End of the line for Netscape
It is hard to say goodbye. I don’t remember the date, but I still remember the first time I saw or used a web browser exactly. I know it was NCSA Mosaic running on a UNIX box in a computer lab at BYU. Having been an avid Compuserve users (and trying AOL) I do remember thinking, this thing is going to change the world. I wish I had known how. For those of you as nostalgic for cyberculture, here is some more history about Mosaic (from Wikipedia).
Scholars consider Mosaic to be the web browser which led to the Internet boom of the 1990s. Robert Reid underscores this importance stating, “while still an undergraduate, Marc wrote the Mosaic software … that made the web popularly relevant and touched off the revolution” (p.xlii). Reid notes that Andreessen’s team hoped:
to rectify many of the shortcomings of the very primitive prototypes then floating around the Internet. Most significantly, their work transformed the appeal of the Web from niche uses in the technical area to mass-market appeal. In particular, these University of Illinois students made two key changes to the Web browser, which hyper-boosted its appeal: they added graphics to what was otherwise boring text-based software, and, most importantly [sic], they ported the software from so-called Unix computers that are popular only in technical and academic circles, to the Microsoft Windows operating system, which is used on more than 80 percent of the computers in the world, especially personal and commercial computers.(p.xxv).
There is more history of the Netscape browser and the company.
Also, evolt.org has a browser archive with almost every known version of every browser ever released. You must check it out. I think I am going to download Mosaic and try to run it on XP under Parallels on my MacBook Pro (is that legal?).
