Hacker News Reader

My first install of Netscape Communicator had an offline mode, and one of my colleagues recent told me how they had fully working live cross-browser video conferencing in 98. Their biggest competitor was WebEx, which is still around.

I think many of us underestimate what was possible to do in browsers. What has happened is that these features have been democratised: what took them months to build I can now pull of using WebRTC in the space of a weekend.

View on HN

My very first software internship ever was getting streaming video to work for the Air Force Center Daily at MITRE Corp, back in 1997. I did it with RealPlayer, Layers in Netscape (remember them?) and DHTML in IE.

The thing is - the polish matters. You can't do viable consumer apps until they actually work like the consumer wants, which is often decades after the technology preview. You could emulate websockets using IFRAMES, script tags, and long-polling back in the late 90s, but a.) you'd get cut off with the slightest network glitch and b.) you'd spend so much time setting up your transport layer that you go bankrupt before writing the app.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com