10 ms·
The story, as best I can remember, of the origin of Mosaic and Netscape [video]
- kovezd 2y agoNow I understand why Marc was so bullish on crypto.
- s1mon 2y agoI can't wait to see what JWZ has to say about this.
- Waterluvian 2y agoWho/what is JWZ?
- TMWNN 2y ago[flagged]
- fragmede 2y agowhat a terrible take. no wonder referrals to his site from this one get the treatment it does.
- TMWNN 2y agoThis is the first time I have ever discussed jwz here. I have no particular brief for, or against, whatever HN's "consensus" on Zawinski is. What I said is based on my reading his blog for more than a decade.
- justin66 2y agoYou believe he’s “eternally bitter” and “mentally ill” but you’ve been reading his blog for over a decade.
- TMWNN 2y agoIt's partially because of inertia, because I put it into my RSS reader a long time ago. It's partially because there are interesting posts every now and then, such as the one about him repurposing his old Lisp Machine terminal, or about XScreeenSaver. And yes, it's partially because rubbernecking while passing by a colossal trainwreck is always entertaining.
- neilv 2y agoJWZ is a skilled and noteworthy hacker, in the sense of HN. IIRC, he decided a long time ago that he'd had enough of crazy startup life, and bought a nightclub, and somehow kept a nightclub going all that time.
- hinkley 2y agoPeople talk the same shit about Woz and Paul Allen too. I could have gotten in on the third big round of hiring at Amazon, but I told my friend I’d rather work until retirement than get rich writing Perl code. People are allowed to have standards, and those standards are allowed to keep you from taking money you don’t feel good about. If it wasn’t then we would all be sex workers. Most pay for the least work.
- wmf 2y agoAs one of the early Netscape employees he should have made pretty good money. He didn't make founder money because he wasn't a founder. As for his personality, I get the impression he was always like that.
- dang 2y agoPlease don't cross into personal attack on HN, regardless of who the person is. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- sib 2y agoJamie Zawinski https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski
- hoten 2y agoTIL he owns and operates DNA Lounge. Thanks for the late night fun and pizza, jwz.
- worstspotgain 2y agoI suspect he made the decision to buy DNA after this: http://home.mcom.com/mozilla.org/1998-03-25/party/ http://home.mcom.com/mozilla.org/1998-03-25/party/ That party was a huge milestone in retrospect. It was the day FOSS went mainstream. Shortly thereafter, the dot-com boom ended and the 90s tech parameters got upended and scrambled.
- davidw 2y agoI went to that! Heady times.
- netsharc 2y agoHis blogs (LiveJournal, and later on, his own WordPress instance) and website has content going all the way back to 1993. I remember finding it as a teenager and reading all the stories and being enchanted by them. At some point he did write why he bought the club, he was moaning about the state of night life in SF, and a friend said something like "Why don't you do something about it?"... so he did. Edit: found it: https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/1998-1999.html https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/1998-1999.html
- r3trohack3r 2y agoI love that this wikipedia article includes a "Principles" section. Is this normal for wiki pages on people?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- NelsonMinar 2y agoThat was my first thought. A few days ago JWZ had a great take on where Mozilla is today: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/06/mozillas-original-sin/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/06/mozillas-original-sin/
- matthewn 2y agoAny link to there from here will only get you JWZ's take on HN.
- lizknope 2y agoThat's kind of hilarious. I guess he's using the HTTP "referer" tag
- neilv 2y agoThere are a bunch of settings in Firefox that affect this (if you don't mind occasionally breaking a Web site in a way no one will bother to diagnose): https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Referrer https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Referrer
- hinkley 2y agoJust copy the url and paste it into a new tab.
- neilv 2y agoThat works for viewing a particular page. Why people might want to adjust the `Referer` behavior of the browser is that it leaks more information than you might think.
- lizknope 2y agoThey spelled it "correctly" there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_referer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_referer Etymology The misspelling of referrer was introduced in the original proposal by computer scientist Phillip Hallam-Baker to incorporate the "Referer" header field into the HTTP specification.[7][8] The misspelling was set in stone by the time (May 1996) of its incorporation into the Request for Comments standards document RFC 1945[9] (which 'reflects common usage of the protocol referred to as "HTTP/1.0"' at that time); document co-author Roy Fielding remarked in March 1995 that "neither one (referer or referrer) is understood by" the standard Unix spell checker of the period.[10] "Referer" has since become a widely used spelling in the industry when discussing HTTP referrers; usage of the misspelling is not universal, though, as the correct spelling "referrer" is used in some web specifications such as the Referrer-Policy HTTP header or the Document Object Model.[3]
- deaddodo 2y agoDespite JWZ's animosity towards HN, his contributions towards open source and his influence on modern web browsers can't be overstated. In a thread about the history of Mozilla, it's worth reviewing his documentary on the open sourcing of Netscape, Code Rush: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_Rush https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_Rush
- janvdberg 2y agoGreat, I am gonna watch this. Hopefully this video also explains what the name 'Netscape' means or implies or is based on. Because I've always found it kind of striking that the name has the same letters (and sort of sounds) like 'NCSA' where Mosaic was originally developed, that seems like more than a coincidence?
- gumby 2y agoLandscape -> Netscape
- hinkley 2y agoStarscape, city scape…
- rambambram 2y agoEscape
- rzzzt 2y ago> "We've got to make progress on [renaming the company]." And I said, > "We've got a couple of ideas, but they're not great." Then it just kind > of popped into my head, and I said, "How about Netscape?" Everyone kind > of looked around, saying, "Hey, that's pretty good. That's better than > these other things." It gave a sense of trying to visualize the Net and > of being able to view what's out there. Greg Sands in https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2005/07/25/8266639/index.htm https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2005...
- nytesky 2y agoSo this is an a16z podcast show? It's a bit navel gazing right, to interview one of the hosts? Slow news day? Am I understanding the setup right?
- gumby 2y agoOne of the few topics on which he has something useful to say (Software is eating the world was another).
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- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- tannhaeuser 2y agoI understand the irony of featuring a web history piece on video.
- wenbin 2y agogonna watch it over the weekend :) And re-watch this also - Project Code Rush - The Beginnings of Netscape / Mozilla Documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q7FTjhvZ7Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q7FTjhvZ7Y
- detourdog 2y agoI remember being underwhelmed by the www before the graphical browser. Gopher I felt was superior. I would read about the graphical web browser in magazines but it required a slip Connection which may not have existed at this point. One day I read about a guy in brooklyn who had a website at www.soundtube.com and was selling music on the internet . I got in touch and went to his office in brooklyn to look at his website in a graphical browser. I than followed his lead in getting setup. The logo for the site was a half squeezed tube of toothpaste with the word sound tube on it. I don’t remember his delivery mechanism. The last time I visited the site it was the same logo but with the subtext that “what could have been”. I occasionally look for more information about sound tube. Seems to be lost but I hope it is only missing.
- Scoundreller 2y agoEvery once in a while I fire up Lynx for various reasons. I’ll try to go to news.ycombinator.com and Lynx tries to make an NNTP connection and I don’t blame it.
- jbaber 2y agoSomeone else told me they thought lynx came first. Is that really true? I thought images were there from the beginning.
- jbaber 2y agoOkay: - Lynx is far older than I thought. - WorldWideWeb 1.0 understood images, but didn't inline them, which is really what my creaky memory meant when it thought images were there from the beginning.
- robterrell 2y agoLynx wasn't first: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb
- asveikau 2y agoNot first but the initial release was 2 years before Netscape was founded, and 1 year before Mosaic. It was definitely an early browser. I first used lynx years later when I was getting into Linux in the late 90s, and I found that part surprising at the time.
- dang 2y agoI had to take something out of the title to squeeze in "[video]" so I took out the removeable bits: the word "true" and the original punctuation. No lack of truth or taste in punctuation is implied by this edit.
- kovezd 2y agoWell, you fixed a logical contradiction.
- talkingtab 2y agoWe can all over estimate our intelligence. I remember clearly getting some email from a list, downloading some weird thing and trying it. I remember clearly deciding it was just total junk - it took me about 5 minutes - and I deleted it. Of course this was Mosaic. And of course I was totally and completely wrong. Said he while using the Firefox web browser. And when was the last time I used telnet?
- tambourine_man 2y agoI wouldn’t judge myself so hard. You were reacting to what the web was back then. It’s pretty hard, perhaps impossible, to foresee what it would become. I remember reading “you can go to the Louvre and then the MoMA, all with a click of the mouse”. But taking a plane felt almost as slow and expensive, only way more fun. I deleted Netscape to claim back the 20MB or so it occupied in my 250MB drive.
- brandall10 2y agoI'm having trouble understanding this mindset. Was it being a contrarian techie against against the "information superhighway" hype at the time? As someone who had used Prodigy since 1990 and began my CS program in fall of '94, I was extremely excited to get a much faster than 14.4k connection in my dorm room so I could use Mosaic at a proper speed. I seem to recall this was a universal feeling amongst other students in my class... like a "holy sh*t, I can't believe I have this level of access now".
- tambourine_man 2y agoPerhaps, I’m known to be curmudgeon from a tender age. But I only really started to enjoy the Web with 33.6k and by 56k I was completely hooked. That’s my recollection at least. I loved IRC and BBS, but the Web took a while. Mostly because it was so slow.
- hinkley 2y agoMy friend was working on the browser team and showed me a demo one time when we stopped by his work. It was a picture with text around it, which you could already do with WordPerfect and Word? So can we go do that thing now? The following summer I applied to work there. I did not miss the next several shifts in the market, but eventually got tired of chasing them.
- ghigh 2y agoI remember as a kid being terrified of Netscape because of the ship's wheel icon. At the time I had a huge fear of the sea and seeing that nautical imagery made me feel sick. I'd always choose Internet Explorer because of this. I'm really glad that Netscape rebranded to Mozilla Firefox. Much warmer and more inviting, less implied threat of drowning.
- geonineties 2y agoYour username is surprisingly fitting.
- schoen 2y agoI wonder if there was another kid out there somewhere who was scared of wild animals (including cute ones) and who became more reluctant to use Firefox as a result of the rebranding.
- m463 2y agojust enter about:jwz
- santiagobasulto 2y agoOh man, I’m such a fan of Marc Andreessen. I know that in the past few years he’s come as a weird figure combining shady VC funds, with crypto and such things. But he’s such a smart insightful guy. And what I love the most about these guys (Marc, PG, even Sam Altman) is that they ARE hackers. They speak in our terms, they have our awkwardness. Thanks for sharing this.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y agoI know they are hackers. Unfortunately their minds have also fallen victim to all the political nonsense going on in our society.
- webwielder2 2y agoI recently read Michael Lewis's "The New New Thing," which posits that Netscape was a get-rich-quick scheme by Jim Clark to fund a computer-navigated sailboat. He knew that Microsoft would render the company obsolete in six months, and bet that investors wouldn't glom on to that fact quickly enough. And boy was he right!
- hinkley 2y agoThat would be consistent with the stories I heard about what hot garbage their Server Software was. The fact that it was where most of their money came from was problematic. It was not built to be a cash cow. I I do think that the free Netscape browser was the genesis of the free-app-with-strings-attached quagmire we are stuck in, but I can’t blame NS for that because one of the browsers Netscape was competing with, the one Spyglass employees seem to leave out of the Browser Wars rather conspicuously, was NCSA Mosaic. Which was developed under grants from the National Science Foundation and thus given away for the public good. It’s hard to compete with free. And the NSF asked several times if they should still be funding it.
- specialist 2y ago> hot garbage their Server Software was True. I created an online product catalog thing. For reasons I can't remember, I used SuiteSpot and JRunner. Turrible. Absolutely turrible. Truly unforgivably bad. Ditto their LDAP thing. And Netscape sabotaged Java and Applets. And created JavaScript. And XUL. And... But hey, marca famously named the image tag "img". So it wasn't all bad.
- dmckeon 2y agoand Mork. Not the alien, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mork_(file_format) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mork_(file_format)
- quonn 2y ago> And Netscape sabotaged Java and Applets. And created JavaScript. And XUL. So in that alternative universe we would likely have a non-responsive rectangle kind of UI that has to be loaded upfront. Despite all its shortcomings I much prefer the web, thank you very much.
- bengoodger 2y agoI'm about a half hour into this, and listening to Marc talk about newsgroups brings strong pangs of nostalgia. These days I'm a bit of a greybeard (salt-n-pepper beard?) of web browsing, but I remember getting started in the late days of Netscape, as a teenage open source hacker discovering all the Netscape engineers sitting on the npm.* newsgroups.. how wild it was to be able to turn up there with a question about the browser you used every day and have someone working on it answer! Netscape didn't survive, but what a legacy.
- tingletech 2y agoWhat were the npm.* newsgroups? I don't remember that hierarchy. Where Netscape and Node contemporaneous?
- bengoodger 2y agonetscape.public.mozilla.* The hierarchy there was basically a reflection of the company's browser team org chart. You could find a group for every team working on the browser where many of them were having their regular technical conversations.
- codetrotter 2y agoJust now I am realizing that Slack is a lot more like a Usenet client than it is like an IRC client. I mean. It’s still very far from actually being NNTP, and it’s not decentralized like Usenet or anything like that. But all this time I’ve been thinking of Slack as “better IRC, with images and links and threads”. When really Slack is more like “fancy Usenet service with client that renders images and other attachments”. (Although on the protocol and server and client implementation level it is very different from NNTP.) Well. At least we don’t have to inefficiently yEnc encode attachments nor to split attachments into a bunch of pieces with par2 files. So there’s that.
- nsguy 2y agonode.js and Netscape are about 20 years apart ;) I also don't remember an npm. newsgroup hierarchy. As a teenager during that time I recall some binary newsgroups though :)
- ericsink 2y agoBased on my understanding, some of the details he gave about the Spyglass/Microsoft situation are not quite right, but I don't think it would appropriate for me to provide specific corrections. However, since I was the Project Lead for the Spyglass browser team, there is one correction I can offer: We licensed the Mosaic code, but we never used any of it. Spyglass Mosaic was written from scratch. In big picture terms, Marc's recollections look essentially correct, and he even shared a couple of credible-looking tidbits that I didn't know. It was a crazy time. Netscape beat us, but I remember my boss observing that we beat everyone who didn't outspend us by a favor of five. I didn't get mega-rich or mega-famous like Marc (deservedly) did, but I learned a lot, and I remain thankful to have been involved in the story.
- HaZeust 2y agoEric, I remember reading your Browser Wars web blog about a decade ago, and this posting caused me to jump back to the source material. While Marc recounts that Microsoft offered for Spyglass to sell "Microsoft Mosaic" as an add-on while still offering your own independent version - despite MSFT eventually making its own browser free anyway - is there anything within that part of the larger story that you would elucidate to tell differently, or clarify deeper into its weeds? It was always one of the parts of the story that was more glossed over.
- hinkley 2y agoI started at NCSA about eight months after Marc left. What I recall of this time is that the management at NCSA found the Microsoft folks so abrasive that they got fed up and told them to talk to Spyglass. I can’t recall the exact timing of when NCSA ceded all sublicensing rights to Spyglass. It may have been after that experience or a relief that they could send MS away in good conscience.
- ericsink 2y agoI don't remember anything about "Microsoft Mosaic" as a name, but we definitely retained the right for Spyglass to sell our own browsers. In my recollection, the initial payment from Microsoft to Spyglass was higher than what Marc said, but I'm not sure. But I am sure that the deal was later renegotiated at a substantially higher number. I'm also pretty sure that even after that rework of the terms, Spyglass didn't get enough from Microsoft to compensate for the fact that Microsoft, er, you know, killed the browser business. And insofar as that is the essence of Marc's point, I agree with it.
- gabrielsroka 2y agoThe video player didn't work too well. Here's the YouTube version https://youtu.be/8aTjA_bGZO4 https://youtu.be/8aTjA_bGZO4
- mturk 2y agoI've worked at NCSA (to one extent or another) for about a decade. It's pretty remarkable to hear (from people who both pre-dated and post-dated the browser work) about the suite of tools being developed around that time. Many had a deep focus on collaboration, but none took off quite as much as Mosaic. A few are harder to find out about -- like the XCMD extension to HyperCard that added support for animations right off the Cray, or Contours, or PalEdit, or Montage for collaborative environments -- and others, like Habanero a few years later ( https://www.hpcwire.com/1999/04/16/ncsa-habanero-hot-java-based-tool-collaboration/ https://www.hpcwire.com/1999/04/16/ncsa-habanero-hot-java-ba... ) left comparatively bigger footprints.
- hinkley 2y agoI stopped by the Oil Chemistry Building when I was in town a while back, and the day I visited they were tearing down the Fishbowl. I’ve gone places and found things still there. I’ve gone places and found them long gone. I’ve never come back to find a demolition crew working during a holiday week to tear one of my landmarks down. That was a very complicated day.
- devilbunny 2y agoNCSA tools were a huge thing for those of us who used DOS. In the summer of 1995, I was still using Windows 3.1, and I was the only one who brought a computer to the research program I was enrolled in (not CS). When I told people that they could use telnet to go read their home email, my computer spent an hour a day being the check-in point (it was a long walk to the computer labs on campus, and we didn't have local logins) for those who wanted to read email. The next summer, I was at the University of Florida, but off-campus. However, the Alachua [County] Freenet offered free dialup with PPP. Since etherppp emulated an Ethernet packet driver, the NCSA apps worked fine there, though obviously much slower. Better, more complete DOS-compatible suites have arisen since then (e.g., mTCP), but the NCSA suite was fantastic. Security? Nah, none of that. But useful? OMG yes.
- rwmj 2y agoI used NCSA telnet for years to talk to Unix and Microware OS-9 machines. In many ways it was a faster, more elegant terminal than what we have now.
- r00tanon 2y agoReading these comments after falling asleep to SNL sketch re-runs. They all sound oddly sarcastic and ironic.
- cafard 2y agoAt some point back when, I had decided that our government contract needed its documentation in hypertext. I spent a few days putting some of it into the GNU Info format, and showed it to my boss. He said something like That's interesting. Then I installed Mosaic on my PC, and ran the Info documents through a converter to produce html. I showed my boss the documents with Mosaic, and this time he said Wow!
- smokefoot 2y agoWhat a circle jerk. I guess there aren’t successful people with any humility. But seriously, he just used his own podcast to feature himself!
- HarHarVeryFunny 2y agoIt's interesting history though - I grew up and was using computers in this period (from 300 baud acoustic couplers and ARPANet, to 14.4K modems and BBSs, then eventually the web (Sun workstation and broadband at work, dial-up at home), but was not aware of all the history myself. The invention of the web was a seminal moment, regardless of what you think of Andreessen, and like he said it could have gone differently. The private networks (AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy) could have prevailed, but luckily the internet and open standards won the day.
- smokefoot 2y agoYeah, I mean I’m being negative but I enjoyed the video. I just found Ben’s whole line of questioning to be pandering and not a dialog (“why not MIT?”) I had a similar experience with BBSs and I remember the romance of using a modem. I actually grew up in Champaign and recall dialing into “prairienet.” I also remember using AOL, but mostly to find and download games.
- jmspring 2y agoI was just out of college (masters) when I worked for Netscape for a couple years. Worked with some super interesting people and learned a lot. General opinion was Marca wasn’t the best engineer and others helped out. There is a huge overlap from groups I hung out with in high school and college (UCSC) and people that were at Netscape. There were a lot of super talented people.
- bane 2y agoI "grew up" on BBSs in the >=2400 baud era. It was about that time, as modems became faster, and as the average personal computer came default with some kind of GUI, that it was only natural that BBSs started to move into the graphical world also. One of the first BBSs I ever accessed was Prodigy [1] when a friend/neighbor bought a bundle at Sears (of all places) that included an external modem and the Prodigy software. At some point we came across and downloaded BBS lists like Focke's and software like Telix, and realized we didn't need to pay $9.95/mo for access to interesting communities. The local BBS's were way more interesting and niche (and longtail) than anything found on the moderated Prodigy anyway. The pressure of not pissing off "mom" for spending extra time on Prodigy, which had a pay-by-the-minute, access plan at the time was extra appealing even if we could only spend 30-45 minutes on a local board at a time. It was all so reasonable. But local boards were ANSI and later ASCII and the graphics on Prodigy [2][3] were sorely missed -- which were about the equal of even the best EGA graphics of the time. Games were descriptive instead of graphical. But the local communities (who you could meet up with), the forums, and the price (free) were an appealing draw to an early teen with no money. RIP Graphics BBSs eventually arrived a couple years later but they were few, fussy, and were more representative of the (by then) aging Prodigy graphics than the new VGA and high-res Windows 3.x GUIs we were growing used to. We had a buddy, the next town over, who was a major Apple Macintosh enthusiast. As a result, he generally eschewed the gross and primitive ASCII scene, but was as cash strapped as we were. IIR RIP BBSs sort of bypassed Macs, but a bizarre sort of Galapagos technology appeared in the form of full GUI BBSs. I remember one client called "FirstClass" [4] that basically just extended the resource of the BBS onto the Mac desktop. It was absolutely mindblowing, and included a primitive ability to request simultaneous data streams allowing you to view a forum and download an image or a file at the same time. There wasn't a good MS-DOS/Windows client so we spent hours and hours and hours at that friend's house blowing up their long-distance bill dialing in to any first-class number we could come across. As a parallel track, in the early 90s, (maybe '91 or '92) my Mac buddy ended up with access to a dial-up Unix shell through their parents, who had it for work. We memorized the password and ended up freaking out as we learned how to gopher, ftp, and telnet to sites all over the world. The semantic binding of protocols://servicestypes made an astonishing kind of sense. I found out about the demoscene around this time on dial-up BBSs, but I found the actual demoscene on open access anonymous ftp sites in Florida and Finland and other places around the world. The amazing movie Sneakers came out about that time and it dropped into our developing digital milieu like warm socks out of a hot clothes dryer on a winter day. My friend's father eventually discovered our account usage (because we were blowing up his corporate account bill), and we were locked out. But I knew at that point, that BBSs were now the second tier in the information landscape. Cyberpunk novels entered my life and I knew the internet = cyberspace, not BBSs. I ended up in a special program through my school district that happened to include access to my own gopher/shell dial-up through the district. I had a luxurious 20 minutes a day and 1 or 2MB of storage to play with. But as a high-schooler, getting access to what I had only known as the realm of top universities or global corporations was thrilling. I learned how to exit the default gopher menu and use the other unix tools to ftp, telnet, and do everything else I needed to connect to what I inferred as other digital pioneers around the world. I graduated in '95, lost my access to the internet, which felt like the loss of a limb and spent a a year relegated to the local BBS scene, which was still going strong. RIP had stalled, and the Mac gui BBSs were only a distant ideal of what could be. Modems were 14.4 or 28.8 baud. I found out that some other friends were starting an ISP through some miracle, and I secured a job with them, quit everything else, immediately transitioned to living off of a T-1 8+ hours a day. I carried a hard drive in to work with me, connected it to a spare IDE port in my day-to-day desktop, downloaded what I wanted, and brought it home...like it was a thumb drive. It was a drug. BBSs died for me at that point -- I just...stopped dialing in to them. Very quickly we adopted this software called Mosaic, tied to yet another semantically aligned protocol called HTTP. It just slotted in the mix of telnet, ftp, nntp, smtp, gopher, and others. It was cool, but it took forever to load a page vs a gopher site or a telnet site. Usenet was the vibrant global forum that was the "big-boy" version of the local BBSs I had been using. I remember when Amazon first put up their website and sold only books. I didn't trust sending my credit card over the internet, so I'd find out about new books then go to local bookstores to buy them. For a year, I lived in the future. At some point we decided to distribute Mosaic, then quickly after than I remember an early Netscape to new signups (along with dial-up sofware, email software, and Usenet software) -- the entire kit fit on two 1.44MB floppies, a version for Windows and Macs (copied by my old Mac First-class BBS buddy). The rest of the semantic protocol internet, other than email died then -- even if we weren't quite aware of it. Gopher became a ghost, ftp lived a while longer, telnet sort of existed, Usenet was a constant "should we still mirror it" question. We would have killed the rest except the dial-up software, email client, and Mosaic needed slightly more than 2 floppies, so we filled the rest of the second disk with more software. Modems at 28.8 became normal, and we started get requests for 56k and ISDN. I started using my access in the ISP to create unlimited time dial-up accounts for my friends. Girls I like dated me because I got them internet access, and members of the U.S. Demoscene suddenly could talk to their peers in Europe because of it. Mosaic drove up bandwidth demand to astronomical levels. It was the Macintosh first-class BBS software realized to the nth degree. We move the ISP to the same building as our tier n-1 provider, drilled a hole in the concrete between floors and got rid of the t-1 by We dropped usenet, ftp, and telnet clients off the disks. Dial-up software + email + Mosaic became the norm. ISDN turned out to be kind of a bust, DSL was on the horizon and we saw that it was the end of the mom-n-pop ISP because of how the technology worked. We sold the ISP and moved on elsewhere -- but Mosaic + email + dial-up became "the internet" from that point forward. To be honest, I'm kind of sad to see PROTOCOL-OVER-HTTP came to erase the other semantic protocols. The way in which the browser kind of erased the rest of the internet has caused later generation from forgetting what could be possible over the internet. There's no reason at all that somebody can't come up with an entirely new protocol for a specialized service -- but the entire industry is stuck trying to figure out how to shove a square protocol into a circular HTTP(s) hole. This has allowed browser makers to really centralize and control large portions of the internet. It's like being told you must stick to specific roads when you are standing in the middle of an easily traversable, open, recently mowed, field. If there is one thing I could will back into existence from OG internet is that concept. The Web IS NOT the internet. 1 - https://youtu.be/FNxKg6ZXax8 https://youtu.be/FNxKg6ZXax8 2 - https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/where-online-services-go-when-they-die/374099/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/where... 3 - https://archive.is/vVRQQ https://archive.is/vVRQQ 4 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FirstClass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FirstClass
- AK42 2y agoSuch a profound time - I was using gopher and AOL to connect to the internet and then there was Mosaic... which literally changed everything and defined my life and work since. Thanks Marc and the NSCA team.
- sixQuarks 2y agoDoes anyone remember a guy who coded a browser during the early days and sold it to Apple for $100 million? It turned out to be useless and Apple shut it down right away.
- godzillabrennus 2y agoNever forget the “Swirl Society of Netscape” http://totic.org/nscp/swirl/swirl.html http://totic.org/nscp/swirl/swirl.html
- HarHarVeryFunny 2y agoMarc mentions the "view source" feature of Mosaic as being important to give people a toehold in developing web pages, and of course the early browsers also included HTML editors so that you could develop right in the browser. I remember using Netscape in the early days, then eventually migrating to SeaMonkey which had the same all-in-one approach of bundling web browser, HTML editor, UseNet client and e-mail client in a single application. I'm sure most younger people think of the internet either as the web (i.e. web pages you can access in your browser) or depending on age maybe just social media apps like TikTok and Snapchat, but of course the internet is just the network itself that connects everyone together, and then there are layers of software protocols (starting with TCP/IP) that support various apps on top of that. If you're young the only protocol you may have heard of is HTTP (Hyper-Text Transport Protocol) which is what the web (World Wide Web) uses to send web pages from server to client (browser), which you are reminded of in web based URLs starting with http://www http://www., where the www is also a reminder of the original "World Wide Web" name. Other internet applications use their own transport protocols on top of TCP/IP to communicate, so we also have NNTP (Network News Transport Protocol) for UseNet, SMTP (Simple Mail Transport Protocol) for e-mail, and FTP (File Transport Protocol) for file transfer. The power of the standard protocols was that they decoupled application from communications so that many alternate web browsers, e-mail clients, etc could exist and all happily communicate with servers supporting these protocols. A good example of what happens when you don't do this is instant messaging where originally the IRC (Internet Relay Chat) protocol was used as a standard, but later chat became balkanized into competing non-standard applications such as AIM, MSN and ICQ which were not able to inter-communicate until many eventually supported ICQ's Jabber/XMPP protocol. Even today instant messaging suffers from balkanization with iPhone and Android not able to share all features (blue vs green messages), although that is finally improving. Nowadays most people have switched to web-based mail rather than using SMTP clients, but happily the e-mail servers still use SMTP to inter-communicate, so we can still send e-mail to each other! The latest internet trend is all the social media apps - Twitter, TikTok, Snapshat, etc - which just like the instant messagers use their own proprietary protocols to talk to their servers, and are therefore not able to inter-communicate.
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- jeremie 2y agoGreat memories! Back in ‘98 I found a floppy with my original 1994 Netscape Mosaic v 0.93 Beta and shared a bunch of tidbits about it on my personal site (thank you Internet Archive!): https://web.archive.org/web/20010430044121/http://www.jeremie.com/misc/moz/ https://web.archive.org/web/20010430044121/http://www.jeremi... Posted it to slashdot at the time too, I miss those green colors ;) https://slashdot.org/story/98/10/28/1923205/original-netscape-mosaic-v-093-beta https://slashdot.org/story/98/10/28/1923205/original-netscap...
- PeterStuer 2y agoI remember the looks of despair from network managements as I told them about Mosaic. "Downloading 100s of KB just to look at stuff once!?*&!". Admittedly, the whole of our university was behind a 2 Mbit link, which was probably the most Internet bandwith in the whole of Belgium at the time.
- spencerchubb 2y agoThis is happening today with LLMs. "You need how much RAM to run that!?"
- gmiller123456 2y agoI was a bit surprised how much he emphasized how open the protocol was. I remember seeing you could mail in a form asking for the code. Part of the form asked why you wanted it, for which I said I wanted to learn the protocol used so I could write a server. The response I got back was that they couldn't release the code to an individual, only organizations. There may have been other sources for information on the protocol, but they didn't bother telling me if there was.
- heratyian 2y agoWow. I didn't know there was long term beef with the University of Illinois.
- fouc 2y agoAmusing, at the beginning they make fun of people retconning fake histories onto successful people, even referencing Elon Musk and the emerald mine.