Comments on: about:mozilla

about:mozilla

ardgedee — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 15:29:21 -0800

Welcome to Mosaic Communications Corporation! It was 1994, and the World Wide Web as we know it today was about to be born.

Mosaic Communications didn't invent the web and didn't even invent the graphical browser. The Netscape browser and Netscape server were instrumental in commercializing the internet. mcom.com was one of the standard starting points for anybody on the Web, and this little slice of history can help the young'uns understand what the Web used to be like. Reconstructed from archived files for your benefit by one jwz, a task epic in the telling.

By: gen

gen — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 15:43:28 -0800

Tangentially relevant, 31 March 2008 is the 10 year anniversary of the start of the Mozilla project. Chief Lizard Wrangler, Mitchell Baker, talks about this anniversary event here: Mitchell's Blog - Mozilla Turns 10 Today

By: not_on_display

not_on_display — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 16:04:18 -0800

Wow, I feel like I have a 386 again!

By: The Light Fantastic

The Light Fantastic — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 16:28:16 -0800

You had a 386 in 1994? You poor sap.

By: Lentrohamsanin

Lentrohamsanin — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 16:30:56 -0800

This guy is my cousin! I'm sure you're all fascinated.

By: parilous

parilous — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 16:35:39 -0800

It was all so simple and boring back then wasn't it? No dancing aliens trying to sell mortgage refinancing or spastic windows claiming I've won an iPod. Sometimes, I wish I could go back ... *cry*

By: Burhanistan

Burhanistan — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 16:38:52 -0800

Or use AdBlocker...

By: boubelium

boubelium — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 16:53:39 -0800

Netscape Navigator 3.x has to be one of my favorite pieces of software ever. Everything since has been bloatware.

By: ardgedee

ardgedee — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 17:02:21 -0800

In the 'epic in the telling' link commenters are now linking to videos circa 1993-94 about our fabulous internet future. Go look.

By: stbalbach

stbalbach — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 17:10:18 -0800

The worlds first web page URL: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.htm is sadly "Not Found".

By November 1992, there were 26 servers in the world, and by October 1993 the figure had increased to over 200 known web servers.[1]

I had the lucky privileged of setting up and running one of the "200 servers" in 1993. The server software (the name of which escapes me) was not freely available, had to register and apply with CERN to get a FTP password. At the time the only widely available client was a unix text-based program that was pretty much useless - Gopher was the obvious future. Of course Marc Andreessen changed everything overnight. I remember talking to him via email when it first came out (this was when anyone could email anyone on the net and get a reply - just the fact of having an Internet email made you an interesting person) - I honestly don't remember what we talked about other than I was blown away by his excitement that it would change the world.

By: localroger

localroger — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 17:17:47 -0800

When I put my novel online I made sure it was compatible with Netscape 2.0. It still is. There is a clunky paragraph kludge but it was the recommended solution in the day and it still works.

By: bonaldi

bonaldi — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 17:24:19 -0800

3.x has to be one of my favorite pieces of software ever Speaking as someone who has to use a not-too-distant relative of that every day ... ugh. It's like going back and playing 8-bit games again. The memories are lovely, but ...

By: pombe

pombe — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 17:24:41 -0800

I fondly remember checking comp.sys.www.announce in my summer job in 1993 or 1994 to see what new websites had been posted that day. It's kind of like how I now check metafilter every morning, except back then just having a website was enough to make you 'best of the web'.

By: mrbill

mrbill — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 17:29:01 -0800

When I started working at ionet.net in 1995, it was pre-Windows 95, and we were still sending out floppy disks with a TCP/IP stack and Netscape. Windows 95 was so amazing because EVERYTHING WAS BUILT IN! I got to where I could walk someone through setting up Dial-Up Networking with my eyes closed. I need to setup a 1994-era system in VMWare, complete with Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and Winsock...

By: dersins

dersins — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 17:29:42 -0800

This is taking a long time to load for me. *presses turbo button*

By: DecemberBoy

DecemberBoy — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 17:42:56 -0800

It was all so simple and boring back then wasn't it? I clearly remember the first time I saw a company advertising their website's URL: it was a guitar string manufacturer in the back of one of those "hair metal will never die!" guitar magazines (I stopped reading them around the time they printed a letter from some Camaro-driver saying, unironically, "THE ONLY SEATTLE BAND I CARE ABOUT IS QUEENSRYCHE!") in late 1994. The web wasn't even the big thing on the Internet then, at that time it was all about IRC and USENET via shell accounts. If you had told me then how commercialized the web would become and that strip clubs would print their URL on the back of taxicabs instead of their phone number, I'd have never believed you. I'm not even sure Sun or IBM had websites then.

By: East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94

East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 18:46:26 -0800

The worlds first web page URL: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.htm is sadly "Not Found". Copy here More history

By: Ian A.T.

Ian A.T. — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 19:17:29 -0800

A standard ice-breaker when I meet people older than 27ish is "Do you remember the first thing you ever looked at on the Internet?" If you ask the right people it can become a hilarious and occasionally touching anecdote about the people we used to be 15 years ago. (Mine, for example, is exquisitely dated: Liz Phair lyrics, followed by information about Pete 'n' Pete.) When I say "the right people" I really mean "not nerds." Yes, I know, the Internet pre-dates the world wide web, and you were on a BBS when you were a toddler...look, just forget I asked.

By: Joseph Gurl

Joseph Gurl — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 19:25:48 -0800

Best of the Web 1994: "There were 5100 total votes; most of the winners averaged around 100 votes."

By: DecemberBoy

DecemberBoy — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 19:43:54 -0800

"Do you remember the first thing you ever looked at on the Internet?" I can't remember the very first thing, but I remember writing Pete Shelley (Buzzcocks frontman) an email in early '95 telling him how I idolized him and his music, etc. and if this wasn't actually Pete himself I'd "feel like a fool", and he wrote back saying "You're not the fool: this time." It was totally awesome. I wrote Bob Mould a similar email to the address printed in the liner notes of Sugar's File Under: Easy Listening, but he never wrote back.

By: bonaldi

bonaldi — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 19:47:08 -0800

I think the very first thing was the bbc homepage, because it was the only address I could remember, and then a Breeders fanpage.

By: tellurian

tellurian — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 20:00:02 -0800

This post made me curious. The 100 oldest registered .com domains. The only one I found interesting was John Gilmore's Toad Hall (if for no other reason than it has footage of Frank Zappa in Prague in 1991).

By: nightwood

nightwood — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 20:09:29 -0800

Ah, those were the days. I was working in the Physics dept at UIUC then - and had installed the CERN web server on one of our machines (most likely one of our VAXstations). I'm not sure if it was in '92 or '93. But mostly we were interested in browsing the CERNlib documentation. Hypertext was a godsend for trying to find the right math function call, and make sure that you had the latest documentation for it. At the time, images seem superfluous and a waste of precious bandwidth. Not to mention that most of the images done by the engineers were pretty awful. I miss the days when pages were tagged with meta-info and the browser got to choose how it was displayed. (Hey you kids, get offa my ~~lawn~~ web!)

By: ethnomethodologist

ethnomethodologist — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 21:06:28 -0800

Thanks tellurian- and it looks like the oldest registered .com domain has never updated its website.

By: The Card Cheat

The Card Cheat — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 21:22:40 -0800

"Do you remember the first thing you ever looked at on the Internet?" www.webcrawler.com

By: not_on_display

not_on_display — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 21:27:10 -0800

I first "connected" via a friend's university unix account, via lynx; I quickly bought an io.com account because my friend was on there. Didn't know I was surfing the web for a couple of hours until I was like, "hey, this isn't all on their computers, is it? ... what's this http:// stuff... oh, hey, where the hell am I, then? back, back, back... aha, here's io.com. Hey, that was cool! I wonder what else people have left up on their computers?" I didn't even know what a link was, but I was already tabbing away. It was neat.

By: mrbill

mrbill — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 21:29:02 -0800

I went to goodwill a couple hours ago. I am now the proud owner of a still-shrinkwrapped 10-license box set of Netscape Navigator 3.0 for Windows, Mac, and UNIX systems. The first thing I remember looking at once I got web access was this nuclear missile silo tour. I don't think the page has changed much in the past thirteen years.

By: Jimbob

Jimbob — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 22:31:33 -0800

"Do you remember the first thing you ever looked at on the Internet?" Paranoia.com. I read about it in a magazine article about The Internet - I believe I discovered the Church of the Subgenius through that site, actually. It died not many years after and the domain has, now, gone to a link farm as usual. But it was fun while it lasted.

By: dhartung

dhartung — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 00:41:05 -0800

Do you remember the first thing you ever looked at on the Internet? Cello. I'm pretty sure I used gopher to find it and ftp to get the software. Hey, I had to build the TCP/IP stack (winsock) by hand, too! It did take me a while to catch on that the "annotate" feature did not work the way Third Voice did (much later). I must have left dozens of notes for other surfers and checked back on them several times for replies ... all on my own hard disk, of course. I also remember the first site war, between a guy who had collected as many different kinds of TCP/IP drivers and other utilities as he could find, but had very slow updates, and a guy who had a bigger and more recent selection. The very idea that there might be two (two!) people doing the same thing on the internet seemed shocking (to that first guy).

By: intermod

intermod — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 04:37:13 -0800

Being an obsessive organizer of data, I used to maintain a list of books I'd read. I wasn't a voracious reader or anything, but I would get through 1 or 2 a month. The list pretty much stops in 1993, when I came across the internet. Recently I've been trying to restart that book habit ... In 1993 I remember having a 286 laptop (with supertwist LCD screen!) and a dialup account (Holonet, I believe). One month I racked up hundreds of dollars in phone charges when the nearest dialup access number was a few counties away (intra-state phone charges were and still are a bitch). Lynx was/is awesome.

By: 1f2frfbf

1f2frfbf — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 09:59:03 -0800

First website: Webcrawler, via Lynx. Weird web synchronicity: Back in 2000 I'd use Newt's cape to download the New York Times Mobile (now sadly gone) page to my Newton before I left for my college classes so I could read it in the back of the gigantic classroom where my American History 106 class met. I went there last week with a friend and her new iPhone and we duplicated the feat wirelessly. My past and present geek self were sufficiently stoked.

By: Chinese Jet Pilot

Chinese Jet Pilot — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 14:25:27 -0800

The source brings back fond memories. I wouldn't be caught dead with a CENTER, B, FONT, or HR tag today. It's really charming 100% HTML code. Adorable, even. First web site: Some guy's Twin Peaks tribute.

By: Quonab

Quonab — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 15:06:54 -0800

I had a 386 in 1995. It was too slow to run Win95. I finally decided that it would be easier to learn to use Slackware linux than to keep fighting with a TCP/IP stack on Windows.