Remembering Netscape and The Birth of the Web 280
bigdaddyhale writes "Picture a world without Google, without eBay or Amazon or broadband, where few people have even heard of IPOs. That was reality just a decade ago. The company that changed it--bringing us into the Internet age--was a brilliant flash in the pan called Netscape. For the tenth anniversary of its IPO, FORTUNE recruited dozens of players to tell the story of Netscape in their own words."
Cern (Score:5, Informative)
Ahem... Mosaic (Score:3, Informative)
Still, I havea great fondness for the big, pulsing, waiting for 56K dial up N that was Netscape in the early days.
Re:Ahem... Mosaic (Score:2, Informative)
As was IE. The humor of it is that, as I recall, most of the programmers responsible for Mosaic were the ones to originally create Netscape. So, if IE was started by building off of Mosaic's roots then those programmers helped Microsoft destroy Netscape.
Then there was Mosaic 2.0, which was just a little less horrible than IE 2.0.. but that's another story.
Imposter Boy (Score:5, Informative)
The only article you can find on what happened with NCSA Mosaic was in a GQ article from 1997. It's called Imposter Boy, and can be found here:
http://web.archive.org/web/20030212202753/http://
Call it sour grapes, or whatever you want, but I defy you to find any other articles about what happened back in those days... you can't. It's all because of the spin that Netscape put on it.
Same tired knee-jerk comment... (Score:5, Informative)
1) The article isn't about the invention of the Internet, it is about the invention of the World Wide Web.
2) How many times do we have to hear the joke about Al Gore claiming to invent the Internet? It's a myth [snopes.com] that Al Gore ever claimed to have anything to do with the technical design of the Internet. He did indeed, however, have a large role [msn.com] in providing the environment in which it became the "Information Superhighway" that it is today.
Re:Remember Lynx and Mosaic? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:picture a world.... (Score:4, Informative)
BIFF BIFF BIFF bIff Biff bIFF
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I remember seeing his posts all over the newsgroups "back in the day". If nothing else, he was creative.
Re:Good Ole Days (Score:2, Informative)
Bastards!
The "Internet age" you're thinking of happened in 1997 along with Windows 98... That's where the noobs came from.
the history of the web from CERN: (Score:3, Informative)
http://public.web.cern.ch/public/Content/Chapters
among others, includes the link to the proposal of the WWW made at CERN by Tim in 1989:
http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html [w3.org]
and refined by Robert Cailliau in 1990:
http://www.w3.org/Proposal.html [w3.org]
BTW, noone seems to remember about Robert Cailliau, the co-author of the thing...
Re:picture a world.... (Score:5, Informative)
Most of my "stupid posting" filtering used to be done by rejecting any message which did not have a lowercase letter in Subject:. Worked great until I got a job at IBM with all those old mono-case mainframe programmers. (You can decide if I'm talking about the mainframes or the programmers being old.)
You want to remember spam, how about Green Card Lottery from Canter & Siegel?
Heck, that was back when people talked about "EMP" (excessive multi-posting) or "ECP" (excessive cross-posting) on USENET, and "UCE" (unsolicited commercial e-mail) for, uh... e-mail I suppose.
Spam originally referred to USENET postings, in honor of those Monty Python vikings who just won't shut up about it--the C&S postings were like that, everywhere you went, there was another damn green card lottery posting....
But that was after the start of Eternal September. (Now that AOL has dropped USENET, is it finally October?) And those of us who complained when Prodigy got 'net access sure looked back fondly when AOL hooked up.
Remember when the worst thing about USENET was a few kooks and badly-configured FIDO BBS doors?
Yeah, me neither, my memory's not what it used to be.
I do remember being shown this neat thing on one of those fancy Sun SPARCStations with the built-in ISDN connection where you could look at a page of text from an information service, and it would be able to have pictures and full-motion video integrated into it! Even over ISDN it took a while to load up, and the video (MPEG 1) got all blurry if there was a lot of movement, and it pretty much swamped the SPARCStation....
It was summer of 1992 and they didn't really have a name for it yet. It was like gopher, but with graphics, too.
They (Northern Telecom's research division) also had a prototype of a new wireless phone from Motorola--it would work with their wireless set-up for private branch exchanges (Meridians). But the cool thing was, it had a flip-down thing like a Star Trek communicator.
Dial-up speeds (Score:3, Informative)
Nobody (on the US PSTN) gets 56 Kbit, as that would exceed some obscure FCC limit. You're limited to 53 Kbit. I have seen that in practice, but it's pretty rare, and I expect you have to be right next to the CO on brand new wires to get it.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Remember Lynx and Mosaic? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The web was always GUI (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Tim Berners-Lee (Score:4, Informative)
Re:How'd it change day to day work? (Score:2, Informative)
No, but it shipped with it turned off by default. You had to go into the
Network Neighborhood properties and Add Protocol and all that jazz to get it
turned on. Also, SMB/CIFS didn't bind to TCP/IP by default, only to NetBEUI.
Basically, TCP/IP had the same level of support as IPX/SPX.
Re:Correction (Score:3, Informative)
e-mail from Vint Cerf (vcerf@MCI.NET) and Robert Kahn, September 28, 2000 [mintruth.com]
They did, in fact, interview JWZ. (Score:3, Informative)