25 years ago today, NCSA Mosaic 1.0 was released | Hacker News Reader

25 years ago today, NCSA Mosaic 1.0 was released

ncsa.illinois.edu

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Reading this today on Firefox on a laptop running Linux.

22 years ago (when using the internet for the first time) it would have been on Netscape running on a green screen Unix terminal in university lab.

I used my first credit card to buy a CD from Amazon in the US. Never thought it would work. But then 2 weeks later a brown box arrived in my halls of residence in London and... well that really did change the world. Not the CD, the browser.

A lot has changed. It has been very incremental and lots of stop-starts, and there have been many pains (supporting standards) but it feels like yesterday. Nice to take stock and look back.

Ha ha, very similar story. I was working with one of the guys that I managed, and he showed me a book relevant to our project that I decided I needed to buy. “Darn, can’t get away at lunch today to hit the bookstore.” He says: “Order it from Amazon.” so I say: “What is Amazon?” him: “It’s a web store. Here is the URL.” me: “I don’t have a web browser”. Him: “ftp the tarball for Mosaic from NCSA and do the standard ./configure; make all; and you will be good to go.”

Here is the thing that really impresses me about Bezos. In a world where Sili Valley engineers were spreading Mosaic by word of mouth and just getting to about 50% penetration among engineers, Amazon was already a store.

What was on the CD ?

I used a text based browser for a year or so. Then, when Mosaic was released, I thought “wow they are really on to something here.”

I was happy with the lynx like text browser but seeing embedded images was mind blowing.

In the 1980s the Internet was gopher and ftp sites. At work I collected indices of what was on different ftp sites. I was sort of like a human search engine.

Was it easier or harder to find the information you were after back then?

Back in those days I literally maintained a bookmarks folder with every web page of any value, anywhere, on the Internet.

That quickly stopped. Bookmarks were functional for about a year, and then quickly became useless. The new hot was the search engine that'd just do the work of finding new sites to read for you.

Navigation-wise?

Not sure what you mean by navigation?

Since it was possible I've pretty much just used "print to PDF" to save web pages I like, which means I can use tools such as 'ls' and 'grep' to find stuff I only remember by a few key words, and I have an easy to maintain filesystem with tons of stuff that is easily and readily available, offline, which is great .. plus instead of having to deal with a proprietary format for saving URL's, its just PDF's. And boy is it fun to mine data out of my collection of everything interesting I've ever read online since .. I guess .. 1997 ..

Utilising the browser to navigate through the web compared to its ancestors.

My first browser was Netscape Navigator 3. I remember how little RAM I had, couldn't keep many windows open (tabs did not exist yet) assuming Windows 9x didn't crash. Some webpages were annoying with blink, horrible colour combinations, many (bloated) pictures, or they had MIDI, GIFs, etc. What I'm wondering about is was all that harder to browse then say Gopher or Usenet? Why is it a website like HN with so little fluff is a breeze to use while Aliexpress or Google News sucks?

The web has a serious case of bloat disease. Sure, back then, site were smaller - we didn't have all the bandwidth we have today. But as bandwidth grew, so did the bloat.

If it existed, easier, because there was less of it.

If it didn't exist, harder, because so little information was online.

To be fair, every technology is compare against the previous. So compared with using a library, or a BBS, yes easier. As some else mentioned, there was less online to discover.

A few years ago I went on an online hunt down various still running gopher sites. It was interesting, seeing the various things people had put online and forgotten about.

You can still run it on Debian[0].

[0] https://github.com/alandipert/ncsa-mosaic

There is a very good podcast episode on this from The Internet History Podcast:

http://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2014/01/mosaic/

Well worth a listen for anyone who remembers Mosaic.

There is now a book out from the podcast series too.

This podcast is fantastic! I've listened to every episode. I wish there were more similar podcasts or other forms of media that chronicle the history of the internet and related tech.

<blink>Thanks for the memories</blink>

Believe Netscape added that, while Mosaic added <img …>.

Yep.

http://www.montulli.org/theoriginofthe%3Cblink%3Etag

I work right next to the NCSA building, still amazed by some of the work they do. Especially, the move to add corporate partners.

Ironically, still bitter about losing out on all the upside of the web browser. The university of Illinois is pretty notorious for missing out on the upside of their work: the browser, transistor, LED, MRI, and others...

U Illinois got stock in Netscape, even though no NCSA Mosaic code was used in Netscape's codebase.

That was Netscape's story at the time when they were being sued for copyright infringement, but it was fairly obvious that there was a certain amount of code copying. There were error messages with the same misspellings in them... Anyhow Netscape decided to settle the lawsuit and give UI the Netscape stock. Interestingly UI then licensed Mosaic to a company called Spyglass, and that version went on to become Internet Explorer 1.0.

Wasn't there some strange IP ownership conflicts between this version and the one that eventually became Netscape?

Not to mention there was the swirl society of Netscape: http://totic.org/nscp/swirl/swirl.html

Use that.

Anyone remember gopher? And the two links protocol, with backlinks.

I remember seeing Mosaic and thinking “meh, not much more than gopher”. I sure didn’t have the vision of where all that would lead!

Yes, gopher was pretty amazing and if it had won, given its well organized nature, there would have been much less need for a google to add some order to the tangled mesh of the web than the tree of the gopher-verse.

Gopher still had Veronica and WAIS, though. No matter what you build, you're eventually going to need some kind of search engine for it.

Oh yeah. I ran gopher. But once I Installed Mosaic I never looked back. I knew the http web would be big but I vastly underestimated how big. Hindsight and all that...

Yes, I do. I loved Gopher. When I was a senior in high school in 1992, a buddy and me discovered Gopher. We were a really unlikely pair of nerds: I was into skateboarding and my buddy was a starting lineman on the HS football team. For the post-internet generation here, you have to understand just how unusual and uncool it was to be into computers in the early 90s. Even the nerds at my school weren't into BBSes or the early Internet but we were, in a closeted sort of way. So, every day at lunchtime, we would go home to our respective houses and get on a BBS and chat with each other just because the technology was so cool.

One day, we were on a local Waffle BBS (I think it ran on BSD-OS or something like that) and we read about a dialup at the local university that could be used to get a gopher client. You would dial into their terminal server and this gave you unauthenticated telnet access anywhere. From there, we would telnet to liberty.wlu.edu, some kind of *nix server (probably Sun) that had a no-auth-required login that would get you a Gopher client. From there, we would browse the Gopher-web, which was pretty amazing for 1992. We'd visit gopher servers in Sweden, Japan, Germany, everywhere. We believed that when we went from the WLU gopher (in Virginia) to a Gopher server in Sweden, that a modem was dialing between those two locations and so on. We were really worried that we'd get in huge trouble for racking up tens of thousands of dollars in long distance.

Yeah, I loved gopher. :)

I remember explaining to my parents what email was, and at one point one of them asked if it cost more money to send an email to a recipient that was further away. That's a similar level of cuteness.

I remember how impressed with myself I was when I learned to simply follow the instructions that said "press ^] to escape" when using the King County Library System's telnet menu system.

That is to say, the library computer system presented you a menu with a very small number of telnet destination options you chose by number. But if you chose one, and hit the escape sequence, it would gasp escape, and then you just had to know the 'open' command to telnet ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD.

You could also access the library system remotely, but I can't remember how or why this mattered -- maybe it was from another menu system that didn't allow escapes, or maybe there was a dialup option, or... something. In any event, you could hop from one place, into KCLS, use the menu to telnet, break out of the connection, and open a connection to another place. It was like magic.

Gopher is still a thing in certain parts of the enthusiast scene.

Notably, https://gopher.floodgap.com/ has been running since 1999 and is still going. It's accessible through a HTTP(S) gateway nowadays too since all common browsers have dropped native Gopher support.

The server also hosts the directory of known currently active Gopher servers:

https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?gopher.floodgap.com/1/...

...and of course there is the Hacker News mirror for those net users who don't have HTTP/WorldWideWeb access:

https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?gopher://hngopher.com:...

I have a fanless thin client acting as server as home that runs a little Gopher server just for fun. It's very easy to set up and play with and there are several daemons for it that run on modern operating systems and are available in most package repositories.

Seems an opportunity to plug my Gopher client :)

http://www.jaruzel.com/gopher/gopher-client-browser-for-wind...

There are over 400 gopher sites online currently. I crawled them recently, and drew a map:

http://www.jaruzel.com/gopher/mapping-gopherspace

Hey, I actually have your Gopher client installed on my Windows machine. Great work!

Cheers! Glad you like it!

I was in college at the University of Texas at the time, and my first exposure to Mosaic was in their new Student Microcomputer Facility. (Aka the SMF or 'Smurf lab.)

The SMF was a large and brand new ncomputer lab in the undergraduate library, equipped with something like 200 computers... 50 of them were Mac Quadras with 17 (!) inch monitors and the rest were Dell Dimension machines... 486DX2/66, local bus video, and 15 inch screens. These all had Mosaic installed with a UT page of some sort as the home. So, clicking on the icon brought up this hypertext display with this colorful 3-D rendered banner image at the top. It looked a lot like the hypertext help facility that Microsoft introduced with Windows 3.0, but better and network connected, and open, and accessible. Truly next generation stuff at the time, in particular in comparison to the purely character based internet that came immediately before. (Think telnet, archie, ftp, etc.)

I started using NCSA Mosaic in the computer lab at college in 1994. It was a very different world online back then, there was so much potential and so much hope. Even so it was hard to imagine the degree to which the internet and especially the web would become an omnipresent part of the lives of most people in the developed world, for good and bad. Certainly the idea that there would be billions of pocket computers might as well have been science fiction.

In 1995-1996, remember I had an i386 PC running Linux right next to a DEC Alpha also running Linux, with thin-net ethernet between them.

For many things, the Alpha was much faster. But for browsing, I ran Mosaic on the PC and remote displayed it on the Alpha which actually had a monitor attached.

Prior to that, I tried running Grail, a browser written in Python, directly on the Alpha. It was so slow it was basically unusable, i.e. slower than the web loading over data over SLIP a 14.4 modem. Running the x86 Mosaic binary in emulation on the Alpha via FX!32 was actually faster, but still too slow to use daily.

> Certainly the idea that there would be billions of pocket computers might as well have been science fiction.

There were a lot of people working on the ideas behind this kind of portable computing, even then. Just a few examples:

* Electronic pocket calculators were a thing back into the early 1970's

* HP had a portable almost-PC called the 95LX that was released in '91, and the Newton was also early 90's.

* Companies like Sharp were making pocket computers back into the early 80's. Some of these were PDA-style organizers, but there were also some that just ran BASIC on a one line display

* PenPoint and Pen windows were also early 90's.

Maybe the scale would have seemed incredible, but the concepts were very much in flight at the time.

I installed Mosaic on the computer I add in my office at University.

It was 1994.

Am I that old ??

I was 2 in 1994. So I skipped over using Mosaic and straight to IE5...

Yup

This morning I saw a comment about “back in 2014” and how they were in high school in 2012.

Fortunately kids today will soon change into tomorrow’s “am I that old” brigade.

If you had to install Chameleon on your Windows box to get TCP/IP working, you're old. Like me. =(

Miss the animated icon, such drama when browsing over dialup.

Browser throbbers were great. The Netscape "meteor shower" felt like it added some cyberpunk mystique to the nighttime browsing experience.

NCSA Mosaic: https://66.media.tumblr.com/619788fdd7d7c121578500013afd7ba7...

Netscape: https://i.stack.imgur.com/oqMri.gif

I wanted that so badly, but my 486dx33 with 4MB of RAM simply couldn't effectively run X. Later, with a SLIP/PP type connection I could use Windows and Trumpet Winsock to run it, but it felt like such a step backwards compared to using my own Linux box.. it felt hardly worth booting into the primitive world of Windows, even if it did get my a GUI browser. Everything else was so much worse.

It's too bad we lost blue waters.

Still my default browser!

Was there frequently while finishing up school last year.

Today, I assume we'd need to fill every office in that building with a talented engineer to produce a competitive browser from scratch.

I can truthfully say that downloading Mosaic changed my entire life. It was 1994 and after I finished installing Trumpet Winsock on my Windows 3.1 machine I finally got it running.

Started browsing and all of a sudden realized that it was 5 am and I was due at work in 3 hours! Four years later I'd quit my job as an ag agronomist for a fertilizer company and betting on my hobbyist programming skills started building web businesses. It hasn't been at all a smooth ride, tell people at times I felt like I took an oath of poverty ;<). But it's a journey than I am quite glad I started.

watch this scene from Halt and Catch Fire where they talk about the browser as the doorway to the possibilities of the 'World Wide Web'. It's great https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mi_fKu9WTAE

and also an actual scene from the season 4 opening montage showing them discovering Mosaic itself https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_l4dRfY-t0I&t=4m54s

I still have a 3 1/4" floppy of the 1.0 release, right next to a sealed CD of Netscape 4.0. Good times.

PC floppies come in 3.5" or 5 1/4"

;)

Well, there was the 3" floppy for a while too, you know ..

EDIT: Really: 3", not 3.5".

There was, but not so much on PC compatibles.

    snap install mosaic

:-)

I remember the day very well .. I'd just gotten an SGI machine for work, and was one of the few who could run Mosaic "out of the box" without faffing around with WinTrumpet and TCP/IP hacks and so on .. I recall the thought process that went "oh so this is just a fancy gopher, really, for transferring files without going through FTP or whatever.." straight to "oh, shit, it can preview images and I don't have to open them separately" .. to "this is the future, all computers sharing docs freely and easily to each other in a user-friendly way, which doesn't involve FTP or whatever.."

It was such a great experience, there were orders placed in the office that day for a few more Indy's for the execs, since nobody sensible wanted a Mac in those days and Windows was just out of the question.

Then, someone noticed that Mosaic was released for Linux too, and suddenly the Indy's weren't so hot but a 486 loaded with RAM would do .. the web truly transformed the hardware world as well as the online information society, too.

The bold (<B>) and italics (<I>) tags now work.

dearly missed

And the internet was born!

No, not at all. There was a lot more to the internet than just the web which was a later arrival to the net. The internet had been around for years. TCP/IP had been standardised for a decade or so.

http was just one of many protocols, and should never have ended up being used for everything, it's not suited. There was plenty of reason to be online years before Mosaic too. They just didn't yet have pretty pictures, ads and tracking built in to every request. :p

whoosh.

True, but the browser brought a GUI and ease of use. More people could use a browser to run ftp than could -- or at least, would -- run ftp.

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