Mosaic Netscape 0.9 was released 30 years ago today
jwz.org
jwz.org
> Mosaic Netscape 0.9 was released 30 years ago today
> 13 days ago
> According to my notes, it went live shortly after midnight on Oct 13, 1994. We sat in the conference room in the dark and listened to different sound effects fired for each different platform that was downloaded. At some point late that night I wandered off and wrote the first version of the page that loaded when you pressed the "What's Cool" button in the toolbar. (A couple days later, Jim Clark would go ballistic in a company-wide email because I had included a link to Bianca's Smut Shack.)
> For those of you who are unaware of these finer details, 0.9 was the first release of the Netscape browser (which begat Firefox) available to the general public. This beta release was an unannounced surprise. Prior to this, everyone assumed that what we were doing was going to be a standard for-sale product where you sent off your $35 and then some time later got a disc in the mail with a license key. That we just said, "Here's our FTP site, come get it, go crazy" was, at the time, shocking to people.
> These anniversaries keep piling up, so I don't really have a lot to add, but check my NSCP tag or the Previouslies for more, particularly the links in this one.
> I'd still like to find a way to run a mid-90s vintage Unix version of the browser under emulation on an M1 Mac. I asked about that a while back but was never able to Make It Go.