Saturday, October 16, 2004

Ten Years Of Netscape

Netscape is celebrating the 10th anniversary of its first browser release those days. On October 13th, 1994 Netscape Navigator, available for Microsoft Windows, Apple Macintosh, and X Window System environments, could be obtained via anonymous FTP from ftp.netscape.com.



I remember the summer of 1994 was the first time I actually used Mosaic on an Apple Macintosh. I think it was not until early 1995 that I switched over to Netscape Navigator.

Its funny to note that Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen originally named their new company "Mosaic", but dropped that name after a dispute with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinios (NCSA), home of the original Mosaic browser, which had been developed under the lead of Marc Andreessen in 1993. Later on, some people seriously dared to doubt Andreessen's contributions to the Netscape browser development.

Jamie Zawinski, one of Netscape's original developers, still got his online diary running, recapitulating how working life looked like at Netscape in summer 1994. Later on, in 1998, a PBS documentation named "Code Rush" showed Netscape's struggle for keeping its browser market share.