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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.
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 That code is version 0.3 which is way outdated.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.
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."
http://scribers.midwest.net/dsmith42 /ns094.zip is where it is now -- mirrors are welcome. :)
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.
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
;)
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.