2 ms·

Kids These Days have no idea how important this was. Loading a 100kB JPEG over a 14.4K dial-up connection took about a minute. As the image crawled into view,

by pavlov 4y ago

Kids These Days have no idea how important this was. Loading a 100kB JPEG over a 14.4K dial-up connection took about a minute. As the image crawled into view, you’d hope the top slice of the image would reveal whether it’s worth waiting for or if you should move on. Progressive JPEG was invented to solve this frustration, but it wasn’t always a great improvement when you were staring at a blobby first-pass rendering of the image trying to guess what it might be.

hinkley 4y ago
The big difference between Netscape and NCSA Mosaic is that NCSA Mosaic demanded WIN32 in order to function, which was (partially) available as an extension to Windows 3.11 in the form of Win32s, which included support for 32 bit binaries and threading. Netscape implemented cooperative multitasking instead. While more error-prone, it did have one distinct advantage: Netscape fit on a 1.44MB floppy. Mosaic also fit on a 1.44MB floppy. However! If you were new to the Web, you would not have downloaded the WIN32 extensions yet. Which meant that practically, if you got Mosaic on a floppy, you needed twice as many floppies, and NCSA needed redistribution rights for Win32s. The world was just damned lucky those disks never got infected with a virus.
- tpmx 4y ago
  I guess that was added in later versions of NCSA Mosaic for Windows, perhaps to match the "asyncness" of Netscape 1.0? https://winworldpc.com/product/ncsa-mosaic/1 https://winworldpc.com/product/ncsa-mosaic/1 has a 720k disk image of Mosaic 1.0 for Windows. INSTALL.TXT mentions needing Winsock 1.1, but it doesn't mention Win32s. The timestamps of the files in the disk image are from Nov 10-11, 1993.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    That did not last long. November 1993, Mosaic for Windows was brand spanking new. https://pubs.usgs.gov/dds/dds-033/USGS_3D/software/pcwindow/mosaic/readme.txt https://pubs.usgs.gov/dds/dds-033/USGS_3D/software/pcwindow/... https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-talk/1995JulAug/0027.html https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-talk/1995JulAug/002... but it was on Win32 by Summer of 1994, when it was also supported on DEC Alpha, MIPS, and PPC versions of Windows NT.
pmontra 4y ago
Yep, that was what made everybody at my company immediately switch to Netscape. "Look, a browser that doesn't stop. You can read the page before images load!" And click to the next one.
- tpmx 4y ago
  Do you know/remember if the NCSA Mosaic 0.x/1.x (pre-Netscape) rendering/browsing process was non-async/blocking on X/Unix as well, and not just on Windows 3.x?
  - pmontra 4y ago
    It was blocking on all platforms. I was using a DEC Alpha and a Sun (some pizza box) to code and a Windows PC for Word and Mail. I think I didn't bother much with browsing on Windows. Too unstable and underpowered back then but it changed quickly. The Moore Law was strong at Intel in the 90s.
loloquwowndueo 4y ago
Would still be good to have for when a “web designer” saves a full-Res 5k-px on their Mac and then scales it using css width/height. Painful to watch the image slowly load on a less-than-50Mbps link.

by pavlov 4y ago

hinkley 4y ago

The big difference between Netscape and NCSA Mosaic is that NCSA Mosaic demanded WIN32 in order to function, which was (partially) available as an extension to Windows 3.11 in the form of Win32s, which included support for 32 bit binaries and threading. Netscape implemented cooperative multitasking instead. While more error-prone, it did have one distinct advantage: Netscape fit on a 1.44MB floppy. Mosaic also fit on a 1.44MB floppy. However! If you were new to the Web, you would not have downloaded the WIN32 extensions yet. Which meant that practically, if you got Mosaic on a floppy, you needed twice as many floppies, and NCSA needed redistribution rights for Win32s. The world was just damned lucky those disks never got infected with a virus.

tpmx 4y ago
I guess that was added in later versions of NCSA Mosaic for Windows, perhaps to match the "asyncness" of Netscape 1.0? https://winworldpc.com/product/ncsa-mosaic/1 https://winworldpc.com/product/ncsa-mosaic/1 has a 720k disk image of Mosaic 1.0 for Windows. INSTALL.TXT mentions needing Winsock 1.1, but it doesn't mention Win32s. The timestamps of the files in the disk image are from Nov 10-11, 1993.
- hinkley 4y ago
  That did not last long. November 1993, Mosaic for Windows was brand spanking new. https://pubs.usgs.gov/dds/dds-033/USGS_3D/software/pcwindow/mosaic/readme.txt https://pubs.usgs.gov/dds/dds-033/USGS_3D/software/pcwindow/... https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-talk/1995JulAug/0027.html https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-talk/1995JulAug/002... but it was on Win32 by Summer of 1994, when it was also supported on DEC Alpha, MIPS, and PPC versions of Windows NT.

pmontra 4y ago

Yep, that was what made everybody at my company immediately switch to Netscape. "Look, a browser that doesn't stop. You can read the page before images load!" And click to the next one.

tpmx 4y ago
Do you know/remember if the NCSA Mosaic 0.x/1.x (pre-Netscape) rendering/browsing process was non-async/blocking on X/Unix as well, and not just on Windows 3.x?
- pmontra 4y ago
  It was blocking on all platforms. I was using a DEC Alpha and a Sun (some pizza box) to code and a Windows PC for Word and Mail. I think I didn't bother much with browsing on Windows. Too unstable and underpowered back then but it changed quickly. The Moore Law was strong at Intel in the 90s.

loloquwowndueo 4y ago

Would still be good to have for when a “web designer” saves a full-Res 5k-px on their Mac and then scales it using css width/height. Painful to watch the image slowly load on a less-than-50Mbps link.