and behold! many people checked out the weather and tarot card reading for the day.

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Um, what?

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Yeah, when the hottest page on the internet was the NCSA "What's New" page - and it actually listed every new webpage online.

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yeah, thanks for destroying my bbs.

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I used to have a copy of Boardwatch Magazine whose cover story was "World Wide Web: The Internet's New BBS!" I wish I could still find it...

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My BBS held out until 1997 - by that time I was getting one call every couple of days and I couldn't pretend it mattered anymore.

In the end, though, I'm glad the intarweeb came along because otherwise I'd have had to get a real job.

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Will this work with Trumpet Winsock? I have Spry's Internet in a Box.

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This is amusing, because of my comment below yours. Oh the irony.

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Coincidentally, I am at this moment drinking tea out of an "FTP Software Inc." mug!

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And that was responsible for me losing my first real job in the Internet 'industry' -- the company I worked for was called "Spry" and they were selling shrinkwrap versions of Mosaic in software stores around the country in a neat little package called "Internet in a Box". They sold themselves to Compuserve three months later in an effort to not go tits-up, and we all got laid off.

My career was to be an infinite repeat of this for the next 8 years. I sure am glad I'm a schoolteacher now.

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I mean, I worked at Spry too. I don't remember you, but I've sniffed a lot of glue since then.

I got hired in 95, signed a lease to an apartment just up the hill from Pioneer Square so I could walk to work, and the next day, they announced we'd be moving to Factoria.

I survived the first round of layoffs, but that just meant I had to deal with when they decided to throw out their browser and use IE instead. I left mid-96, and was the last techwriter out, which means I was the one that got the call from some stupid PM a few months later asking where everything was.

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WOW

that long. I remember that download. via a slow modem. :-)

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-rwxr-xr-x  1 greg  wheel  703540 Dec 15  1994 NS16_096.EXE

Download it here.

I know this file exists elsewhere in archives of old browsers and stuff, but this was the one I downloaded. :)

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None of you people ever actually click the links I post, do you?

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I don't remember a NSCP themed Doom. Crap.

I think the ST:TNG cube walls are a nice touch. That makes it more NSCP themed than marca's head(s).

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Dood, that MCOM website is sooooo 1994.

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That means I've been reading your rants for 10 years.

Great, now I feel old.

Wait until the people coming into your club were born after Mosaic Netscape came out.

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I'm still reeling at the fact that a lot of our customers were born in 1983. This is only going to get creepier, isn't it?

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I have fond memories of Netscape 0.9...

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IHNMTS except your icon owns.

Though I suddenly now miss seeing Green-Mozilla breathing fire as sites loaded.

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Ten years, and Brendan Eich is still in charge and still fucking everything up.

Ah, back in the day, when interlaced images actually mattered, and people would send hate mail to anyone who dared use <p> as a spacer. Fortunately the powers that be got over that idiocy, and didn't do anything crazy like add in a whole other language hidden within html to preserve html's purity as a semantics-only language.

Multiple connections introduced in 1994, and it only took eight years for them to figure out pipelining.

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<p>Holy hell, you mean there are other people out there who know how this tag is supposed to be used?</p>

fo0bar's friend: Hey, you should check out this new program called Netscape. It's like NCSA Mosaic, but better!
fo0bar: No way, Mosaic rocks!
-- Actual conversation, circa December 1994

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did you know waldemar? he's at google now -- definitely a, um, character.

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I loved this. Especially:
"Netscape is the first Internet tool that lets the average user with a 14.4 kb modem work with the Internet interactively,"

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Those were the days...

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Yeah, I read that.

Powerful stuff.

[j]

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Poor, poor NCSA Mosaic, with its lack of propriatory tags, tables, frames or scripting. Netscape was that evil baddie, my website was jpeg-free for a long time.

Think I'm over that now (especially since the gif patent issue)


the hatter

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"That's it," Zawinski said of his vocation as a club owner. "I just sell beer."

They say it like it isn't one of the most important jobs on earth. Bastards.

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Isn't that the second-oldest profession?

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So I clicked on all the links as I felt bad. What the hell 0.93beta is only 740k it works well on a 14.4k modem and I have crippled ADSL. So sool here's a retro brower, the default home page no longer exists so we'll type in www.netscape.com. Whoops lots of html in the browser window and then bang a GP fault. Oh well progress happens.

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Zawinski, whose title at Netscape was "hacker" before it became "hacker emeritus" and finally "loose cannon," is now the proprietor of the DNA Lounge in San Francisco.

Somehow I'm reminded of the liner notes to Monty Python's Final Rip Off.... "Eric Idle, now a nightclub owner in Sheffield..."

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Is there any of jwz's code left in Firefox? Or was it all abandoned?

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I don't know about Firefox, but I grepped through the Mozilla 1.7 source I had lying around, and I suspect that there's not much of my work left in there, though I didn't look too closely. Things I spotted that are still largely my code (though it's all been hacked on and needlessly converted to C++) were:

• nsMsgKeySet.cpp: the .newsrc file parser
• nsParseMailbox.cpp: the bsd mbox file parser
• mailnews/mime/src/: the whole MIME message engine. Though I'm actually not sure if that directory is even used any more; if that's still in use, it's the single biggest surviving piece.

All of the above code first appeared in Netscape 2.0 (actually, the newsrc parser might have been in 1.0.)

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