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."
How'd it change day to day work? (Score:5, Insightful)
By doing this [suntimes.com].
MS not very insightful (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:MS not very insightful (Score:2)
Hmm.. seems to me they get it quite well, but have an all improved version of it..
Let others put the efford into making something a part of a person's lifestyle, and then have the 'right' product available once that happened..
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.
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.
Remember Lynx and Mosaic? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Remember Lynx and Mosaic? (Score:3, Informative)
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:5, Insightful)
Re:Remember Lynx and Mosaic? (Score:2)
Back in the day when inline pictures were a big deal.
Re:Remember Lynx and Mosaic? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Remember Lynx and Mosaic? (Score:2)
Surfing via dialup was/is sooo much faster going text only.
Actually, now and then I switch to that mode in the latest version of Opera just for a little nostalga.
Re:Remember Lynx and Mosaic? (Score:3, Interesting)
Remember Gopher? (Score:2)
Remember Gopher? If not for the Netscape browser revolution, we might be still using Gopher to this day (and Google would be the top-of-the-line Archie site). Somewhere along the way, someone would have found a way to crap up Gopher with popups and scripts, no doubt.
Mosaic (Score:3, Funny)
Anybody who uses IE probably still has some of the original Mosic bugs in the code they use
Re:Remember Lynx and Mosaic? (Score:2)
What did happen to Constellation? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What did happen to Constellation? (Score:2)
I don't remember anything of the sort. What I do remember was that Netscape was seen as a cross-OS platform of APIs upon which applications could be built. Looking at how things panned out for Netscape, that seems a little odd these days, but its successor Mozilla (not to be confused with the original Netscape codename) has succeeded where Netscape failed. Even using just the standards compliant HTML/CSS/JavaScript e
Cern (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Cern (Score:2)
It was later renamed to Nexus.app [w3.org].
the history of the web from CERN: (Score:3, Informative)
http://public.web.cern.ch/public/Content/Chapters/ AboutCERN/Achievements/WorldWideWeb/WWW-en.html [web.cern.ch]
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:Cern (Score:2)
Ask the non-geeks around you if they know what Mosaic is. Then ask them when they started using "Netscape".
Mosaic did it first, yes. But Netscape made the interweb a popular place to be.
Big Blue E (Score:3, Funny)
Most of the non-geeks around me think "the Internet" is a big blue E that sits on their desktop. If I say "browser" they think I'm talking about a customer that doesn't buy anything.
Re:Cern (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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 ol
Re:The web was always GUI (Score:3, Informative)
Quiet Article (Score:3, Funny)
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
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.
Re:Ahem... Mosaic (Score:2)
On a real note, who gets 56k dialup? I have never experienced true 56k dialup no matter where i lived. At best I have got around 48k, mostly it was 32 or 28k. Yes I had the 56k modems but the lines were not providing me with that speed.
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.
"Data conditioned" phone lines (Score:2)
That's pretty much a scam, yah. At least it is in the US.
With standard analog modems at both ends, government mandated line quality is good enough for the 33 Kbit symetric max you see. Paying extra for what you're already entitled to is silly.
For 53 Kbit connects (which rely on having a dig
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:Ahem... Mosaic (Score:2)
And IE.
Still, I havea great fondness for the big, pulsing, waiting for 56K dial up N that was Netscape in the early days.
Hmm, you had 56K "in the early days" with pulsing Ns? The rest of us had much slower connections.
Re:Ahem... Mosaic (Score:2)
Re:Ahem... Mosaic (Score:2)
The throughput and latency of it were just mindboggling at the time..
Now that I think of it, there are probably quite a few places on the planet where that would still qualify as broadband.
Seems isdn was rather expensive in many places back then.. here it was about twice as expensive as a normal analog line, and my isp back then was just starting experimental support for it, and did not charge anything on top of a norm
Dear Slashdot (Score:4, Funny)
Good Ole Days (Score:5, Funny)
No or less newbs. Far less spam. Fewer viruses.
*sniff* The good ole days.
The company that changed it--bringing us into the Internet age--was a brilliant flash in the pan called Netscape
Bastards!
Re:Good Ole Days (Score:2)
*sniff* The good ole days."
And lots of rose-tinted glasses....
Do you recall:
If you don't then you're either young or deluding yourself into thinking the world got ugly all of a sudden.
Re:Good Ole Days (Score:4, Insightful)
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: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.
Re:Good Ole Days (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Ah, the internet. (Score:2)
I find it unfortunate that I never got into the BBS scene - moreso, that I didn't know it existed. When I got my first modem-equipped computer, the modem sat unused until we even
What a change (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah (Score:2)
Re:What a change (Score:2)
Not netscape. (Score:5, Insightful)
Mosaic? (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Mosaic? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 al
Mosaic Communications (Score:2)
Not so much wrong as incomplete.
The original name for the company was "Mosaic Communications". The domain name they registered for this, http://www.mcom.com/ [mcom.com], still takes you to the Netscape website. The name for the product was going to be "Mosaic NetScape". It turned out they couldn't use the Mosaic name (I forget why, prolly a trademark), so they
Re:Mosaic? (Score:2)
The details are fuzzy in my head, but back then I used Mosaic as the first graphical web browser. It sucked. It wasn't able do concurrently download text and images at the same time (or even multiple images concurrently). It would suck down the HTML, and then at the bottom status bar it would say something like "Downloading images...", while you waited. I believe that Netscape was more po
picture a world.... (Score:5, Funny)
and I remember a world where I had an email box that had NO spam in it, and a USENET with little to no spam... where porn was in alt.binaries.* and NOT in comp.*.... and posts were ON TOPIC.
OTOH - it was also a world without
I'd like to turn back time.
Re:picture a world.... (Score:4, Informative)
BIFF BIFF BIFF bIff Biff bIFF
BIFF
BIFF BIFF
BIFF BIFF BIFF
BIFF BIFF BIFF BIFF
BIFF BIFF BIFF BIFF BIFF
BIFF BIFF BIFF BIFF BIFF BIFF
I remember seeing his posts all over the newsgroups "back in the day". If nothing else, he was creative.
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.
Re:picture a world.... (Score:2)
It still is, you know. Obviously, you have to weed out all spam, but filesize is a pretty good filter.
I remember the Netscape release .. (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Ah, the web. What would the Internets be without you now, eh? A massive landscape of gopher piles and archie bookmarks, no doubt
Myopic vision (Score:5, Funny)
If nothing else, you think he would appreciate the ease of getting pr0n. Cobbling together alt.binary... threads was state-of-the-art back then.
Tim Berners-Lee (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Tim Berners-Lee (Score:2)
People don't seem to care about you if you don't make an unreasonable amount of money doing something.
Imagine if some greedy pig like MS had "invented" the internet. We'd be paying by the bit.
Re:Tim Berners-Lee (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Tim Berners-Lee (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Give Rise? (Score:2)
Perhaps Netscape did help the open source movement. But did not give rise. People like RMS, ESR, Linus and many others that I can't possibly remember did that. Maybe they mean it was first for a company to open its source ? I don't know about that. Was there no large company before 1995 to give away source?
Netscape didn't start dotcommania (Score:2)
But after Netscape, it was raining VC money, more money than good ideas.
It's not so hard to picture, really (Score:5, Funny)
Picture a world without Google, without eBay or Amazon or broadband
Well, it'd make Jeff Bezos patent portfolio look a lot different. That's for sure.
They left out. . . (Score:5, Insightful)
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:They left out. . . (Score:2)
"A world where people had to, gasp!, go out and talk to other people face-to-face to buy product..."
It was called mail order back then. You would either phone or mail in an order instead of placing your order on the internet, but otherwise the idea was much the same.
Some of us have been avoiding people for a lot longer than 10 years.
The old face of identity theft. (Score:2)
You bet! I remember the good old days [imdb.com] when you had to rip someone's face from their skull and replace yours with it.
dumb moves (Score:4, Funny)
Re:dumb moves (Score:2)
Accelerating business cycles: Netscape v MS (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
IPO was not a new TLA (Score:2)
Just because the dot-com boom was the first time that geeks started noticing talk about IPOs, the concept of companies going public and selling stock with Initial Public Offerings wasn't exactly new, not even to the general public. "IPO" was already part of the standard jargon of Wall Street and the countless people who invested in the stock market... more than "a few".
Picture a world (Score:2)
Sigh, sorry to complain, but it's a pet peeve of mine.
Microsoft and Mozilla really got things going (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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]
They did, in fact, interview JWZ. (Score:3, Informative)
Let's Not Forget Netscape's Arrogance (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
The two other things that made it possible (Score:2)
A text-only web is perfectly usable at 2400bps, but uninteresting to most of the general public.
The 14.4kbps modem and jpeg image compression made it possible for the average person to say "pretty pictures from 3000 miles away. Neat!"
In my judgement, these technologies were more more difficult to develop and more important than adding graphics to the web browser.
Re:The two other things that made it possible (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Good ol' days... (Score:3, Funny)
Why, when I was a young programmer we had to write the code in the snow with our pee, and a compiler was just a word for the pilot of the hovering dirigible that read the instructions and passed them to the ALU, which was another fellow with an abacus. They would wrap the results around a rock, and drop it on my house when the program would exit. We had to walk uphill...
I love these good ol' days stories :)
Screw the web! (Score:3, Funny)
Topic Marathons (Score:2, Funny)
What about tomorrow?
You Got to Be Innovative (Score:2)
They didn't even mention me! (Score:4, Funny)
I was working as a student support tech at the University of Illinois. My boss, who had been in Marc Andreesen's department, said he was having trouble with some Unix thing. Being the only approachable Unix type around, she asked me to help him. I called or emailed him, and agreed to come take a look at his workstation.
In my august wizardness I never found the building, so I never got to meet Marc or solve his problem.
I can't believe they didn't even mention my central role in Netscape's development.
What about CERN?? (Score:2, Interesting)
MM
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
So here's the question (Score:3, Funny)
IE lives on, while Netscape died in an "accident" but is survived by more-or-less bastard children of many names- mozilla/firefox, Opera, etc.
So now, 10 years later, do we know for sure: did IE murder Netscape, was it truly an accident of circumstance, or was it semi-suicide?
I'd genuinely like to know.
XMosaic in 2005! (Score:4, Funny)
It won't render slashdot, though
Now I'm off to build 2.6!
How old is the avg /.r, 12? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I did not know Netscape invented the internet.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I did not know Netscape invented the internet.. (Score:2, Funny)
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:Same tired knee-jerk comment... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Same tired knee-jerk comment... (Score:3, Insightful)
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:Correction (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Correction (Score:3, Informative)
e-mail from Vint Cerf (vcerf@MCI.NET) and Robert Kahn, September 28, 2000 [mintruth.com]
Re:DMZ (Score:3, Funny)
Gopher was my friend, email was useable, usenet was great and IRC was the new kid on the block.
gimmie!
Re:DMZ (Score:2)
What decade are you from? The 50's?
Re:IPO's (Score:2)
Re:Netscape was great (Score:2)
And apparently the lack of competition is catching on like wildfire -- the Mozilla Project has dropped mozilla (like Communicator)