The king is dead. Long live the king.
Time to go ubber geek for a moment and reminisce about the old days of the Internet - back in 1994 when I discovered the world wide web as a freshmen engineering student at WVU. A bunch of us were in the computer lab running experiments on the VAXA computer system newbies were allowed to use. See the Unix systems were for upper classmen, not us lowly first years.
Sometime during the first semester someone told me to type: lynx http://www.playboy.com. I didn’t understand the phrasing but I typed it. And behold, a new era for me was born because right there on my computer screen. Anyone hanging back in the day can attest, it was all line driven with asterisks for pictures. One would move the cursor to the asterisk, click return and the file would download. Good times.
Later came the software package Internet in a Box and graphical user interfaces and the web were born - no more lynx (thanks Golden Gophers, by the way).
My friends at the time were hooked (not just on Play Boy, but also on a new company called Yahoo). During this time, the fine folks at Mosaic started this entire browser thing off with their academic research into browsers. Skip ahead and the Netscape browser was born. And was the best on the block for years. I personally consider Netscape Communicator 3 the best browser of all time. Like a great movie Caddie Shack or a 57 Chevy it was classic and damn good. However, like Caddie Shack II, Communicator 4 (renamed something) was damn hard to use and confusing.
The Netscape gang really coughed up a hairball with their version 4, while the gang up in Seattle absolutely nailed Internet Explorer 2.0 (or was it 3?). Over night through some hard nosed business (think anti-trust) and a better browser Microsoft destroyed Netscape.
The rest of the story is in the below link, but the browser is now going away. It’s linage leads us to Mozilla Firefox since the folks at AOL released the Netscape code to open source. I understand business and evolution, but it’s still a sad moment. I’m a Firefox kid and will surf away knowing the process by which this new upstart got going.
The king is dead. Long live the king.
Netscape Browser to Die a Quiet Death in February 2008 | Compiler from Wired.com
