And re-watch this also - Project Code Rush - The Beginnings of Netscape / Mozilla Documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q7FTjhvZ7Y
> "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.
A few days ago JWZ had a great take on where Mozilla is today: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/06/mozillas-original-sin/
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.
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://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]
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
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...
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.
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.
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...
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.