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The story, as best I can remember, of the origin of Mosaic and Netscape [video]

372 points by kjhughes

by gabrielsroka

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The video player didn't work too well. Here's the YouTube version
https://youtu.be/8aTjA_bGZO4

by ericsink

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Based on my understanding, some of the details he gave about the Spyglass/Microsoft situation are not quite right, but I don't think it would appropriate for me to provide specific corrections.
However, since I was the Project Lead for the Spyglass browser team, there is one correction I can offer: We licensed the Mosaic code, but we never used any of it. Spyglass Mosaic was written from scratch.
In big picture terms, Marc's recollections look essentially correct, and he even shared a couple of credible-looking tidbits that I didn't know.
It was a crazy time. Netscape beat us, but I remember my boss observing that we beat everyone who didn't outspend us by a favor of five. I didn't get mega-rich or mega-famous like Marc (deservedly) did, but I learned a lot, and I remain thankful to have been involved in the story.

by detourdog

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I remember being underwhelmed by the www before the graphical browser. Gopher I felt was superior. I would read about the graphical web browser in magazines but it required a slip Connection which may not have existed at this point.
One day I read about a guy in brooklyn who had a website at www.soundtube.com and was selling music on the internet . I got in touch and went to his office in brooklyn to look at his website in a graphical browser. I than followed his lead in getting setup.
The logo for the site was a half squeezed tube of toothpaste with the word sound tube on it.
I don’t remember his delivery mechanism. The last time I visited the site it was the same logo but with the subtext that “what could have been”.
I occasionally look for more information about sound tube.
Seems to be lost but I hope it is only missing.

by bengoodger

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I'm about a half hour into this, and listening to Marc talk about newsgroups brings strong pangs of nostalgia. These days I'm a bit of a greybeard (salt-n-pepper beard?) of web browsing, but I remember getting started in the late days of Netscape, as a teenage open source hacker discovering all the Netscape engineers sitting on the npm.* newsgroups.. how wild it was to be able to turn up there with a question about the browser you used every day and have someone working on it answer! Netscape didn't survive, but what a legacy.

by webwielder2

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I recently read Michael Lewis's "The New New Thing," which posits that Netscape was a get-rich-quick scheme by Jim Clark to fund a computer-navigated sailboat. He knew that Microsoft would render the company obsolete in six months, and bet that investors wouldn't glom on to that fact quickly enough. And boy was he right!

by mturk

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I've worked at NCSA (to one extent or another) for about a decade. It's pretty remarkable to hear (from people who both pre-dated and post-dated the browser work) about the suite of tools being developed around that time. Many had a deep focus on collaboration, but none took off quite as much as Mosaic. A few are harder to find out about -- like the XCMD extension to HyperCard that added support for animations right off the Cray, or Contours, or PalEdit, or Montage for collaborative environments -- and others, like Habanero a few years later ( https://www.hpcwire.com/1999/04/16/ncsa-habanero-hot-java-ba... ) left comparatively bigger footprints.

by talkingtab

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We can all over estimate our intelligence. I remember clearly getting some email from a list, downloading some weird thing and trying it. I remember clearly deciding it was just total junk - it took me about 5 minutes - and I deleted it.
Of course this was Mosaic. And of course I was totally and completely wrong. Said he while using the Firefox web browser. And when was the last time I used telnet?

by janvdberg

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Great, I am gonna watch this. Hopefully this video also explains what the name 'Netscape' means or implies or is based on. Because I've always found it kind of striking that the name has the same letters (and sort of sounds) like 'NCSA' where Mosaic was originally developed, that seems like more than a coincidence?

by jeremie

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Great memories! Back in ‘98 I found a floppy with my original 1994 Netscape Mosaic v 0.93 Beta and shared a bunch of tidbits about it on my personal site (thank you Internet Archive!):
https://web.archive.org/web/20010430044121/http://www.jeremi...
Posted it to slashdot at the time too, I miss those green colors ;)
https://slashdot.org/story/98/10/28/1923205/original-netscap...

by s1mon

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I can't wait to see what JWZ has to say about this.

by PeterStuer

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I remember the looks of despair from network managements as I told them about Mosaic. "Downloading 100s of KB just to look at stuff once!?*&!". Admittedly, the whole of our university was behind a 2 Mbit link, which was probably the most Internet bandwith in the whole of Belgium at the time.

by cafard

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At some point back when, I had decided that our government contract needed its documentation in hypertext. I spent a few days putting some of it into the GNU Info format, and showed it to my boss. He said something like That's interesting.
Then I installed Mosaic on my PC, and ran the Info documents through a converter to produce html. I showed my boss the documents with Mosaic, and this time he said Wow!

by dang

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I had to take something out of the title to squeeze in "[video]" so I took out the removeable bits: the word "true" and the original punctuation.
No lack of truth or taste in punctuation is implied by this edit.

by wenbin

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gonna watch it over the weekend :)
And re-watch this also - Project Code Rush - The Beginnings of Netscape / Mozilla Documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q7FTjhvZ7Y

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by jmspring

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I was just out of college (masters) when I worked for Netscape for a couple years. Worked with some super interesting people and learned a lot. General opinion was Marca wasn’t the best engineer and others helped out.
There is a huge overlap from groups I hung out with in high school and college (UCSC) and people that were at Netscape. There were a lot of super talented people.

by gmiller123456

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I was a bit surprised how much he emphasized how open the protocol was. I remember seeing you could mail in a form asking for the code. Part of the form asked why you wanted it, for which I said I wanted to learn the protocol used so I could write a server. The response I got back was that they couldn't release the code to an individual, only organizations. There may have been other sources for information on the protocol, but they didn't bother telling me if there was.

by godzillabrennus

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Never forget the “Swirl Society of Netscape”
http://totic.org/nscp/swirl/swirl.html

by HarHarVeryFunny

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Marc mentions the "view source" feature of Mosaic as being important to give people a toehold in developing web pages, and of course the early browsers also included HTML editors so that you could develop right in the browser. I remember using Netscape in the early days, then eventually migrating to SeaMonkey which had the same all-in-one approach of bundling web browser, HTML editor, UseNet client and e-mail client in a single application.
I'm sure most younger people think of the internet either as the web (i.e. web pages you can access in your browser) or depending on age maybe just social media apps like TikTok and Snapchat, but of course the internet is just the network itself that connects everyone together, and then there are layers of software protocols (starting with TCP/IP) that support various apps on top of that.
If you're young the only protocol you may have heard of is HTTP (Hyper-Text Transport Protocol) which is what the web (World Wide Web) uses to send web pages from server to client (browser), which you are reminded of in web based URLs starting with http://www., where the www is also a reminder of the original "World Wide Web" name.
Other internet applications use their own transport protocols on top of TCP/IP to communicate, so we also have NNTP (Network News Transport Protocol) for UseNet, SMTP (Simple Mail Transport Protocol) for e-mail, and FTP (File Transport Protocol) for file transfer.
The power of the standard protocols was that they decoupled application from communications so that many alternate web browsers, e-mail clients, etc could exist and all happily communicate with servers supporting these protocols. A good example of what happens when you don't do this is instant messaging where originally the IRC (Internet Relay Chat) protocol was used as a standard, but later chat became balkanized into competing non-standard applications such as AIM, MSN and ICQ which were not able to inter-communicate until many eventually supported ICQ's Jabber/XMPP protocol. Even today instant messaging suffers from balkanization with iPhone and Android not able to share all features (blue vs green messages), although that is finally improving.
Nowadays most people have switched to web-based mail rather than using SMTP clients, but happily the e-mail servers still use SMTP to inter-communicate, so we can still send e-mail to each other!
The latest internet trend is all the social media apps - Twitter, TikTok, Snapshat, etc - which just like the instant messagers use their own proprietary protocols to talk to their servers, and are therefore not able to inter-communicate.

by AK42

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Such a profound time - I was using gopher and AOL to connect to the internet and then there was Mosaic... which literally changed everything and defined my life and work since. Thanks Marc and the NSCA team.

by heratyian

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Wow. I didn't know there was long term beef with the University of Illinois.

by r00tanon

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Reading these comments after falling asleep to SNL sketch re-runs. They all sound oddly sarcastic and ironic.

by fouc

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Amusing, at the beginning they make fun of people retconning fake histories onto successful people, even referencing Elon Musk and the emerald mine.

by bane

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I "grew up" on BBSs in the >=2400 baud era. It was about that time, as modems became faster, and as the average personal computer came default with some kind of GUI, that it was only natural that BBSs started to move into the graphical world also. One of the first BBSs I ever accessed was Prodigy [1] when a friend/neighbor bought a bundle at Sears (of all places) that included an external modem and the Prodigy software.
At some point we came across and downloaded BBS lists like Focke's and software like Telix, and realized we didn't need to pay $9.95/mo for access to interesting communities. The local BBS's were way more interesting and niche (and longtail) than anything found on the moderated Prodigy anyway. The pressure of not pissing off "mom" for spending extra time on Prodigy, which had a pay-by-the-minute, access plan at the time was extra appealing even if we could only spend 30-45 minutes on a local board at a time. It was all so reasonable.
But local boards were ANSI and later ASCII and the graphics on Prodigy [2][3] were sorely missed -- which were about the equal of even the best EGA graphics of the time. Games were descriptive instead of graphical. But the local communities (who you could meet up with), the forums, and the price (free) were an appealing draw to an early teen with no money. RIP Graphics BBSs eventually arrived a couple years later but they were few, fussy, and were more representative of the (by then) aging Prodigy graphics than the new VGA and high-res Windows 3.x GUIs we were growing used to.
We had a buddy, the next town over, who was a major Apple Macintosh enthusiast. As a result, he generally eschewed the gross and primitive ASCII scene, but was as cash strapped as we were. IIR RIP BBSs sort of bypassed Macs, but a bizarre sort of Galapagos technology appeared in the form of full GUI BBSs. I remember one client called "FirstClass" [4] that basically just extended the resource of the BBS onto the Mac desktop. It was absolutely mindblowing, and included a primitive ability to request simultaneous data streams allowing you to view a forum and download an image or a file at the same time. There wasn't a good MS-DOS/Windows client so we spent hours and hours and hours at that friend's house blowing up their long-distance bill dialing in to any first-class number we could come across.
As a parallel track, in the early 90s, (maybe '91 or '92) my Mac buddy ended up with access to a dial-up Unix shell through their parents, who had it for work. We memorized the password and ended up freaking out as we learned how to gopher, ftp, and telnet to sites all over the world. The semantic binding of protocols://servicestypes made an astonishing kind of sense.
I found out about the demoscene around this time on dial-up BBSs, but I found the actual demoscene on open access anonymous ftp sites in Florida and Finland and other places around the world. The amazing movie Sneakers came out about that time and it dropped into our developing digital milieu like warm socks out of a hot clothes dryer on a winter day. My friend's father eventually discovered our account usage (because we were blowing up his corporate account bill), and we were locked out. But I knew at that point, that BBSs were now the second tier in the information landscape. Cyberpunk novels entered my life and I knew the internet = cyberspace, not BBSs.
I ended up in a special program through my school district that happened to include access to my own gopher/shell dial-up through the district. I had a luxurious 20 minutes a day and 1 or 2MB of storage to play with. But as a high-schooler, getting access to what I had only known as the realm of top universities or global corporations was thrilling. I learned how to exit the default gopher menu and use the other unix tools to ftp, telnet, and do everything else I needed to connect to what I inferred as other digital pioneers around the world.
I graduated in '95, lost my access to the internet, which felt like the loss of a limb and spent a a year relegated to the local BBS scene, which was still going strong. RIP had stalled, and the Mac gui BBSs were only a distant ideal of what could be. Modems were 14.4 or 28.8 baud.
I found out that some other friends were starting an ISP through some miracle, and I secured a job with them, quit everything else, immediately transitioned to living off of a T-1 8+ hours a day. I carried a hard drive in to work with me, connected it to a spare IDE port in my day-to-day desktop, downloaded what I wanted, and brought it home...like it was a thumb drive. It was a drug. BBSs died for me at that point -- I just...stopped dialing in to them. Very quickly we adopted this software called Mosaic, tied to yet another semantically aligned protocol called HTTP. It just slotted in the mix of telnet, ftp, nntp, smtp, gopher, and others. It was cool, but it took forever to load a page vs a gopher site or a telnet site. Usenet was the vibrant global forum that was the "big-boy" version of the local BBSs I had been using. I remember when Amazon first put up their website and sold only books. I didn't trust sending my credit card over the internet, so I'd find out about new books then go to local bookstores to buy them. For a year, I lived in the future.
At some point we decided to distribute Mosaic, then quickly after than I remember an early Netscape to new signups (along with dial-up sofware, email software, and Usenet software) -- the entire kit fit on two 1.44MB floppies, a version for Windows and Macs (copied by my old Mac First-class BBS buddy). The rest of the semantic protocol internet, other than email died then -- even if we weren't quite aware of it. Gopher became a ghost, ftp lived a while longer, telnet sort of existed, Usenet was a constant "should we still mirror it" question. We would have killed the rest except the dial-up software, email client, and Mosaic needed slightly more than 2 floppies, so we filled the rest of the second disk with more software.
Modems at 28.8 became normal, and we started get requests for 56k and ISDN.
I started using my access in the ISP to create unlimited time dial-up accounts for my friends. Girls I like dated me because I got them internet access, and members of the U.S. Demoscene suddenly could talk to their peers in Europe because of it.
Mosaic drove up bandwidth demand to astronomical levels. It was the Macintosh first-class BBS software realized to the nth degree. We move the ISP to the same building as our tier n-1 provider, drilled a hole in the concrete between floors and got rid of the t-1 by
We dropped usenet, ftp, and telnet clients off the disks. Dial-up software + email + Mosaic became the norm. ISDN turned out to be kind of a bust, DSL was on the horizon and we saw that it was the end of the mom-n-pop ISP because of how the technology worked. We sold the ISP and moved on elsewhere -- but Mosaic + email + dial-up became "the internet" from that point forward.
To be honest, I'm kind of sad to see PROTOCOL-OVER-HTTP came to erase the other semantic protocols. The way in which the browser kind of erased the rest of the internet has caused later generation from forgetting what could be possible over the internet. There's no reason at all that somebody can't come up with an entirely new protocol for a specialized service -- but the entire industry is stuck trying to figure out how to shove a square protocol into a circular HTTP(s) hole. This has allowed browser makers to really centralize and control large portions of the internet. It's like being told you must stick to specific roads when you are standing in the middle of an easily traversable, open, recently mowed, field.
If there is one thing I could will back into existence from OG internet is that concept. The Web IS NOT the internet.
1 - https://youtu.be/FNxKg6ZXax8
2 - https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/where...
3 - https://archive.is/vVRQQ
4 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FirstClass

by sixQuarks

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Does anyone remember a guy who coded a browser during the early days and sold it to Apple for $100 million? It turned out to be useless and Apple shut it down right away.

by kovezd

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Now I understand why Marc was so bullish on crypto.

by ghigh

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I remember as a kid being terrified of Netscape because of the ship's wheel icon. At the time I had a huge fear of the sea and seeing that nautical imagery made me feel sick.
I'd always choose Internet Explorer because of this. I'm really glad that Netscape rebranded to Mozilla Firefox. Much warmer and more inviting, less implied threat of drowning.

by smokefoot

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What a circle jerk. I guess there aren’t successful people with any humility. But seriously, he just used his own podcast to feature himself!

by santiagobasulto

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Oh man, I’m such a fan of Marc Andreessen. I know that in the past few years he’s come as a weird figure combining shady VC funds, with crypto and such things. But he’s such a smart insightful guy.
And what I love the most about these guys (Marc, PG, even Sam Altman) is that they ARE hackers. They speak in our terms, they have our awkwardness.
Thanks for sharing this.

by nytesky

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So this is an a16z podcast show? It's a bit navel gazing right, to interview one of the hosts? Slow news day?
Am I understanding the setup right?