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."
What did happen to Constellation? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Ahem... Mosaic (Score:5, Interesting)
http://web.archive.org/web/20030212202753/http://
Kinda odd that the guy that was supposed to have written Mosaic single-handedly didn't write ANY code at Netscape.
Re:How'd it change day to day work? (Score:3, Interesting)
Gopher was a new thing also, but not very big and when Mosaic came out with their World Wide Web I said over and over again how it wasn't ever going to catch on, that it was just a fad.
Meh...I never said I was a visionary.
They didn't interview JWZ! (Score:5, Interesting)
the netscape dorm [jwz.org]
my employer can blow me [jwz.org]
resignation and postmortem [jwz.org]
netscape and aol [jwz.org]
Re:Remember Lynx and Mosaic? (Score:2, Interesting)
Granted, without graphics, the Web wouldn't have caught on nearly as well, particularly among corporations, but gopher would still have become one of those things that people don't notice on the Internet.
Re:Remember Lynx and Mosaic? (Score:3, Interesting)
The web was always GUI (Score:3, Interesting)
Um, the original web browser, called "WorldWideWeb", was GUI. On NextSTEP, even, which is known to be very GUI. The big thing that Mosaic introduced, I believe, was the ability to display graphics (GIFs and JPGs) and text together. It turned the web into multimedia.
Another interesting bit is that WorldWideWeb allowed interactive, real-time editing from early on. To edit a page, you just clicked in and started typing. Wiki is old news.
(DISCLAIMER: I've never actually used WorldWideWeb, only read about it. I could be even more wrong then usual.)
What about CERN?? (Score:2, Interesting)
MM
Re:How'd it change day to day work? (Score:5, Interesting)
At the time though, I though I was a bit slow to catch on myself. Usenet was where everything was happening (For some categories it still is) and I saw Mosaic, but couldn't ever figure out what it was for or even find a working URL. Then some months later, when I did find one, it linked to a handful of sites all linking to each other and containing only a list of the rest of the handful of sites.
What was the break through for me was that it was similar to Hypercard and I could arrange for material to be put up. Towards the end of 1994, I had arranged for the departmental IT staff to make a web accessible space on one of the departmental unix servers. Then I had HTML versions of previously paper-only tutorials to be posted there. No big deal, I thought. It was for a large class with a few hundred students, but the few that use the tutorials will continue to use the paper copies anyway.
Wrong. With a major exam on a Monday, starting Friday afternoon, it became progressively harder to reach the servers for anything, even e-mail. By the time Sunday night rolled around, there was effectively a denial of service going on. I had set up the documents with internal links and pared the diagrams down to one or two KB. However, the browser kept polling the server even for the internal links and reloading everything. That clogged the 2Mb/s network.
That got the attention of the faculty and put WWW on the map, at least for the department. After that, web versions of tutorials were considered essential and an established part of the administration by 1995.
Re:Remember Lynx and Mosaic? (Score:2, Interesting)
-Jar.
Re:The web was always GUI (Score:2, Interesting)
1. Yes, the source code to the original (1990/1991?) version of WorldWideWeb can be found in the W3.org history section [w3.org].
2. It definitely doesn't work on Mac OS X as-is, though I've been wondering for a few months how much effort would be required to get it working, just for kicks.