10 ms·

home.netscape.com in 1997

157 points by codetrotter 5y ago

shmoe 5y ago
That "N" used to astound me when it animated :)
- _puk 5y ago
  I have strong memories of swapping that out for an animated "smoking camel", as well as the Guiness fish on a bicycle (If we're talking the animated "N" in the top right of communicator..). Life was great when we could mod everything!
  - mattowen_uk 5y ago
    I worked at a large corporate bank during the late 90s, and they[1] rolled out a branded version of Netscape with the animated 'N' logo swapped out for rotating 'Golden Keys' which was their logo[2]. I've still got the image files for it somewhere. --- [1] I say 'they' I mean 'me' - I did application packaging at the time. [2] Upvotes for those who guess the bank! :D
    - codetrotter 5y ago
      > Upvotes for those who guess the bank! :D Does it still count as a guess if I clicked on your username, visited the website you listed on your profile and read the CV that you have on said website? :p
      - mattowen_uk 5y ago
        I think you deserve an up-vote just for doing all that!
        codetrotter 5y ago
        Thanks :)
    - Symbiote 5y ago
      My pub quiz trivia knowledge thinks UBS have crossed keys, although a search shows the current logo is black, not golden.
accountofme 5y ago
Ahhh the feels, Netscape was my first browser.
LeoPanthera 5y ago
If you set your http proxy to be "theoldnet.com" port 1997, and (important!) add an exclusion for web.archive.org, then you can browse the entire web from 1997. You can also change the port number to your preferred year. This is really fun on retro systems / web browsers. Detailed instructions: https://theoldnet.com/docs/httpproxy/index.html https://theoldnet.com/docs/httpproxy/index.html
- aardvarkr 5y ago
  Now that’s a fun fact! Thanks for sharing this blast from the past
- stolen_biscuit 5y ago
  That is awesome!
- qwerty456127 5y ago
  Is there something like that to translate the modern web into some lo-fi HTML 3 to view on an old computer?
  - LeoPanthera 5y ago
    You could use WRP, which renders web pages into giant imagemaps. https://github.com/tenox7/wrp https://github.com/tenox7/wrp There's also Browservice: https://github.com/ttalvitie/browservice https://github.com/ttalvitie/browservice
  - torgoguys 5y ago
    FrogFind will make things into about html2 and change any links on the page to go through FrogFind as well. It is lo-fi, not trying to mimic the orginal page, unlike those that do the giant image trick. Just paste your URL to the end of this URL to use it: http://frogfind.com/read.php?a= http://frogfind.com/read.php?a= EDIT: example using a random MDN page: http://frogfind.com/read.php?a=https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_Fonts/Variable_Fonts_Guide http://frogfind.com/read.php?a=https://developer.mozilla.org...
- 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
drmpeg 5y ago
Netscape Communicator 4.76 running on a QEMU emulation of the SPARCstation 20 and Solaris 8. It took a while to find a site that would render. https://www.w6rz.net/netscape.png https://www.w6rz.net/netscape.png
- josteink 5y ago
  That good old CDE-look is making me feel seriously nostalgic :)
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    CDE runs fine on modern Linuxes.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
      In fact, they just had a release:)
      - rbanffy 5y ago
        Didn’t know that. Next step is to get it supported by a couple major distros.
- qwerty456127 5y ago
  I wish somebody would update the old Netscape to add XMLHttpRequest support. We could write a gateway to translate the web relevant today to be usable on old computers.
ab_testing 5y ago
One of the working links on that page refers to Netscape Visual JavaScript. That sounds interesting .. Netscape Visual JavaScript helps make it practical and easy to develop sophisticated crossware applications through drag-and-drop components and simple visual programming. You can easily incorporate sophisticated functionality and database connectivity into web pages without writing code. Netscape Visual JavaScript enables you to deliver finished applications to users quickly and easily. https://web.archive.org/web/19970613210706/http://home.netscape.com/comprod/products/tools/visual_js.html https://web.archive.org/web/19970613210706/http://home.netsc...
- ghayes 5y ago
  Yeah, I saw that when I was reading some of the columns from Marc Andreessen [0]. I can't find any details on Visual JavaScript; does anyone have an old screenshot or video of the product experience? [0] https://web.archive.org/web/19970613210940/http://home.netscape.com/comprod/columns/techvision/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/19970613210940/http://home.netsc...
  - codetrotter 5y ago
    Here’s one that seems to be it: https://internet.watch.impress.co.jp/www/article/970409/vjs.jpg https://internet.watch.impress.co.jp/www/article/970409/vjs.... Image via https://internet.watch.impress.co.jp/www/article/970409/vjs.htm https://internet.watch.impress.co.jp/www/article/970409/vjs....
    - ghayes 5y ago
      Cool, so almost an early version of Firebug / Developer Tools.
- rikroots 5y ago
  Amazon still have copies available of both the Official Netscape Visual JavaScript Developers Guide[1] and Netscape Visual JavaScript For Dummies[2] books. [1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Official-Netscape-Visual-JavaScript-Developers/dp/1566047617 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Official-Netscape-Visual-JavaScript... [2] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Netscape-Visual-JavaScript-Dummies-Vander/dp/0764502867 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Netscape-Visual-JavaScript-Dummies-...
a-dub 5y ago
going back further, here's the original mosaic homepage from the ncsa snapshotted in 1996 (this look and homepage was in place since the the early 90s): https://web.archive.org/web/19961220005222/http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/ https://web.archive.org/web/19961220005222/http://www.ncsa.u... and here's the netscape homepage but with the old netscape "mosaic communications" domain: https://web.archive.org/web/19980109011204/http://home.mcom.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/19980109011204/http://home.mcom....
- bellyfullofbac 5y ago
  JWZ (and friends?) resurrected the home.mcom.com from 1994, so you don't even need the archive.org URL to load that version.
  - jd3 5y ago
    https://www.jwz.org/blog/2008/03/happy-run-some-old-web-browsers-day/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2008/03/happy-run-some-old-web-brow... https://www.jwz.org/blog/2019/03/help-me-keep-home-mcom-com-online/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2019/03/help-me-keep-home-mcom-com-...
    - Jenda_ 5y ago
      PSA: copy and paste the link URL (or otherwise make sure you won't send the referrer containing news.ycombinator.com), otherwise it redirects you to a nsfw page.
31tor 5y ago
<3
stevep98 5y ago
Ah.. from July 9. I was hired there on July 1. Good times!
projectileboy 5y ago
Sure does load fast…
DonHopkins 5y ago
Oh wow, I found the full documentation for the ill-conceived and ill-fated IFC -- Internet Foundation Classes. https://web.archive.org/web/19961116025218/http://developer.netscape.com/library/ifc/documentation/barium/DeveloperGuide/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/19961116025218/http://developer.... Check out that jaggy squinched text in those diagrams! Somebody resized a GIF file smaller to save some bandwidth, and so it would fit on a 640x480 screen. 1997 web design at its finest! Pro Tip: Never name a user interface toolkit after "MFC" with "M" crossed out and "I" written in -- that doesn't make it sound very appetizing, and wrongly sets expectations that you can actually write a viable application with it, given enough pain and suffering. Just as you should never name a component system after "COM" with "XP/" written before it, for the same reason. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12968830 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12968830 And while you're at it, you should never name a company after "Microsoft" with "Micro" crossed out and "Sun" written in, because it makes it look like you define your company in terms of your biggest competitor instead of having your own identity and mission, which is what losers and foaming-at-the-mouth libertarian Trump supporters like Scott McNealy do. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/17/trump-silicon-valley-fundraiser-at-scott-mcnealys-home.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/17/trump-silicon-valley-fundrai... Marimba was much better at naming things, thanks to Kim Polese, who came up with the name "Java" when she was at Sun, then left Sun with several of the finest Java engineers to form the drum-themed Java start-up company, "Marimba". Their product "Castanet" literally cast a net to deliver interactive content over the internet, and their Java-powered HyperCard-like user interface builder "Bongo" actually let you interactively edit Java scripts to handle events, by calling the Java compiler at runtime (which was unheard-of at the time, but normal for IDEs to do now). https://www.wired.com/1996/11/es-marimba/ https://www.wired.com/1996/11/es-marimba/ I wrote a comparison of Bongo and IFC about a year before that Netscape page was captured in 1997. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19837817 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19837817 >Wow, a blast from the past! 1996, what a year that was. >Sun was freaking out about Microsoft, and announced Java Beans as their vaporware "alternative" to ActiveX. JavaScript had just come onto the scene, then Netscape announced they were going to reimplement Navigator in Java, so they dove into the deep end and came up with IFC, which designed by NeXTStep programmers. A bunch of the original Java team left Sun and formed Marima, and developed the Castanet network push distribution system, and the Bongo user interface editor (like HyperCard for Java, calling the Java compiler incrementally to support dynamic script editing). https://people.apache.org/~jim/NewArchitect/webtech/1997/10/note/index.html https://people.apache.org/~jim/NewArchitect/webtech/1997/10/... >While I was working at Interval Research Corporation in 1996, after playing around with and reading over the source code and documentation, I wrote up a deep comparison and analysis of Internet Foundation Classes (IFC) versus Marimba Bongo (which was written by Arthur van Hoff, who worked on Java, wrote AWT, and before Java wrote another user interface system for NeWS similar to Bongo and HyperCard in PostScript, called HyperLook), and other related user interface component technologies. https://donhopkins.com/home/interval/ifc-vs-bongo.html https://donhopkins.com/home/interval/ifc-vs-bongo.html >This is a comparison of two component frameworks for Java, IFC and Bongo. >IFC (Internet Foundation Classes) is from NetScape, and is similar NeXTStep, which was written in Objective C. It was written by some former NeXT developers, whose company NetScape bought because they needed a Java toolkit. >Bongo is from Marimba, and is similar to HyperLook, which was written in NeWS object oriented PostScript. Marimba was founded by some of the original Sun Java developers, who left Sun to form their own company. >[That also compares IFC with Microsoft's ActiveX/OLE/COM/MIDL stuff, and gets into some Java/JavaBeans/J++/CORBA/OpenDoc politics, and includes some comments by Arthur about IFC, AWT, Bongo, JDK 1.1, etc.] >[...] >Date: Mon, 06 Jan 1997 13:27:40 -0800 To: hopkins@interval.com (Don Hopkins) From: Arthur van Hoff <avh@marimba.com> >Hi Don, >Although I am pretty biased I would like to make one or two comments. >We decided to build a very AWT friendly GUI toolkit. What this means is that there are as few gratuitous differences as possible. We did this for two reasons. One is that we don't want our developers to relearn what they know about the AWT, and secondly we are anticipating the integration of JDK 1.1 functionality sooner rather than later. >The IFC has made a huge mistake in reinventing classes like the Event, Graphics, and Color classes. This makes it extremely hard to integrate IFC components into existing AWT applications (and visa versa). We think this is a great advantage of Bongo. >We also focussed on mimicking the PC look&feel whenever possible. We've had very positive feedback on this feature. It seems to be what people want. If you want you can still create your own look and feel, but at least the default is familiar to most users. >I strongly believe that JavaBeans is the right way to go. It is big, and it is not a framework for building widgets, but at a slightly coarser granularity it solves the problem of integrating components from other vendors very effectively. >Over the next few months we are going to put effort into the following areas: >JDK 1.1 integration >JavaBeans support >Extend the widget set with new business oriented widgets >Extend the builder with better layout functionality >Make the builder more content oriented >Add better support for time based media >Add some paint/draw functionality to the builder >Further improve our support for PC-look alike widgets >Have fun, >Arthur van Hoff
dividuum 5y ago
Clicking the "What's your DOMAIN NAME?" ad returns a MIPS binary? From 'string' output it seems like the the cgi-bin binary handling the redirect and writing a log file to /d/adserv/netgravity/logs/AdServer_log. I wonder how that got indexed.
- caf 5y ago
  I'd say at some point the cgi-bin/ handling got disabled on the server, so it just started serving the binaries.
  - wazoox 5y ago
    And it was running on a big SGI Challenge server, too :)
- tyingq 5y ago
  Interesting that they would have used old-school CGI in 1997. Netscape invented NSAPI, which was basically FastCGI before that existed. It had been around 2-3 years prior to 1997. Edit: There's an online disassembler here that can grok the downloaded file: https://onlinedisassembler.com/ https://onlinedisassembler.com/
jbverschoor 5y ago
The animated Navigator icon with the stars always gave me a sense of actually navigating cyberspace. Same with the BBSes These days we're just browsing glossy magazines.
- function_seven 5y ago
  Related nostalgia: websites that didn’t specify a bgcolor, so they got defaulted to gray. And the tables with the default embossed look.
  - LeoPanthera 5y ago
    Grey on Netscape, IE's default background was white.
    - CTOSian 5y ago
      also : text in black not the today's crap look.
      - scarygliders 5y ago
        I will never understand why people think grey text on a white background is a good idea.
        iamjochem 5y ago
        the following explains the 'why': https://uxmovement.com/content/why-you-should-never-use-pure-black-for-text-or-backgrounds/ https://uxmovement.com/content/why-you-should-never-use-pure... no idea to what extent, if at all, it is true. I can imagine there being a grain of truth in there but that implementing this correctly is much more difficult and nuanced than it might seem at first glance - most "digital designers"[1] probably don't get the budget/freedom to properly tackle accessibility in their commercial projects, I can also imagine that the majority of digital designers are 'young' and have close to 20/20 vision making it that much harder for them to truly put themselves in the shoes (eyes?) of people with lesser than perfect vision[2]. as someone with only a laymans' understanding of all this stuff I'm probably guilty of talking out of my **; I welcome someone with real graphic design credentials putting me straight :D [1] "digital designer", a person working in/with visual design, who started employment, or was born, after the release of the first iPhone ;-) (alternatively someone working in the design industry who never had the privilege of buying a copy of "The Face" for the simple fact they we not born in 1985) [2] a category I begrudgingly have to admit to being part of more and more ;-/
jimjimjim 5y ago
an elegant weapon for a more civilized age
Annatar 5y ago
How many people know that the ship in the Netscape's banner on that web page is Jim Clark's yacht, completely controlled by SGI IRIX servers?
retrofuturism 5y ago
I love that the rotated headlines from ABC News were in gif format. I did a double take when I saw the headline about landing a rover on Mars.
nikkinana 5y ago
Back then it was Netscape and NCSA Mosaic. IE was being forced upon us by Microsoft. In the end, it's Google everywhere. My how times have changed.
findthewords 5y ago
Simple. Focused. 5 key points, that's it, a button to click for more news. No scrolling required to read the main content on the frontpage. I like it.
- haolez 5y ago
  And it works perfectly on mobile.
jgalt212 5y ago
I wonder if Jim Clark chose that boat for the logo.
Applejinx 5y ago
I remember being mad when they went to 'Communicator'. Like: no! I want to use a web browser, not a pile of other garbage bolted on, and I already have an email program, and what the hell is this?
- smhenderson 5y ago
  I liked Composer though. It wrote readable, reasonably compliant (for the time) HTML. It was an invaluable learning tool for me, writing WYSIWYG in one window and seeing the source in another...
gpmcadam 5y ago
reminder to resize your browser to something like 640x480 when looking at older sites for real nostalgia
Svperstar 5y ago
In 1996 I got online for the first time with dial up, it creeped my mother out "why do people talk to each other over the computer why can't they use the phone?" lol
- illegalsmile 5y ago
  I think it creeped my parents out when I, at 14, had the sysop from one of the local BBSs come to my house to pick up cash for access.
  - kstrauser 5y ago
    Heh. "Son, explain to me why you need to drive you over to this older man's house with a boxful of floppies?" "It's for school, Dad!"
myth_drannon 5y ago
Is it just me, but my mind immediately relaxed and I started to have good feeling vibe after seeing the Netscape logo and all this simple blue background and text... I guess I just came back to my childhood and the simple sense of wonder and exploration. Nowdays the internet is mostly stress inducing FOMO feeling of another tech article, new languages/framework, bad news everywhere...
- fatnoah 5y ago
  I felt exactly the same thing. It was like a harkening back to a simpler time.
- sockpuppet_12 5y ago
  Same bro
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
300bps 5y ago
Whenever I hear of Netscape around this time frame I think of this 21 year old blog post by Joel Spolsky (among other things, founder of Trello). I still use it as a reference anytime someone recommends making the same fatal software product mistake that Netscape did. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
snake_plissken 5y ago
I clicked on that little ABC News scroller and went down a rabbit hole of news stories from a Tuesday July 8th, 1997. Topics include: -mars rover -global warming -The P.R.I. losing their elections in Mexico -clashes in Northern Ireland -Congressional hearing into Chinese political influences -Feds puzzled by low inflation (https://web.archive.org/web/19970709022322/http://www.abcnews.com/sections/business/ap_fed704/index.html) Last one is way too ironic.
retrac 5y ago
"now reaching more than 2 million seats" Isn't that amazing? One of the most widely used telecommunication programs in the world at the time, every continent, claiming some two million users. That number does not raise much of an eyebrow now, but it blew my mind. I first used the Internet in 1996-7 at the local public college. Netscape Navigator, on the Power Macintosh. I was only in middle school, but already interested in computers. One could stream video even then if you had the bandwidth. From NASA, from people with webcams pointing at their office parking lots. I was blown away. A multimedia world of millions of people. And mostly academics and some fellow geeks, back then. Being able to stream a video of repairs in orbit, from a computer in another country, on a machine I was already starting to learn to program myself, is a vivid memory. That experience changed me, and I got hooked online, for better and for worse.

157 points by codetrotter 5y ago

shmoe 5y ago

That "N" used to astound me when it animated :)

_puk 5y ago
I have strong memories of swapping that out for an animated "smoking camel", as well as the Guiness fish on a bicycle (If we're talking the animated "N" in the top right of communicator..). Life was great when we could mod everything!
- mattowen_uk 5y ago
  I worked at a large corporate bank during the late 90s, and they[1] rolled out a branded version of Netscape with the animated 'N' logo swapped out for rotating 'Golden Keys' which was their logo[2]. I've still got the image files for it somewhere. --- [1] I say 'they' I mean 'me' - I did application packaging at the time. [2] Upvotes for those who guess the bank! :D
  - codetrotter 5y ago
    > Upvotes for those who guess the bank! :D Does it still count as a guess if I clicked on your username, visited the website you listed on your profile and read the CV that you have on said website? :p
    - mattowen_uk 5y ago
      I think you deserve an up-vote just for doing all that!
      - codetrotter 5y ago
        Thanks :)
  - Symbiote 5y ago
    My pub quiz trivia knowledge thinks UBS have crossed keys, although a search shows the current logo is black, not golden.

accountofme 5y ago

Ahhh the feels, Netscape was my first browser.

LeoPanthera 5y ago

If you set your http proxy to be "theoldnet.com" port 1997, and (important!) add an exclusion for web.archive.org, then you can browse the entire web from 1997. You can also change the port number to your preferred year. This is really fun on retro systems / web browsers. Detailed instructions: https://theoldnet.com/docs/httpproxy/index.html https://theoldnet.com/docs/httpproxy/index.html

aardvarkr 5y ago
Now that’s a fun fact! Thanks for sharing this blast from the past
stolen_biscuit 5y ago
That is awesome!
qwerty456127 5y ago
Is there something like that to translate the modern web into some lo-fi HTML 3 to view on an old computer?
- LeoPanthera 5y ago
  You could use WRP, which renders web pages into giant imagemaps. https://github.com/tenox7/wrp https://github.com/tenox7/wrp There's also Browservice: https://github.com/ttalvitie/browservice https://github.com/ttalvitie/browservice
- torgoguys 5y ago
  FrogFind will make things into about html2 and change any links on the page to go through FrogFind as well. It is lo-fi, not trying to mimic the orginal page, unlike those that do the giant image trick. Just paste your URL to the end of this URL to use it: http://frogfind.com/read.php?a= http://frogfind.com/read.php?a= EDIT: example using a random MDN page: http://frogfind.com/read.php?a=https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_Fonts/Variable_Fonts_Guide http://frogfind.com/read.php?a=https://developer.mozilla.org...
5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

drmpeg 5y ago

Netscape Communicator 4.76 running on a QEMU emulation of the SPARCstation 20 and Solaris 8. It took a while to find a site that would render. https://www.w6rz.net/netscape.png https://www.w6rz.net/netscape.png

josteink 5y ago
That good old CDE-look is making me feel seriously nostalgic :)
- rbanffy 5y ago
  CDE runs fine on modern Linuxes.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
    In fact, they just had a release:)
    - rbanffy 5y ago
      Didn’t know that. Next step is to get it supported by a couple major distros.
qwerty456127 5y ago
I wish somebody would update the old Netscape to add XMLHttpRequest support. We could write a gateway to translate the web relevant today to be usable on old computers.

ab_testing 5y ago

One of the working links on that page refers to Netscape Visual JavaScript. That sounds interesting .. Netscape Visual JavaScript helps make it practical and easy to develop sophisticated crossware applications through drag-and-drop components and simple visual programming. You can easily incorporate sophisticated functionality and database connectivity into web pages without writing code. Netscape Visual JavaScript enables you to deliver finished applications to users quickly and easily. https://web.archive.org/web/19970613210706/http://home.netscape.com/comprod/products/tools/visual_js.html https://web.archive.org/web/19970613210706/http://home.netsc...

ghayes 5y ago
Yeah, I saw that when I was reading some of the columns from Marc Andreessen [0]. I can't find any details on Visual JavaScript; does anyone have an old screenshot or video of the product experience? [0] https://web.archive.org/web/19970613210940/http://home.netscape.com/comprod/columns/techvision/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/19970613210940/http://home.netsc...
- codetrotter 5y ago
  Here’s one that seems to be it: https://internet.watch.impress.co.jp/www/article/970409/vjs.jpg https://internet.watch.impress.co.jp/www/article/970409/vjs.... Image via https://internet.watch.impress.co.jp/www/article/970409/vjs.htm https://internet.watch.impress.co.jp/www/article/970409/vjs....
  - ghayes 5y ago
    Cool, so almost an early version of Firebug / Developer Tools.
rikroots 5y ago
Amazon still have copies available of both the Official Netscape Visual JavaScript Developers Guide[1] and Netscape Visual JavaScript For Dummies[2] books. [1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Official-Netscape-Visual-JavaScript-Developers/dp/1566047617 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Official-Netscape-Visual-JavaScript... [2] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Netscape-Visual-JavaScript-Dummies-Vander/dp/0764502867 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Netscape-Visual-JavaScript-Dummies-...

a-dub 5y ago

going back further, here's the original mosaic homepage from the ncsa snapshotted in 1996 (this look and homepage was in place since the the early 90s): https://web.archive.org/web/19961220005222/http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/ https://web.archive.org/web/19961220005222/http://www.ncsa.u... and here's the netscape homepage but with the old netscape "mosaic communications" domain: https://web.archive.org/web/19980109011204/http://home.mcom.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/19980109011204/http://home.mcom....

bellyfullofbac 5y ago
JWZ (and friends?) resurrected the home.mcom.com from 1994, so you don't even need the archive.org URL to load that version.
- jd3 5y ago
  https://www.jwz.org/blog/2008/03/happy-run-some-old-web-browsers-day/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2008/03/happy-run-some-old-web-brow... https://www.jwz.org/blog/2019/03/help-me-keep-home-mcom-com-online/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2019/03/help-me-keep-home-mcom-com-...
  - Jenda_ 5y ago
    PSA: copy and paste the link URL (or otherwise make sure you won't send the referrer containing news.ycombinator.com), otherwise it redirects you to a nsfw page.

31tor 5y ago

stevep98 5y ago

Ah.. from July 9. I was hired there on July 1. Good times!

projectileboy 5y ago

Sure does load fast…

DonHopkins 5y ago

Oh wow, I found the full documentation for the ill-conceived and ill-fated IFC -- Internet Foundation Classes. https://web.archive.org/web/19961116025218/http://developer.netscape.com/library/ifc/documentation/barium/DeveloperGuide/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/19961116025218/http://developer.... Check out that jaggy squinched text in those diagrams! Somebody resized a GIF file smaller to save some bandwidth, and so it would fit on a 640x480 screen. 1997 web design at its finest! Pro Tip: Never name a user interface toolkit after "MFC" with "M" crossed out and "I" written in -- that doesn't make it sound very appetizing, and wrongly sets expectations that you can actually write a viable application with it, given enough pain and suffering. Just as you should never name a component system after "COM" with "XP/" written before it, for the same reason. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12968830 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12968830 And while you're at it, you should never name a company after "Microsoft" with "Micro" crossed out and "Sun" written in, because it makes it look like you define your company in terms of your biggest competitor instead of having your own identity and mission, which is what losers and foaming-at-the-mouth libertarian Trump supporters like Scott McNealy do. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/17/trump-silicon-valley-fundraiser-at-scott-mcnealys-home.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/17/trump-silicon-valley-fundrai... Marimba was much better at naming things, thanks to Kim Polese, who came up with the name "Java" when she was at Sun, then left Sun with several of the finest Java engineers to form the drum-themed Java start-up company, "Marimba". Their product "Castanet" literally cast a net to deliver interactive content over the internet, and their Java-powered HyperCard-like user interface builder "Bongo" actually let you interactively edit Java scripts to handle events, by calling the Java compiler at runtime (which was unheard-of at the time, but normal for IDEs to do now). https://www.wired.com/1996/11/es-marimba/ https://www.wired.com/1996/11/es-marimba/ I wrote a comparison of Bongo and IFC about a year before that Netscape page was captured in 1997. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19837817 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19837817 >Wow, a blast from the past! 1996, what a year that was. >Sun was freaking out about Microsoft, and announced Java Beans as their vaporware "alternative" to ActiveX. JavaScript had just come onto the scene, then Netscape announced they were going to reimplement Navigator in Java, so they dove into the deep end and came up with IFC, which designed by NeXTStep programmers. A bunch of the original Java team left Sun and formed Marima, and developed the Castanet network push distribution system, and the Bongo user interface editor (like HyperCard for Java, calling the Java compiler incrementally to support dynamic script editing). https://people.apache.org/~jim/NewArchitect/webtech/1997/10/note/index.html https://people.apache.org/~jim/NewArchitect/webtech/1997/10/... >While I was working at Interval Research Corporation in 1996, after playing around with and reading over the source code and documentation, I wrote up a deep comparison and analysis of Internet Foundation Classes (IFC) versus Marimba Bongo (which was written by Arthur van Hoff, who worked on Java, wrote AWT, and before Java wrote another user interface system for NeWS similar to Bongo and HyperCard in PostScript, called HyperLook), and other related user interface component technologies. https://donhopkins.com/home/interval/ifc-vs-bongo.html https://donhopkins.com/home/interval/ifc-vs-bongo.html >This is a comparison of two component frameworks for Java, IFC and Bongo. >IFC (Internet Foundation Classes) is from NetScape, and is similar NeXTStep, which was written in Objective C. It was written by some former NeXT developers, whose company NetScape bought because they needed a Java toolkit. >Bongo is from Marimba, and is similar to HyperLook, which was written in NeWS object oriented PostScript. Marimba was founded by some of the original Sun Java developers, who left Sun to form their own company. >[That also compares IFC with Microsoft's ActiveX/OLE/COM/MIDL stuff, and gets into some Java/JavaBeans/J++/CORBA/OpenDoc politics, and includes some comments by Arthur about IFC, AWT, Bongo, JDK 1.1, etc.] >[...] >Date: Mon, 06 Jan 1997 13:27:40 -0800 To: hopkins@interval.com (Don Hopkins) From: Arthur van Hoff <avh@marimba.com> >Hi Don, >Although I am pretty biased I would like to make one or two comments. >We decided to build a very AWT friendly GUI toolkit. What this means is that there are as few gratuitous differences as possible. We did this for two reasons. One is that we don't want our developers to relearn what they know about the AWT, and secondly we are anticipating the integration of JDK 1.1 functionality sooner rather than later. >The IFC has made a huge mistake in reinventing classes like the Event, Graphics, and Color classes. This makes it extremely hard to integrate IFC components into existing AWT applications (and visa versa). We think this is a great advantage of Bongo. >We also focussed on mimicking the PC look&feel whenever possible. We've had very positive feedback on this feature. It seems to be what people want. If you want you can still create your own look and feel, but at least the default is familiar to most users. >I strongly believe that JavaBeans is the right way to go. It is big, and it is not a framework for building widgets, but at a slightly coarser granularity it solves the problem of integrating components from other vendors very effectively. >Over the next few months we are going to put effort into the following areas: >JDK 1.1 integration >JavaBeans support >Extend the widget set with new business oriented widgets >Extend the builder with better layout functionality >Make the builder more content oriented >Add better support for time based media >Add some paint/draw functionality to the builder >Further improve our support for PC-look alike widgets >Have fun, >Arthur van Hoff

dividuum 5y ago

Clicking the "What's your DOMAIN NAME?" ad returns a MIPS binary? From 'string' output it seems like the the cgi-bin binary handling the redirect and writing a log file to /d/adserv/netgravity/logs/AdServer_log. I wonder how that got indexed.

caf 5y ago
I'd say at some point the cgi-bin/ handling got disabled on the server, so it just started serving the binaries.
- wazoox 5y ago
  And it was running on a big SGI Challenge server, too :)
tyingq 5y ago
Interesting that they would have used old-school CGI in 1997. Netscape invented NSAPI, which was basically FastCGI before that existed. It had been around 2-3 years prior to 1997. Edit: There's an online disassembler here that can grok the downloaded file: https://onlinedisassembler.com/ https://onlinedisassembler.com/

jbverschoor 5y ago

The animated Navigator icon with the stars always gave me a sense of actually navigating cyberspace. Same with the BBSes These days we're just browsing glossy magazines.

function_seven 5y ago
Related nostalgia: websites that didn’t specify a bgcolor, so they got defaulted to gray. And the tables with the default embossed look.
- LeoPanthera 5y ago
  Grey on Netscape, IE's default background was white.
  - CTOSian 5y ago
    also : text in black not the today's crap look.
    - scarygliders 5y ago
      I will never understand why people think grey text on a white background is a good idea.
      - iamjochem 5y ago
        the following explains the 'why': https://uxmovement.com/content/why-you-should-never-use-pure-black-for-text-or-backgrounds/ https://uxmovement.com/content/why-you-should-never-use-pure... no idea to what extent, if at all, it is true. I can imagine there being a grain of truth in there but that implementing this correctly is much more difficult and nuanced than it might seem at first glance - most "digital designers"[1] probably don't get the budget/freedom to properly tackle accessibility in their commercial projects, I can also imagine that the majority of digital designers are 'young' and have close to 20/20 vision making it that much harder for them to truly put themselves in the shoes (eyes?) of people with lesser than perfect vision[2]. as someone with only a laymans' understanding of all this stuff I'm probably guilty of talking out of my **; I welcome someone with real graphic design credentials putting me straight :D [1] "digital designer", a person working in/with visual design, who started employment, or was born, after the release of the first iPhone ;-) (alternatively someone working in the design industry who never had the privilege of buying a copy of "The Face" for the simple fact they we not born in 1985) [2] a category I begrudgingly have to admit to being part of more and more ;-/

jimjimjim 5y ago

an elegant weapon for a more civilized age

Annatar 5y ago

How many people know that the ship in the Netscape's banner on that web page is Jim Clark's yacht, completely controlled by SGI IRIX servers?

retrofuturism 5y ago

I love that the rotated headlines from ABC News were in gif format. I did a double take when I saw the headline about landing a rover on Mars.

nikkinana 5y ago

Back then it was Netscape and NCSA Mosaic. IE was being forced upon us by Microsoft. In the end, it's Google everywhere. My how times have changed.

findthewords 5y ago

Simple. Focused. 5 key points, that's it, a button to click for more news. No scrolling required to read the main content on the frontpage. I like it.

haolez 5y ago
And it works perfectly on mobile.

jgalt212 5y ago

I wonder if Jim Clark chose that boat for the logo.

Applejinx 5y ago

I remember being mad when they went to 'Communicator'. Like: no! I want to use a web browser, not a pile of other garbage bolted on, and I already have an email program, and what the hell is this?

smhenderson 5y ago
I liked Composer though. It wrote readable, reasonably compliant (for the time) HTML. It was an invaluable learning tool for me, writing WYSIWYG in one window and seeing the source in another...

gpmcadam 5y ago

reminder to resize your browser to something like 640x480 when looking at older sites for real nostalgia

Svperstar 5y ago

In 1996 I got online for the first time with dial up, it creeped my mother out "why do people talk to each other over the computer why can't they use the phone?" lol

illegalsmile 5y ago
I think it creeped my parents out when I, at 14, had the sysop from one of the local BBSs come to my house to pick up cash for access.
- kstrauser 5y ago
  Heh. "Son, explain to me why you need to drive you over to this older man's house with a boxful of floppies?" "It's for school, Dad!"

myth_drannon 5y ago

Is it just me, but my mind immediately relaxed and I started to have good feeling vibe after seeing the Netscape logo and all this simple blue background and text... I guess I just came back to my childhood and the simple sense of wonder and exploration. Nowdays the internet is mostly stress inducing FOMO feeling of another tech article, new languages/framework, bad news everywhere...

fatnoah 5y ago
I felt exactly the same thing. It was like a harkening back to a simpler time.
sockpuppet_12 5y ago
Same bro

deleted 5y ago

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300bps 5y ago

Whenever I hear of Netscape around this time frame I think of this 21 year old blog post by Joel Spolsky (among other things, founder of Trello). I still use it as a reference anytime someone recommends making the same fatal software product mistake that Netscape did. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

snake_plissken 5y ago

I clicked on that little ABC News scroller and went down a rabbit hole of news stories from a Tuesday July 8th, 1997. Topics include: -mars rover -global warming -The P.R.I. losing their elections in Mexico -clashes in Northern Ireland -Congressional hearing into Chinese political influences -Feds puzzled by low inflation (https://web.archive.org/web/19970709022322/http://www.abcnews.com/sections/business/ap_fed704/index.html) Last one is way too ironic.

retrac 5y ago

"now reaching more than 2 million seats" Isn't that amazing? One of the most widely used telecommunication programs in the world at the time, every continent, claiming some two million users. That number does not raise much of an eyebrow now, but it blew my mind. I first used the Internet in 1996-7 at the local public college. Netscape Navigator, on the Power Macintosh. I was only in middle school, but already interested in computers. One could stream video even then if you had the bandwidth. From NASA, from people with webcams pointing at their office parking lots. I was blown away. A multimedia world of millions of people. And mostly academics and some fellow geeks, back then. Being able to stream a video of repairs in orbit, from a computer in another country, on a machine I was already starting to learn to program myself, is a vivid memory. That experience changed me, and I got hooked online, for better and for worse.