Remembering Netscape and The Birth of the Web

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."

How'd it change day to day work?

[garcia]

Sam Jadallah: There was definitely a buzz at Microsoft about the Internet--we were trying to understand why everybody was getting all hyped up. Certainly for us up in the Northwest, we didn't know what to make of it. It seemed pretty cool, pretty exciting, but really what were you going to do with it? How was it going to change your day-to-day work?

By doing this [suntimes.com]. :)

Remember Lynx and Mosaic?

[Anonymous Coward]

Remembr Lynx and mosaic, anyone? I still use Lynx under Windows and linux, though.

Re:I did not know Netscape invented the internet..

[Raistlin77]

Nobody said Netscape invented the internet. However, one could argue that Netscape invented public interest in the internet.

What a change

[mfloy]

Sometimes we don't even realize what a change 10 years can make to our lives. I can't even not being able to use the internet for news, chat, shoppings, research, etc. The only unfortunate part is that Netscape has been hit by the Microsoft Monopoly and is a shell of it's former glory.

Not netscape.

[jellomizer]

I wouldn't give netscape the credit for the birth of the web. I would give Netscape credit for the .COM bubble, and making the web well known. But it is more of an issue of the right place at the right time. Modems have gotten fast enough to display bitmapped graphics, at a reasionable speed. Most people had 8 bit color at 640x480 displays, and the OS's and Computers were powerful enough to run a multitasking windowed environment. I think if netscape wan't there Mosaic may have stayed the big dog for Browsers untill microsoft wanted a piece of the action. It would be fair to say the Netscape help popularized the web, not threw anything really technical, but because it gave wallstreet a look at what the internet combined with html can promice, thus giving advertising time to the internet.

Mosaic?

[meckardt]

The company that changed it--bringing us into the Internet age--was a brilliant flash in the pan called Netscape.

How about Mosaic? I admit that Netscape was a big step forward, but it was evolutionary, rather than revolutionary.

I remember the Netscape release ..

[torpor]

.. I'd just helped start up a (what is now very large) ISP in Los Angeles, and we were having a blast (i kid) helping people get the Trumpet Winsock Dialler and some 3rd-party TCP/IP stack installed on their Windows 3.0 and 3.1/WFW machines .. 'real TCP/IP access' was one of the major draws to us as an ISP, and for the first few weeks we had about 15 new signups a day.

Then Mosaic went "Netscape", and suddenly, literally in a matter of one week, it was like 100 signups a day... just so people could get into this new-fangled "GUI"-style info resource they'd heard about in WIRED and Mondo2000 and BoingBoing magazines ... phew. We nearly melted down, but I'm glad to say I really had a unique opportunity to see this turning point from the perspective of a major ISP .. which is still around, and has grown a lot since those humble days with 20 14.4k modems and 10 28.8k modems, sitting on a Livingston rack, hanging off a single 56k line ..

Ah, the web. What would the Internets be without you now, eh? A massive landscape of gopher piles and archie bookmarks, no doubt .. no doubt .. /pours one on the ground for the poor suckers still in the ISP business ...

Tim Berners-Lee

[an_mo]

Why do people talk about Netscape so much and forget that one person only, Tim Berners-Lee, invented the web? He code the first browser, the first web server, invented html, convinced CERN to keep it free and open. And yet, when you tell the average educated guy that there is one person that did all this, they find it hard to believe. I just can't understand why Andreesen is more popular than Berners-Lee.

MS not very insightful

[Mr. Underbridge]

How was it going to change your day-to-day work?

That's what MS has never gotten. Make it part of a person's lifestyle first, then they'll make it part of their work.

They left out. . .

[smooth wombat]

Picture a world without Google, without eBay or Amazon or broadband,

Or one without billions of emails promising V14gr4! on the cheap!, where stealing someones identity involved more than point-and-click. A world where people had to, gasp!, go out and talk to other people face-to-face to buy products or knew how to use a card catalog at the library.

Yeah, those were the days oh so many eons ago. In fact, I distinctly remember my mom and dad having to round up the horses every morning to hook them to the carriage so they could go to work every morning while my brother and I washed our feet so they looked somewhat presentable after we had walked the two miles to school (uphill both ways mind you).

While it's nice to remember how things were and the progress we've made, let's also not forget the things that we don't know how to do anymore. We're so wrapped up (some of us anyway) in what's latest and greatest that we now have less overall free time to do things and spend most of our time trying to figure out how to schedule our days.

No, I'm not a luddite. I'm just one of those who don't see the point in much of what people are gaga over nowadays (a cel phone which can do 20 different things except make a decent call for example). If you're into web pages with Flash simply because Flash is the 'in thing' for web design, more power to ya. Just don't think that everyone else cares.

Re:Remember Lynx and Mosaic?

[shokk]

I remember Mosaic being the revolutionary web app, not Netscape! What's this crap? Selective memory, or purposeful revisionism to get AOL sponsorship $$$ for OSTG?

Accelerating business cycles: Netscape v MS

[G4from128k]

Netscape's rise and fall epitomizes the acceleration of the business cycle. The fact that anyone can download anything at low cost and the fact that most people replace their computers every 2 years means a new, small company can quickly grow its customer base. And those same tools meant that MS could, just as quickly distribute its own browser and quickly take Netscape's installbase from the company.

Low distribution costs and PC turnover means that marketshare leadership is not assailable under most conditions -- its too easy for people to replace old software, especially when they get a new computer. Only companies that have an interoperability hook that ties past, present, and future generations of software and systems together have any hope of retaining marketshare.

MS has tried, and succeeded, in creating that hook with IE in that many websites "work best" with Explorer and Windows-specific web functionality (VBscript, ActiveX, MS-extensions to javascript, etc.). To the extent that MS is forced, in the future, to embrace true open standards (not embrace-and-extent forks of those standards) then the OS and app maker will become vulnerable to rapid changes in marketshare.

Microsoft and Mozilla really got things going

[ShatteredDream]

What many people also forget is that Netscape sucked after version 3. I was one of those rabidly anti-Microsoft people who defended Netscape (wrongly) because of Microsoft's monopoly. Firefox and Mozilla proved that Microsoft can be beaten in time without the government.

Let's also not forget that AJAX' XMLHttpRequest object, which powers many of Google's new services, was invented by Microsoft with IE 5. I remember Netscape 4 sucking so bad that when IE 4 was about to go gold that there were people lining up in the chat room that I was in on Westwood Studios' chat service for C&C players to get as they ranted about Communicator.

And my God was it a POS. The thing was horribly bloated, ugly, not standards compliant and a spectacular mess to maintain, hence the mozilla guys practically starting over from scratch. Let's not forget something here, which Google has not. Netscape lost not because IE went free, but because Netscape 4 was such a bloat POS that it was agonizing to use it compared to IE 4. Netscape lost because when Microsoft got their act together, Netscape went from the elite of browser design to rank amateurs at best.

Re:Good Ole Days

[RetroGeek]

AOL ruled supreme

No, that would be CompuServe. If you wanted to reach company information, message boards, CompuServe was the way to go. They had local MODEM numbers in every major city.

And they are still around [compuserve.com], though on the WWW.

Let's Not Forget Netscape's Arrogance

[zentec]

The common mode for many Silicon Valley companies of the time like Netscape and SGI was simply pure arrogance. Ever try dealing with these people?

Netscape was unbelieveable. While they might have been the first to come up with an ISP agreement, wanting a percentage of the ISP's revenue for a package they GAVE AWAY online was asking way too much. Their other products, like their Collabra server, were WinNT ports of open source products like INN. And they worked like magic; it took a lot of hocus pokus to keep it running more than twelve hours. And forget actually interfacing it to Usenet, it simply couldn't handle the load.

If you called and complained, you were basically told "it is what it is, but the new version fixes it so send us more money". And that was just one software product.

Marc Andressen was not the golden boy he likes to make himself out to be. He was in the right place at the right time, and fortunately for him, made out pretty well. But he's a one trick pony.

Netscape didn't die because of Microsoft, Netscape died because of their own arrogance and they believed their own marketing. Good riddance. At least what was left was turned into something decent.

Re:Mosaic?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Henry Ford didn't invent the automobile, either. (Nor, BTW, did he invent the assembly line.) And the Model T wasn't the first car he produced. But when he did ...

So it seems kind of like that. Before Netscape, the Web was an interesting idea, with some modest success, but basically the domain of hobbyists with a high tolerance for quirks. And the first release of the Netscape browser (the "Navigator" name didn't come until a couple years later, IIRC, but someone please tell me if I'm wrong) wasn't all that much of an improvement over Mosaic. But with a little refinement, they hit the sweet spot, in much the same way Ford did, with a product that worked for damn near everybody.

Re:Tim Berners-Lee

[m50d]

Because he resisted the future. He didn't want pictures on the web, and certainly not all the plugin based stuff we have today. You get the impression he wanted to keep it academic. If TBL had run the show the web would be just another cool research toy.

Re:The two other things that made it possible

[AtariAmarok]

"A text-only web is perfectly usable at 2400bps, but uninteresting to most of the general public"

It would have worked at that speed. The page designers and web app programmers would have been forced to come up with ingenious compression routines and efficient transfer protocols. You would have ended up with a Web that would have had enough useful color graphics and "Pizzazz" to have been extremel popular with the public, even if the ability to download large files and stream intense media would have never been comparable.

With high-speed modems and broadband, it matters a lot less if the 'Net apps are kludgey and the pages are huge and sloppy.

Re:Correction

[jedidiah]

Al Gore was the congressional patron of the old bearded guys that did the actual work. None of them take exception to the idea that Gore created the internet.

Re:Good Ole Days

[jedidiah]

The Morris worm was a flash in the pan compared to the neverending parade of WinDOS remote exploits and email/word/excel viruses. The Morris worm inspired Unix vendors to change their habits. Microsoft seems immune from the pressures that make most companies fix their screwups.

Back when everyone had to worry about link and boot sector viruses, you would get laughed off the board for suggesting something like an email virus.

Re:Same tired knee-jerk comment...

[RealProgrammer]

The reason Mr. Gore's comment about "taking initiative in creating the Internet" is so widely lampooned is its manifest braggadocio. It does no good to pretend he never tried to make the claim, or that he wasn't trying to get more credit than he was due.

See here [slashdot.org].

Re:Cern

[cshotton]

Yeah, this Fortune article is definitely revisionist history, drawn up by some of the people that capitalized on a lot of hard work by others. I know, I was there. I spent a LOT of time in late '91 and most of 1992 corresponding with Robert Cailliau, who was responsible for much of the work on the CERN server/browser combo that predated anything done at NCSA. We at Univ. of Texas were interested in getting scientific papers on-line and had found Gopher to be a train wreck when it came to managing scientific notations, footnotes, and bibliographic references. The guys at CERN had solved the problem for text with the work Tim Berners-Lee had done with HTML and the networking code others at CERN had created for HTTP.

I originally contacted Robert and TB-L about writing a browser for the Mac. They said they'd rather see a server, which is how MacHTTP was born. Once the Mac server was running, I started working with Aleks Totic at NCSA to get the early versions of Mosaic on the Mac to work with the same server. Another prominent figure at NCSA at the time was Tom Redman, who if I recall correctly, was leading the Mosaic effort. At the time, Andressen was just another programmer on the Mosaic effort who had some glory because he hacked up the first working image tag in HTML. Until that time, everything had been text and hyperlinks

Long story short, everyone knew that Andressen snuck out of town with the Mosaic source code, and a few weeks later lured several of the developers like Aleks to go with him. There was a lot of ill-will engendered by that move and it wasn't all sweetness and light as the Fortune article would have you believe.

I remember speaking to the NCSA team (and then the SpyGlass team) many times afterwards, and no one ever really got over the fact that a junior programmer walked out the door with the IP created by dozens of other people and got filthy rich out of it while many of the people who built the original World Wide Web labored on in obscurity. At the time, the Internet culture wasn't about getting rich. It was about creating cool technology and sharing it with others, and almost all of the innovative stuff was still coming out of academia.

If anything, Netscape was the prototypical example of how to swipe someone elses' good ideas, rebrand them, and get rich. That was the company's real legacy to the Internet and the subsequent DotCom lunacy.