[HN Gopher] The story, as best I can remember, of the origin of ...
___________________________________________________________________
The story, as best I can remember, of the origin of Mosaic and
Netscape [video]
Author : kjhughes
Score : 325 points
Date : 2024-06-28 20:39 UTC (1 days 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?
| TMWNN wrote:
| A mentally ill San Francisco restaurant/nightclub owner [1]
| who is eternally bitter that he did not become a billionaire
| like his colleagues and contemporaries during the dotcom
| bubble.
|
| [1] Well, until said restaurant/nightclub finally drain his
| remaining funds
| fragmede wrote:
| what a terrible take. no wonder referrals to his site from
| this one get the treatment it does.
| TMWNN wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| You believe he's "eternally bitter" and "mentally ill"
| but you've been reading his blog for over a decade.
| TMWNN wrote:
| It'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 wrote:
| JWZ 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 wrote:
| People 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 wrote:
| As 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 wrote:
| Please don't cross into personal attack on HN, regardless
| of who the person is.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| 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
| neilv wrote:
| There 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
| hinkley wrote:
| Just copy the url and paste it into a new tab.
| neilv wrote:
| That 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 wrote:
| They spelled it "correctly" there.
|
| 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]
| asveikau wrote:
| I think his bitterness and open hostility are not well
| received on HN and simar places, but I find it absolutely
| refreshing. He's often right too.
| yborg wrote:
| His blog is linked to his Mastodon account:
| @jwz@mastodon.social
| tom_ wrote:
| Clicking that specific link does work - at least, at time
| of writing!
| hinkley wrote:
| I don't think the dumbest thing Mozilla did was take money
| from Google.
|
| It was spending the fucking money.
|
| Foundations like some cancer groups and the arts have an
| endowment. Each year they build up their war chest by seeking
| new funding, but a lot of the money they spend each year is
| the interest payments on their giant piles of cash. Mozilla
| could have run in perpetuity on the money Google gave them,
| but instead they decided to branch out into boondoggles and
| dipping their hands into the cookie jar.
| pavon wrote:
| The Google search deal started at around $50 million a year
| and has grown to a bit over $500 million a year. Let's
| estimate $5 billion total. It is typical to take 5% out of
| an endowment each year today, which means they would be
| have an income of $250 million a year if they had invested
| the money instead of spending it. Not bad!
|
| On the other hand, the Google money accounted for around
| 85% of their income over the years, so if they hadn't been
| spending it they would have been operating on around 20% of
| the income for many years while the endowment grew, and
| likely would not have been able to keep up with competing
| browsers.
|
| Also, for as much crap as she gets, Mitchell Baker invested
| over 20% of the Google money Mozilla received during her
| tenure, far more than was invested by prior CEOs. And
| before anyone brings it up, all that "woke activist"
| spending comes from donations, not Google money, which the
| IRS prohibits them from spending on browser development.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| It's a very butthurt take about Mozilla agreeing to DRM in
| browsers. I prefer to watch Netflix or other streaming
| services in my browser, using its native features, not Flash,
| not Silverlight, not some native app not available for Linux.
| shiomiru wrote:
| Surely you don't think DRM is necessary for streaming
| services to work...
|
| My reading is that jwz thinks there was a possible future
| where DRM is dropped because it's as useless & impractical
| to enforce as cryptography export restrictions had been.
| Mozilla could have contributed to this future by not
| implementing DRM, but instead supported the outcome we got:
| DRM is ubiquitous, browsers that don't support it are
| disadvantaged significantly, and an anti-DRM streaming
| service (similar to GOG) no longer has any real advantage
| over DRM-enabled services.
|
| It is possible that no DRM in Mozilla would have resulted
| in the same outcome we arrived at - Mozilla gave in, so
| we'll never know. But what does Mozilla even exist for if
| it's unwilling to stick to its principles?
| Kwpolska wrote:
| DRM is necessary for streaming services which want to
| carry movies made by the big studios. They love their
| DRM.
|
| If Mozilla refused to implement DRM in Firefox, Netflix
| would have just said "you need Silverlight, Chrome, or
| the native Netflix app to watch movies", plain and
| simple.
| rchaud wrote:
| ...and there would be nothing wrong with that. As late as
| 2011, Silverlight was needed to stream Netflix on Chrome.
|
| It's not like FF is a major browser that _needs_ DRM to
| compete against Edge /Chrome. Its market share is in the
| single digits regardless.
| deaddodo wrote:
| > It is possible that no DRM in Mozilla would have
| resulted in the same outcome we arrived at - Mozilla gave
| in, so we'll never know. But what does Mozilla even exist
| for if it's unwilling to stick to its principles?
|
| If DRM weren't added to Mozilla and Firefox, then they
| would have continued to languish in marketshare on
| Windows/Mac and only would have hurt open source users on
| Linux/FreeBSD/etc.
|
| The long-term gains of Firefox gaining marketshare
| (shaking up the IE monopoly and allowing web technologies
| to break stagnation) were worth the short term loss of
| "principals" on DRM. At least, IMO.
| deaddodo wrote:
| Despite 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
| 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
| hinkley wrote:
| Starscape, city scape...
| rambambram wrote:
| Escape
| 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).
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| I understand the irony of featuring a web history piece on
| video.
| 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.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Every 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 wrote:
| Someone else told me they thought lynx came first. Is that
| really true? I thought images were there from the beginning.
| robterrell wrote:
| Lynx wasn't first:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb
| asveikau wrote:
| Not 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.
| dboreham wrote:
| Lynx wasn't first, but images weren't there from the
| beginning either. At least, not inline images.
| fsckboy wrote:
| lynx's goal was running in-terminal/cli, not "full web,
| because web has no images". HTML was also designed to allow
| unknown tags to be ignored. back in those days I ran mosaic
| and netscape with image download off by default to speed
| navigation up.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| The second web browser came in 1992. Unlike the first one
| from 1990 that was written in "Objective C" for _only_ NeXT
| computers (thanks to Steve Jobs BS), this one was written in
| C and thus portable to multiple operating systems and
| multiple architectures. It was distributed with a library,
| libwww, and at least thirty(!) simple, example programs
| illustrating how to use the library to write programs to
| access websites.
|
| IMHO, it puts to shame the bloated, non-portable, overly-
| complicated, advertising-sponsored crap that is distrubuted
| today.
|
| https://www.w3.org/Library/Distribution/w3c-libwww-5.4.2.tgz
|
| 30 small example programs written in C plus documentation for
| every one. Good luck finding something like that today.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| https://www.w3.org/History.html
|
| Line mode still works great. Text-only.
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| Oh wow, I had completely forgotten about slip connections, what
| a nightmare to try and figure out during the time period. Loved
| gopher, used it all the time.
| bane wrote:
| Remembering other pseudo packet data connections that could
| interleave various data streams all at once, I _wanted_ SLIP
| so bad, but could never figure it out. The paradox of the
| early internet is that we didn 't have the internet at that
| time to help us out.
| dang wrote:
| Pretty sure that was my friend Joe. A passionate music fan and
| early tech adopter who ran one of the first online record
| stores out of his apartment in Brooklyn. I visited that
| apartment too! Inviting you over to show you a graphical web
| browser is exactly the sort of thing he would do.
|
| It was called Sound Wire, not Sound Tube - which is probably
| why you couldn't find anything... perhaps the name got mixed up
| with the toothpaste logo in your memory. Memory does that!
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/19961122055147/http://soundwire....
|
| https://www.wired.com/1995/05/net-surf-44/
|
| p.s. I messaged him - maybe he'll show up in the thread
| fsckboy wrote:
| animated toothpasted logo
|
| http://web.archive.org/web/19980116081704/http://soundwire.c.
| ..
| detourdog wrote:
| Awesome, missing not lost yes it was soundwure. Joe must have
| been the one that told how to register a domain name.
| latchkey wrote:
| gopher client ux was really nice, but building the "gopherapps"
| was not fun at all.
| warpech wrote:
| Can you expand what you mean by gopherapps?
| 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.
| kovezd wrote:
| Well, you fixed a logical contradiction.
| 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?
| tambourine_man wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| Perhaps, 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 wrote:
| My 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.
| foobarian wrote:
| I first saw this on a Sparcstation in our college lab that
| had a giant monochrome display. Even though the functionality
| was not necessarily novel compared to latex or wordperfect or
| other local programs, what really blew me away is that the
| source format was an open standard you could pull up from
| IETF, you could inspect it and copy it and modify it, etc.
| After having spent a lot of time trying to reverse engineer
| .doc and other types of software this just felt like such a
| gift and I was instantly converted. I was in that first
| generation where everyone had a homepage in their home
| directory that anyone else in the world could visit since
| there were no firewalls and all computers had public IPs.
|
| I ended up going to grad school instead of jumping on the
| gravy train. Still kicking myself for that to this day :-)
| rjsw wrote:
| I think that HTML was a product of the exact time it was
| invented, it matched the point that some computers became
| fast enough to parse a text source format on the fly.
|
| I wrote an online hypertext system in 1985, but the storage
| format was optimized to make it as efficient to transfer
| and display as possible and was not easy to author. It ran
| on top of the GEM GUI and you could click on a word that
| had been defined as a link to take you to the target page.
|
| Someone could also have defined a rich-text schema in ASN.1
| in the late 80s then written an application to retrieve
| data in this format from a remote server over an OSI
| network and display it. Interfacing the typical public text
| database of the time to this would have been a lot of work,
| they just expected to output to a terminal.
| paulpauper wrote:
| run bitcoin core, mine a few blocks and delete. I am sure also
| people did that
| wil421 wrote:
| Or not mine bitcoin because you want to play Crysis. Or not
| buy bitcoin at $11 because I was a dead broke college
| student.
|
| I don't feel bad because I would've sold it at $20 or $100
| for beer money.
| 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.
| apantel wrote:
| Or giant ringed 'e' planets. You gotta watch out for those.
| They'll embrace you then extend you then extinguish you.
| rzzzt wrote:
| _wheeee_
| m463 wrote:
| just enter about:jwz
| 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.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| I know they are hackers. Unfortunately their minds have also
| fallen victim to all the political nonsense going on in our
| society.
| 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!
| hinkley wrote:
| That 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 wrote:
| > _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 wrote:
| and Mork. Not the alien, but
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mork_(file_format)
| quonn wrote:
| > 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.
| specialist wrote:
| Correct.
|
| Simply granting access to the host browser's DOM and
| event loop was intractably, technically, logically,
| morally, plantatively, confectionately, legally,
| politically, and in all other ways utterly impossible.
|
| > _non-responsive rectangle kind of UI that has to be
| loaded upfront_
|
| You probably never heard of the Shockwave/Flash runtime.
| Like Java Applets, Flash was also stillborn, for similar
| reasons.
|
| Ha.
|
| That said, Netscape's brain dead thread implementation,
| and seemingly unwillingness to even try to fix it, is
| what borked Java Applets. The success of the JavaScript,
| and now WASM, VM & runtime is proof enough of the
| feasibility.
|
| ##
|
| Mea culpa: Upthread, I lied by omission.
|
| Speaking of GUIs, you reminded me of Netscape's awesome
| Internet Foundation Classes. It greatly informed the
| subsequent Java Swing.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Foundation_Classes
|
| Architectually, IFC is Qt, more or less, but written in
| Java. As the successor to IFC, Swing is also awesome.
|
| With the benefit of hindsight, Swing's embrace of MVC was
| an error. But "we" didn't know that then. (Design
| Patterns, amirite? It was phase. Sure seemed smart at the
| time.)
|
| Ditto direct access to components vs requiring all state
| changes to go thru the event loop.
|
| I can't defend AWT. I'm sure they had their reasons.
| Probably peer pressure. (Edit: An unintentional pun!
| Peer! Like AWT's component peers. Get it?! Gasp; I slay
| me.)
|
| EVERYONE was so certain components had to be native and
| owner-drawn. Of all the prior cross platform GUI
| frameworks, AWT was simply the most ambitious, and so
| therefore the easiest to criticize.
|
| Having previously shipped a few cross platform products,
| with the scars to prove it, I was completely against the
| strategy.
| 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.
| tingletech wrote:
| What were the npm.* newsgroups? I don't remember that
| hierarchy. Where Netscape and Node contemporaneous?
| bengoodger wrote:
| netscape.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 wrote:
| Just 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 wrote:
| node.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 :)
| dboreham wrote:
| There were netscape.xxx internal news groups.
| esprehn wrote:
| That world lived on for quite a while through different
| mediums. I remember joining the webkit IRC channel in the early
| days and being full of wonder that folks like Hyatt were just
| hanging out willing to chat with me and answer questions.
|
| There's something really special about the community and
| openness of folks who work on web browsers. Maybe it traces
| it's way back to the newsgroups.
| 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.
| HaZeust wrote:
| Eric, 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| I 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.
| HaZeust wrote:
| Sorry, I should have cited. 1:52:30
|
| "The Microsoft guys call Spyglass and they're like, yeah,
| we want to license Spyglass Mosaic so we can build it into
| Windows. The Spyglass guys say, yeah, that sounds great.
| Basically, how much per copy are you going to pay us for
| that? Microsoft says, you don't understand, we're going to
| pay you a flat fee, which is the same thing that Microsoft
| did when they originally licensed DOS way back when. But
| Microsoft said, basically, or at least my understanding of
| what Microsoft said was, don't worry about it. We're going
| to sell it as an add-on to Windows. We'll have Microsoft
| Mosaic and then you'll still have Spyglass Mosaic and you
| can sell it on other operating systems or compete with us
| or whatever, do whatever you want."
|
| Thank you for your response!
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| I was on the early Netscape team and you guys were always
| cooler than us by a mile IMO. Markets aren't always about best.
| jesup wrote:
| In ~1997ish, the company I was soon to work for licensed
| Spyglass for use in our Internet-over-cable-TV startup,
| WorldGate. We ran the browsers in the headend, eventually on
| custom-designed laptop-chipset-based blades, 10 to a 2U
| chassis, with 10-20 browser instances running on each blade.
| (No commercial blades existed back then.) We compressed the
| screen images and sent them down to settops, with user input
| via IR keyboards and remotes being sent back up to the headend.
|
| I was hired in Sept 1998 to work on the browser; we had built
| our own Javascript engine to add to it (since that was kinda
| required for the web by then). I rewrote all the table code,
| because it just really didn't work well when you had "too few"
| horizontal pixels, especially if table widths were expressed in
| things like %. In the end, after a major redesign of all the
| table code, it did better than Netscape did in the 'hard'
| cases.
|
| However, before long, it became apparent with all the additions
| being made as part of HTML4 that sticking with Spyglass-derived
| code and trying to update it ourselves to compatibly implement
| HTML4 (or enough of it) was going to be a herculean effort for
| a small company (max ~350 people and briefly a $1B valuation
| (1999), but only around 5 or 10 people max on the browser,
| including the JS engine.
|
| Given that, I made the decision in late 1999/early 2000 to
| switch us to the upcoming Mozilla open-source browser, and got
| deeply involved. The Internet-over-cable-TV part of the company
| failed (cable companies had other priorities, like breaking
| TVGuide's patent monopoly, which they paid us to do for them),
| and we moved onto other markets (hardware videophones) not
| involving browsers in 2003. I stayed involved peripherally in
| Mozilla, and when WorldGate dissolved in 2011 I joined Mozilla
| fulltime to lead the WebRTC effort.
|
| The Spyglass internal architecture seemed at the time to be
| pretty reasonable compared to what I knew of the NCSA code.
| ericsink wrote:
| Interesting. I left Spyglass in January 1997, just as they
| were heading in that general direction.
| 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.
| hinkley wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| NCSA 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 wrote:
| I 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.
| detourdog wrote:
| I was installing ISDN lines in NYC I had various hypercard
| stacks for doing networking testing. There was a thriving Mac
| shareware market and HyperCard stacks were one of things I
| would download with gopher. The internet was full of strange
| repositories of software tools. I think the term at that time
| for impossibly connected systems was "toaster net".
| r00tanon wrote:
| Reading these comments after falling asleep to SNL sketch re-
| runs. They all sound oddly sarcastic and ironic.
| cafard wrote:
| At 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 wrote:
| What 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 wrote:
| It'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.
| jmspring wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| I "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
|
| 2 -
| https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/where...
|
| 3 - https://archive.is/vVRQQ
|
| 4 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FirstClass
| AK42 wrote:
| Such 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.
| kovezd wrote:
| Now I understand why Marc was so bullish on crypto.
| sixQuarks wrote:
| Does 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 wrote:
| Never forget the "Swirl Society of Netscape"
|
| http://totic.org/nscp/swirl/swirl.html
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Marc 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., 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.
| jeremie wrote:
| Great 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.jeremi...
|
| Posted it to slashdot at the time too, I miss those green colors
| ;)
|
| https://slashdot.org/story/98/10/28/1923205/original-netscap...
| PeterStuer wrote:
| I 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.
| gmiller123456 wrote:
| I 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.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-06-29 23:00 UTC)