Welcome to Netscape (1994) | Hacker News Reader

Welcome to Netscape (1994)

home.mcom.com

73 pointsshalmanese37 comments

See jwz's blog for details on how this actually still works. https://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/02/seeking-contact-inside-aol/

This is just gold:

view-source:http://home.mcom.com/home/welcome.html

:-)

I thought something looked "off" but it may just be my memory lying to me - I'm pretty sure the default (or maybe just the trend) in the mid-90s was for gray backgrounds rather than white. I see from the source that this page is a straight copy with no background set so in modern browsers it defaults to white.

Or perhaps it's just me? I would've been 10 at the time but we did have internet access at home (Dad needed it for work) so perhaps I'm mis-remembering.

You're right, it should be a gray background. I don't even remember when the browser default changed to white.

Wasn't it Netscape 1.1? Everything looked so modern after that.

<3 this source code. I think I'll start building sites like this again. At least I know it'll work anywhere.

I miss the pulsing N.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/throbber-rest...

If you can find the proper graphics files, the Firefox addon above should be able to reproduce it.

I tracked down the graphics a while ago for exactly this purpose.

http://imgur.com/a/R9b84

Always really liked this one:

http://i.imgur.com/0xn9DUF.gif

I remember spending hours (and hours and hours) downloading the latest Netscape over a 14.4k modem in the mid-nineties, and somehow that awesome icon really did make it all seem worth it. What a time to be alive!

Almost all of the links on the "What's Cool" section are now, sadly, defunct.

http://home.mcom.com/home/whats-cool.html

Good news is a lot of the links are browsable on archive.org's Wayback Machine!

I found it interesting that both Lycos and WebCrawler linked to university domains and were in subdirectories. Those where my go-to when I was first online, but I remember them having concise domains by that time.

Wow, reminds me of visiting the first internet cafe in the UK.. it seemed weird getting served coffee and cake while using a computer, + using very early internet browsers and Gopher.

Do you remember, Cyberia!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberia,_London

My flatmate's (at the time) girlfriend (at the time) worked there.

But none of us were cybergoths, really ;-)

Interesting, I wonder if the name was a bit of inspiration for Cyberdelia [1,2].

[1] http://letshang.tumblr.com/post/6801119158/cyberdelia-hacker...

[2] http://cyberdelianyc.tumblr.com/

Wasn't the first UK internet cafe in Cambridge? I think I've been.

That's CB1 you're thinking of, which I believe was the second to open. It's the oldest surviving in the UK.

There are still cybercafes in the UK. They are found now in poor areas, and they do phone calls as well as Internet access. Strange how stuff changes.

There are still internet cafes in most countries. Obviously not as much but they are still useful sometimes.

Jason Bourne is quite a big fan of them, as I recall.

My favorite tidbit about this site is that Netscape was hard coded to randomly hit a subdomain of that site, in order to distribute load on the servers.

I think the best part is the "what's new" section: http://home.mcom.com/home/whats-new.html

I imagine that today every minute more new stuff appears on the Internet than in all of those what's new pages combined. Just shows how far we went from there.

That's really interesting. Especially the search websites and the internet white pages considering what we have now.

The "what's new" section was good too. Do we have anything similar now? Probably Reddit.. but it would be good to have a "what's new" about websites and their content rather than news articles/pictures.

And they IPOd for what, a little over $100mn?

An internet-connected connected, cat-enabled, SaaS, Bootstrap-themed, social, app that does something, anything, can realistically imagine those numbers.

Certainly, from today's perspective (and at the time), these were internet heavyweights. I write this using Firefox, to whom Netscape was a direct ancestor. Visionary.

$2.9Bn

They were one of the last technology companies to produce, y'know, actual technology, a product, with a revenue model (originally the browser was a paid-for product for corporate use, free for personal use, then they pivoted to give away the browser to create a market for web servers - yes people used to pay for web servers+). Nowadays there's no actual technology being developed by the so-called "unicorns", just ways to trick you into viewing ads or side-step regulation.

+ I maintain to this day, having been in this business 20 years, that Netscape Enterprise Server 2.1 is the best web server ever written

People don't pay for web servers now?

Who do we call "unicorns" now? (serious question)

It's the hipster term for "technology" companies valued at over $1Bn. But AirBnB, Uber et al don't make money by making technology.

They make money by solving problems using technology, just like Netscape.

What's the novel technology behind running an unlicensed minicab firm? Or subletting a room in your house against the terms of your lease?

Your point would be stronger (and just as valid) if you deemphasized the moralization with respect to skirting laws. Yes, it's important to illustrate where the "energy" is coming from, but most people will pigeonhole your entire point as curmudgeonly anti-progress.

But indeed, our community is in a sad state of affairs. The technology industry got taken over by the LA business model - hipster home runs. Money and social recognition made it easy for us to look the other way, and to even mislead our friends down this broken path of mass media 2.0. Most "startups" purport to deal with technology but are essentially just creating CRUD CRApps, inserting themselves as the new middlemen, and whitewashing it as empowering individuals.

It's not a moral thing exactly; Uber's competitive advantage is that they don't bear the cost of compliance.

Sure, but that doesn't mean your argument won't be perceived as such. The knee jerk reaction is to think "yeah but those laws are obsolete", and identify with the direct connection between driver and rider (as the "sharing economy" whitewash encourages).

I for one don't mind the obsoleting of taxi regulation by direct summoning (which itself solves most of what taxi regulation was a response to), but I also don't perceive Uber as looking to eliminate regulation - they are hoping to become the new middleman by owning the market, buying "appropriate" public regulation to create a barrier to entry, and then enjoying the security of a public organization with the accountability of a private one. Actual P2P empowerment would consist of a bona fide application that directly interacted with driver app, with appropriate reputation system etc. But of course there's inherently no "scalable" profits (aka rent) to be made off of that, so investors aren't lining up.

> People don't pay for web servers now?

Back in the day, you had to pay for the web server software, as well as the hardware.

3,500,000 shares @ $28/share.

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