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My first browser I was accustomed to using was Netscape on a Mac. Search engines were Hotbot and Webcrawler after Yahoo. Cannot recall the others. When I thi

My first browser I was accustomed to using was Netscape on a Mac. Search engines were Hotbot and Webcrawler after Yahoo. Cannot recall the others. When I think back IE browser was the top browser and there were all sorts of workarounds to get it html compliant (or rather IE compliant). Easy to learn html, but hard to get it working right. Then adding in javascript for the added dynamic flair. I wanted to learn javascript & I ended up learning first java not knowing the difference at the time. Fun times were also spent at Barnes & Nobles / Borders (bookstore in U.S.) - checking out technical books and eventually I toiled through learning VBScript / Windows IIS to extend out a simple ecommerce site and possibly paving my way into the technical field. Didn't Netscape also have email integration? I can't recall anymore as I went through multiple internet providers like Aol.

godot 6y ago
I find the fragmentation interesting. In the mid to late 90s when I was first on the internet, the "prominent search engines" ranked (given to me by my ISP and some other sites) was something like AltaVista, Yahoo, InfoSeek, with Webcrawler and Hotbot down at the bottom. I believe my ISP distributed IE (3 at the time) with whatever internet software cd they included, and it was my first and default browser. Later on I tried installing Netscape Navigator, but it felt slow and clumsy compared to IE3 at the time, so I never understood why anyone used it. It's quite interesting how our internet experiences were so different! What is the same between us however is I also learned coding practically by first starting to make HTML pages, and some Javascript, and that was also my way into the technical field (decade and a half of working as a software engineer now). Like, sure, there were computer programming classes in school and every class used Pascal at the time (Quick or Turbo). It didn't feel like creating anything useful for the real world though; whereas with the web, I was immediately creating something for the world to see. I'd say learning to make web pages on my own was 99% of the reasons I became a software engineer later. The programming classes in high school, not so much.
mixmastamyk 6y ago
Thunderbird debuted as Netscape mail and was combined in Netscape Communicator suite I believe. Memory fuzzy.
- cxr 6y ago
  Thunderbird came out of the Netscape 6 rewrite by way of the Mozilla Application Suite, not either of the Netscape 3 or Netscape 4 mail clients.
  - mixmastamyk 6y ago
    I find it hard to believe it doesn't share any code, it was a near copy.
    - cxr 6y ago
      Near copy how? Their UIs? Rebooting a project or cloning another project and copying the old UI without sharing code isn't necessarily hard. I've done it plenty. Netscape was already doing it internally—each platform's (Unix, Windows, etc) GUI was a separate project. The details don't really match up, either. Netscape 3 was written in C. Netscape 6, Thunderbird et al are drawn by Gecko and written in JavaScript and XUL—which didn't even exist at the time of Netscape 3.
- jzer0cool 6y ago
  I do recall using Thunderbird at some point. Anyone still using a local client?
smt1 6y ago
I used Netscape 0.99 on a Mac. It was on a BMUG CD from 1994 that I would get a lot of freeware/shareware. Used it download SPRY Mosaic, which Microsoft licensed to create IE on Win95 soon after (I had already seen Mosaic running on CDE on HP/UX at my mom's scanning electron lab. she was getting a physics ph.d). Then I got a Mac clone from Metroworks. It had a pretty innovative C++ engine for its' time (PowerPlant), but I ended up booting into mkLinux (a mach-based linux) just in time for linux 2.0.0, discovering kde, then spending a while trying to emulate hacking at khtml/konqueror just to reverse engineer IE behavior "quirks" (5+ was a disaster) just to get websites to behave. Eventually both Apple and Chromium adopted khtml (webkit) instead of Gecko, before Firefox itself revived via Netscape and Mozilla (after it escaped the AOL/Time Warner fiasco). The funny thing is I use Firefox, chrome (on my android), and safari (on my Mac) much more than I use linux anymore. I'm pretty luckily to not have been just slightly too young (I'm mid 30s) to go after the original .com boom. I enjoy Rust the days. Modern C++ certainly ain't bad, but nostdlib Rust is also the first serious threat to full spectrum C in a long time.

godot 6y ago

I find the fragmentation interesting. In the mid to late 90s when I was first on the internet, the "prominent search engines" ranked (given to me by my ISP and some other sites) was something like AltaVista, Yahoo, InfoSeek, with Webcrawler and Hotbot down at the bottom. I believe my ISP distributed IE (3 at the time) with whatever internet software cd they included, and it was my first and default browser. Later on I tried installing Netscape Navigator, but it felt slow and clumsy compared to IE3 at the time, so I never understood why anyone used it. It's quite interesting how our internet experiences were so different! What is the same between us however is I also learned coding practically by first starting to make HTML pages, and some Javascript, and that was also my way into the technical field (decade and a half of working as a software engineer now). Like, sure, there were computer programming classes in school and every class used Pascal at the time (Quick or Turbo). It didn't feel like creating anything useful for the real world though; whereas with the web, I was immediately creating something for the world to see. I'd say learning to make web pages on my own was 99% of the reasons I became a software engineer later. The programming classes in high school, not so much.

mixmastamyk 6y ago

Thunderbird debuted as Netscape mail and was combined in Netscape Communicator suite I believe. Memory fuzzy.

cxr 6y ago
Thunderbird came out of the Netscape 6 rewrite by way of the Mozilla Application Suite, not either of the Netscape 3 or Netscape 4 mail clients.
- mixmastamyk 6y ago
  I find it hard to believe it doesn't share any code, it was a near copy.
  - cxr 6y ago
    Near copy how? Their UIs? Rebooting a project or cloning another project and copying the old UI without sharing code isn't necessarily hard. I've done it plenty. Netscape was already doing it internally—each platform's (Unix, Windows, etc) GUI was a separate project. The details don't really match up, either. Netscape 3 was written in C. Netscape 6, Thunderbird et al are drawn by Gecko and written in JavaScript and XUL—which didn't even exist at the time of Netscape 3.
jzer0cool 6y ago
I do recall using Thunderbird at some point. Anyone still using a local client?

smt1 6y ago

I used Netscape 0.99 on a Mac. It was on a BMUG CD from 1994 that I would get a lot of freeware/shareware. Used it download SPRY Mosaic, which Microsoft licensed to create IE on Win95 soon after (I had already seen Mosaic running on CDE on HP/UX at my mom's scanning electron lab. she was getting a physics ph.d). Then I got a Mac clone from Metroworks. It had a pretty innovative C++ engine for its' time (PowerPlant), but I ended up booting into mkLinux (a mach-based linux) just in time for linux 2.0.0, discovering kde, then spending a while trying to emulate hacking at khtml/konqueror just to reverse engineer IE behavior "quirks" (5+ was a disaster) just to get websites to behave. Eventually both Apple and Chromium adopted khtml (webkit) instead of Gecko, before Firefox itself revived via Netscape and Mozilla (after it escaped the AOL/Time Warner fiasco). The funny thing is I use Firefox, chrome (on my android), and safari (on my Mac) much more than I use linux anymore. I'm pretty luckily to not have been just slightly too young (I'm mid 30s) to go after the original .com boom. I enjoy Rust the days. Modern C++ certainly ain't bad, but nostdlib Rust is also the first serious threat to full spectrum C in a long time.