.
Man, oh man. Those boys over at Microsoft are trying to make it sound as if they invented the web "way back" in 1994! Can you believe that? They talk about one server sitting under a desk that some guy kept switching off by mistake. Hey, switching off a box running NT is no mistake; it is an honorable act. They have a screen shot of one of their early pages. It's pretty amusing. http://www.microsoft.com/library/images/gifs/stori es/flshbk_starmap.gif Now everybody together, let's slashdot 'em!
Windows is going the way of phlogiston...
To : release@mcom.com
Cc :
Attchmnt:
Subject : Re: Here it is, world!
----- Message Text -----
Hi Marc,
Sorry for the late reply, please send me an
updated list of the mirrors, thanks!
>An up-to-date listing of mirror sites can be
>obtained at any time by
>sending email to release@mcom.com.
Just want to point out that the Microsoft.com story is working fine. Now the question is posed: Can Microsoft.com really handle the Slashdot effect, or do people just not care about MS? :)
:)
Wait...don't answer that.
While we're all flashing back, here's another great flashback to what www.microsoft.com looked like back in 1993. Enjoy! www.microsofttimecapsule.com
To anyone I may have freaked out on: I apologize. I was beside myself trying to get things working again, as this server is sometimes used for Real Work, and was totally useless during the initial onslaught. I'm better now ... :-)
-- Dave