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Philip Greenspun has a great review of Netscape LiveWire from the time. https://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/livewire.html https://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/livewir
by AntiRush 6y ago
Philip Greenspun has a great review of Netscape LiveWire from the time.
https://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/livewire.html https://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/livewire.html
You can see that the current JavaScript tooling complains are nothing new under the sun:
So what used to be a few keystrokes in Emacs or Netscape
Gold now requires three steps:
edit the .html file
recompile the .web file
restart the LiveWire app from the appmgr
- Lammy 6y agoThis quote is adorable considering the size of most pages today: "This approach has several disadvantages, the first of which is speed. You are gratuitously transporting potentially many kilobytes of data back and forth across the network."
- pmontra 6y agoI was there, kB were an issue. We had 56 kb/s modems vs (let's say) 56 Mb/s fiber now. We gained a x1000 factor and we're dealing with many MB now instead of many kB back then. Page size grew x1000 too. But loading pages was really slow, mainly because browsers were slow. No parallel loading of images, no progressive rendering. Those were the first optimizations.
- icedchai 6y agoI think you underestimate the effects of high bandwidth. There was a sweet spot in the late 90's when some people had broadband (early cable modems, generally 3 megabits, or DSL.) I had an ISDN line from 1996 through 1998, then a cable modem after that. The web was fast because it was built for dial up. As broadband gained more and more market-share, the bloat increased.
- icedchai 6y agoWorking with LiveWire was incredibly painful. Often the server would crash during the restart phase (this was under WinNT 4.0 back in 1997.)