[HN Gopher] The story, as best I can remember, of the origin of ...
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The story, as best I can remember, of the origin of Mosaic and
Netscape [video]
Author : kjhughes
Score : 67 points
Date : 2024-06-28 20:39 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (pmarca.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (pmarca.substack.com)
| s1mon wrote:
| I can't wait to see what JWZ has to say about this.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Who/what is JWZ?
| sib wrote:
| Jamie Zawinski
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski
| hoten wrote:
| TIL he owns and operates DNA Lounge. Thanks for the late
| night fun and pizza, jwz.
| worstspotgain wrote:
| I suspect he made the decision to buy DNA after this:
|
| 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 wrote:
| I went to that! Heady times.
| netsharc wrote:
| His 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
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| I love that this wikipedia article includes a "Principles"
| section.
|
| Is this normal for wiki pages on people?
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| That 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/
| matthewn wrote:
| Any link to there from here will only get you JWZ's take on
| HN.
| lizknope wrote:
| That's kind of hilarious. I guess he's using the HTTP
| "referer" tag
| janvdberg wrote:
| Great, 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 wrote:
| Landscape -> Netscape
| rzzzt wrote:
| > "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...
| nytesky wrote:
| So 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 wrote:
| One of the few topics on which he has something useful to say
| (Software is eating the world was another).
| jasode wrote:
| _> It's a bit navel gazing right, to interview one of the
| hosts? Slow news day? Am I understanding the setup right?_
|
| No, that's not the setup. The a16z podcast regularly (every few
| weeks) has the 2 founders provide commentary on various topics.
| Similar to Bill Gurley and Brad Gerstner (bg2 podcast) pairing
| up to provide commentary on the investment landscape.
|
| It's the other a16z associates that do interviews of outsiders.
| wenbin wrote:
| gonna 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
| detourdog wrote:
| I 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.
| dang wrote:
| I 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.
| talkingtab wrote:
| We 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?
| ghigh wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Your username is surprisingly fitting.
| schoen wrote:
| I 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.
| santiagobasulto wrote:
| Oh 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.
| webwielder2 wrote:
| I 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!
| bengoodger wrote:
| I'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.
| ericsink wrote:
| Based 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.
| gabrielsroka wrote:
| The video player didn't work too well. Here's the YouTube version
|
| https://youtu.be/8aTjA_bGZO4
| mturk wrote:
| I'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-ba... )
| left comparatively bigger footprints.
| r00tanon wrote:
| Reading these comments after falling asleep to SNL sketch re-
| runs. They all sound oddly sarcastic and ironic.
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