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I started using NCSA Mosaic in the computer lab at college in 1994. It was a very different world online back then, there was so much potential and so much hope

I started using NCSA Mosaic in the computer lab at college in 1994. It was a very different world online back then, there was so much potential and so much hope. Even so it was hard to imagine the degree to which the internet and especially the web would become an omnipresent part of the lives of most people in the developed world, for good and bad. Certainly the idea that there would be billions of pocket computers might as well have been science fiction.

saltcured 8y ago
In 1995-1996, remember I had an i386 PC running Linux right next to a DEC Alpha also running Linux, with thin-net ethernet between them. For many things, the Alpha was much faster. But for browsing, I ran Mosaic on the PC and remote displayed it on the Alpha which actually had a monitor attached. Prior to that, I tried running Grail, a browser written in Python, directly on the Alpha. It was so slow it was basically unusable, i.e. slower than the web loading over data over SLIP a 14.4 modem. Running the x86 Mosaic binary in emulation on the Alpha via FX!32 was actually faster, but still too slow to use daily.
mschaef 8y ago
> Certainly the idea that there would be billions of pocket computers might as well have been science fiction. There were a lot of people working on the ideas behind this kind of portable computing, even then. Just a few examples: * Electronic pocket calculators were a thing back into the early 1970's * HP had a portable almost-PC called the 95LX that was released in '91, and the Newton was also early 90's. * Companies like Sharp were making pocket computers back into the early 80's. Some of these were PDA-style organizers, but there were also some that just ran BASIC on a one line display * PenPoint and Pen windows were also early 90's. Maybe the scale would have seemed incredible, but the concepts were very much in flight at the time.

saltcured 8y ago

In 1995-1996, remember I had an i386 PC running Linux right next to a DEC Alpha also running Linux, with thin-net ethernet between them. For many things, the Alpha was much faster. But for browsing, I ran Mosaic on the PC and remote displayed it on the Alpha which actually had a monitor attached. Prior to that, I tried running Grail, a browser written in Python, directly on the Alpha. It was so slow it was basically unusable, i.e. slower than the web loading over data over SLIP a 14.4 modem. Running the x86 Mosaic binary in emulation on the Alpha via FX!32 was actually faster, but still too slow to use daily.

mschaef 8y ago

> Certainly the idea that there would be billions of pocket computers might as well have been science fiction. There were a lot of people working on the ideas behind this kind of portable computing, even then. Just a few examples: * Electronic pocket calculators were a thing back into the early 1970's * HP had a portable almost-PC called the 95LX that was released in '91, and the Newton was also early 90's. * Companies like Sharp were making pocket computers back into the early 80's. Some of these were PDA-style organizers, but there were also some that just ran BASIC on a one line display * PenPoint and Pen windows were also early 90's. Maybe the scale would have seemed incredible, but the concepts were very much in flight at the time.