Netscape's Constellation (1997) | Hacker News Reader

Netscape's Constellation (1997)

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69 pointsLammy37 comments

Wow. I was a contractor on the Netcaster team summer of 1997. That's the offline web subscription thing, the UI of which runs along the right side column in that Constellation screen shot.

A small group built a simple desktop UI as a tech demo. They'd start the talk at that desktop, launch the "web browser" and demo some web page techniques, then close the "browser" and deliver the punchline: "Now we're back to the desktop. And we're still in the web browser."

Front-end development in that era was called "web design", not programming. A big part of our job was to change that perception, to show that a web "site" could be an interactive experience.

The front-line techs at companies committed to a web presence already knew this stuff, and it was an incredible privilege to be working with them. But those responsible for allocating web site budgets had some tough decisions to make, 25 years ago.

I was honestly quite confused reading the article and making comparisons from what Constellation was doing then and what we are doing now (for context I was 4 in 1999).

They mentioned an "NUI" and called it a "Network User Interface", would the modern equivalent just be interactive websites that we are very used to today?

Seems that what really killed this product was just faster internet speeds. It was a good idea to "eager load" (if you can even call it that) content when we had dial up but even with DSL it pretty much removed the need since an article would take only a few seconds to load on DSL (correct me if I'm wrong, I was like 6 or 7 when DSL was a thing).

90's web development is very fascinating to me because it was truly a time before my time. I swear if Stephen Hawking is one day proved wrong and we can take vacations back in time, I would go get a job at pets.com as a dev.

Frankly, the offline feature was never a satisfactory experience. It was making the best of the reality of slow modem speeds, versus the clear increase in demand for interactive and multi media web services. Netscape was trying to address a situation that was simply not theirs to control; no amount of money was going to roll out universal broadband in 1997.

Offline experience required content providers to associate a web manifest with their pages that they offered for offline. Even those who went to heroic lengths to re- structure their sites to work that way, were often defeated by the utterly unreliable nature of dial-up internet service. Did the resource fail to load because dependency tracking is NP-hard, or did it fail because someone picked up the phone at 10pm, or forgot to disable call waiting, or the ISP dropped the connection, or…? Not the hill to die on.

Nevertheless, those very first moments of JavaScript and CSS were indeed very exciting, because however murky some essential details, the fact that web experiences were the future of UI for decades to come — that was crystal clear. It was a Singularity moment. Right there in the offices recently vacated by WebTV, across the street from the Shoreline Amphitheater, now part of the GooglePlex. I’m not sorry I was there.

(I was offered a job at pets.com — if you picked up an AOL installer CD, a pets.com sock puppet would spontaneously materialize and hand you an offer letter — but there’s crazy fun and then there’s just crazy.)

> They mentioned an "NUI" and called it a "Network User Interface", would the modern equivalent just be interactive websites that we are very used to today?

Yes. I think that the lesson of “NUI” is basically ChromeOS, a ChromeBook experience. You need enough OS to boot the computer, set up the hardware, and start the web browser. That’s a platform sufficient to provide pretty much enough computer for most people.

(I just wrote a bunch of paragraphs about trying to disrupt Microsoft Windows in the 1990s, but deleted it. Essentially, when Linux and open source boot-loaders had enough hardware support to deploy on real laptops, and web browser standard had enough features, and network was fast enough, mass-market “NUI” was obvious. That took about fifteen years, and thousands of developers. A tenfold reduction in RAM prices. But here we are.

Closer to 1997, we could do “NUI” in controlled environments, in corporate networks. Thin clients. Turns out, that still needed things like “Office” software and printer drivers. But oh my goodness how we tried…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray )

There's a live demo of Constellation in Computer Chronicles' Comdex '96 episode for anyone who wants to see it in motion: https://youtu.be/FNPCD55IQ8Q?t=711

I came here to post just that! On a different note, I'll take this chance to plug the Computer Chronicles Metadata project! If you're really into Computer Chronicles, you might even want to join our efforts to properly archive every episode on the IA :)

https://computerchronicles.karpour.net/

Thanks for making me aware of this! I am right in the middle of doing my own encodes (cropped, color-corrected, deinterlaced, consistent audio levels, HEVC/AAC, etc) from the MPEG files on Archive, and this will save me a ton of time.

Let's get in touch! There are countless broken and missing episodes, the good news is that the original tapes are now at the internet archive. So currently the plan is to fix episodes that are slightly broken (audio off sync, mono audio on one channel only, etc) and re-digitize all completely broken episodes. We also already found a few tapes of completely missing episodes.

Btw, the episode list on thetvdb is completely wrong, don't use it as a source. This whole project spawned from me trying to fix some errors in there and... escalated a bit. :)

Got a favorite email address? My only request is that the new tapes are also captured and uploaded in an interlaced format, since otherwise you will be throwing away half the motion information and make it impossible for me to get a proper 60FPS :)

I prefer not posting my e-mail address right here in the comments, do you happen to have Discord, Twitter or Mastodon?

Discord server for the project is: https://discord.com/invite/STPwnYqcnW (Not a fan of Discord myself, but it's what people use for these things these days, and it was simple to write a bot)

On Twitter I'm @karpour

Mastodon: https://mstdn.social/@karpour

Nice project! I love having this show on in the background and will help out when I can.

I can't think about computer chronicles without thinking about this segment about "computer music", I hope someone else enjoys it.[1]

[1]https://youtu.be/1LEn94TF1tg?t=1095

For me, it's the original IBM PS/2 review and its components "pop out" demo[0]. It's something worth watching!

[0]: https://youtu.be/yoAH1aHmwR0?t=861

Oh wow that is hilarious!

I don’t think I’ve ever heard of this show. Thanks a lot!!

My friends and I love watching the Computer Chronicles. Gary Kildall (CP/M, Digital Research) would make appearances from time to time, in varying states of sobriety.

He was a super sharp guy, a massive influence in the computer industry, and he died in a biker bar fight. What an incredible life.

My husband was a lead on Constellation, if anyone has any questions I will be happy to ask him and copy his answers here.

Did any of this ever make it into the "Maui"/"Xena"/"Javagator" codebase?

He says: No. Some of the Javascript/DHTML concepts were submitted for standardization and I think some of those became part of HTML and therefore made it into the codebase, but not directly.

What was his impression of IE4 / Active Desktop? Was it a serious competitor or a sideshow?

He says:

It was clear that Active Desktop was basically invented as a response/me-too to compete against Constellation and for Pointcast. We didn’t think it was a particularly good product, but because it was Microsoft and bundled with IE and they started locking up content providers, we had to take it seriously.

At one point late at night after some trade show they had in San Francisco, they dropped off their giant IE4 logo on the lawn in front of the Netscape sign on campus. We were still working and saw them drive off, so we went out and bought a bunch of spray paint and graffitied the ‘e’ so it was properly defaced before morning

https://people.apache.org/~jim/NewArchitect/webrevu/index.ht...

Wow, these site is quite a fun trip back in time! So much good reading here.

I love this one "How librarians are shaping the web."

https://people.apache.org/~jim/NewArchitect/webrevu/1997/07_...

For context, IIRC 1997 is close to when UserLand was first pushing blogging and syndication.

The first generation of walled gardens had largely been conquered, and the next generation had not yet arisen...

> Let's say you subscribe to the hypothetical MTV live site. You specify the music you like and it's automatically downloaded in the background or overnight. Clips for new music in your genre can be automatically broadcast to you -- no need to click and wait.

ah, the nostalgia of slow connections

Also, a vision of a world not hampered by DRM to excess.

"Clips", not whole tracks.

On the one hand, I did actually miss that. On the other hand, no; I don't believe that even clips would fly today.

YouTube Music literally has the full tracks with no DRM.

I distinctly remember watching music videos of Beck in what must have been summer of 1998. So it didn’t stay slow forever.

https://www.my90stv.com/

> “Instead of a scroll bar, McCue continued, with Constellation, you'll move around the screen by grabbing objects with the mouse and flinging them.”

This is a UI idea that only took off when capacitive touchscreens happened with the iPhone. It didn’t really feel natural with mouse or stylus input. There were some pro design apps that used a “grab hand” cursor for scrolling, but to my recollection it wasn’t in consumer apps.

Mike McCue, the person giving this demo of Netscape Constellation, is now the CEO of Flipboard, a tablet news app with a focus on visual design. That sounds pretty similar to Constellation actually! (Flipboard was one of the OG iPad apps generating buzz around 2011-12. I was surprised they’re still around today.)

Wow. That intro with the joke about Hale-Bopp comet fans certainly wouldn't age well. I was surprised he made such a seemingly tonedeaf statement, but the whole Heaven's Gate fiasco didn't happen until a month later.

> Netscape devotees everywhere await the appearance of the mystical Constellation with all the fervor of Hale-Bopp comet fans

A little cringe in hindsight: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven%27s_Gate_(religious_gro...

You make something fancy and it's easier to dismiss, downplay, avoid. Make it boring and easy and the barrier to adoption is lower. I wonder if some of these concepts would have taken off if it was just advertised as a boring solution to a boring problem.

Ahh, remember Windows 95/98 Active Desktop? What a resource pig! Seemed cool at the time though.

It took awhile before PCs really caught up with the demands that a full-fledged Active Desktop would put on them. I remember trying it on my 83MHz Pentium with 16MB of RAM, and later a 233MHz Pentium II with 32MB of RAM, both without much success.

Towards the early 2000s, I was using it successfully on an Athlon XP with 256MB of RAM, displaying some live-updating weather widgets. That worked wonderfully, and actually felt like a great use of Active Desktop. Screenshot: https://hardwarehacks.org/lt/bcweather4tn.jpg

The 00's, where the future existed but the 70's was the show.

I remember writing an "active desktop" page (the desktop was really just a fullscreen -minus taskbar- IE control) that had some green-and-black background and assembly code scrolling at the side ala Terminator (the code was for some DOS VGA mode 13h effect i'd written) as it felt very hackerish to have a desktop like that.

Around 1-2 days later i disable it since it was constantly eating all of my (200MHz Pentium) CPU time, visibly making everything feel slower :-P.

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