
The Year on the Net (1996) - bookofjoe
https://www.wsj.com/public/current/summaries/hypetoc.htm
======
neovive
For those interested in Internet history, there's a very interesting
roundtable discussion hosted by Walt Mossberg with Steve Case, Marc Andreessen
and Brad Silverberg at:
[https://www.wsj.com/public/current/summaries/hyperoun.htm](https://www.wsj.com/public/current/summaries/hyperoun.htm).

If you scroll to the question: "Brad -- you seem much less interested than
Marc or Steve in the prospect for non-PC hardware to access the Internet. Can
you really make the PC simple enough and cheap enough to make it a ubiquitous
access device?

Brad's response seems to foreshadow Microsoft's notorious mobile device
strategy for the forthcoming decade leading up to the release of the iPhone:
"...Given the choice of a Web appliance with a sub-optimal Web experience
(because by definition it can't do everything a PC can) or a PC that gives the
best Web experience, plays games, runs productivity applications and
everything else you can do with a PC, we think the overwhelming majority of
customers will continue to choose the PC. If the Web appliance is a 10x
opportunity relative to the PC, Netscape's investments certainly don't match
their rhetoric. Finally, everyone is in favor of the subsidy model, but no one
has agreed to actually spend their own money to subsidize devices...."

------
pmlnr
[https://www.wsj.com/public/current/summaries/hypefaq.htm](https://www.wsj.com/public/current/summaries/hypefaq.htm)

"Do I Have Privacy On-Line?

While you sign on to the Internet and blithely zap and receive electronic
mail, visit Web sites and bare your soul in on-line discussion groups, you are
increasingly being watched and tracked. Every move you make on the Internet
can be followed, and the information gathered can be used against you."

Is this really from 1996?

EDIT: Looking at the site HTML, it looks very legit, or someone remembers way
too well how '96 HTML looked like.

~~~
oelmekki
I wonder what the doctype is supposed to mean:

> <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//Dow Jones//DTD DJ-HTML//EN">

What is supposed to be a copyright notice or something?

~~~
grzm
The DOCTYPE element technically describes the Document Type Definition (DTD).
The HTML there doesn't mean it's an HTML document: it means the root element
of the document is an HTML tag. The "-//Dow Jones//DTD DJ-HTML//EN" is a
Formal Public Identifier, which specifies the actual DTD. The vast majority of
sites don't actually guarantee their HTML is valid or even well-formed. In the
grand scheme of things, this is most likely cruft left over from the early
days of when the site was published and a lot of these things were more up in
the air.

For a bit more detail:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_type_declaration#Synt...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_type_declaration#Syntax)

~~~
chrisfinazzo
It's never really gone away either. Even now, provided you take the time to
learn the format, custom DTD's are still very much a thing.

[http://leancrew.com/all-this/2014/09/sgml-
nostalgia/](http://leancrew.com/all-this/2014/09/sgml-nostalgia/)

------
piker
The browser wars link is great. It's crazy to see how fast Microsoft moved on
Netscape back in 95. Hard to imagine such a short release cycle for ANY
company today, let alone Microsoft.

> Microsoft has come a long way in a short time. The first version of Explorer
> was released in August 1995, for use with what was then the company's on-
> line focus, the Microsoft Network -- a proprietary network that was
> refocused toward the Internet in February. Explorer 2.0 was released in
> December 1995 and widely derided as an also-ran by the on-line community.
> But such critics were silenced by the quality of Explorer 3.0 [released in
> August 96].

~~~
epc
The initial iteration of MSIE was based on the existing Spyglass Browser (see
[https://www.nytimes.com/1998/03/02/business/spyglass-a-
pione...](https://www.nytimes.com/1998/03/02/business/spyglass-a-pioneer-
learns-hard-lessons-about-microsoft.html) ). Spyglass made a deal with MS to
get a % of the sales of MSIE. Unfortunately for Spyglass, MS gave IE away for
free.

~~~
ktpsns
Wow, I never heard of this story so far. Back then, I was naive and young and
believed Internet Explorer to be the better browser ;-)

~~~
epc
When I first started running www.ibm.com in 1994 the only realistic browser
options were Viola and Mosaic. IBM WebExplorer (OS/2 only at first) showed up
and was fairly good but quickly lost out to the Netscape betas. While I was
aware of Spyglass I can't remember ever using it.

When MSIE first came out I was explicitly prohibited from using it (typical of
IBM at the time). Netscape gets slagged for becoming bloatware but the initial
versions were fairly decent and cross–platform. IBM WebExplorer was genuinely
not too bad, but it became a victim of IBM internal politics and died a slow
death of neglect.

True tidbit which I have no public sources to cite: IBM WebExplorer was the
first browser to support scripting, albeit in Rexx, IIRC a couple of months
before LiveScript came to Netscape. IBM, in its wisdom, decided not to release
that browser, I believe out of concern it might undercut the market for Lotus
Notes.

~~~
ebj73
I was first online during the summer of 1993. I remember using a browser
called Cello, which was developed at Cornell Law School. I suppose it's name
must somehow be inspired by the name of the Viola browser that you mention. I
did not know about Viola at the time.

I also remember using a shareware winsock implementation to get online,
Trumpet Winsock.

~~~
epc
I remember Cello, I think I even tried the beta port of it to OS/2\. IIRC it
died fairly quickly after Mosaic appeared.

TCP/IP on OS/2 2.x and Windows 3.x was provided through shims or DLLs. I think
out-of-the-box OS/2 came with no networking at all (you could add SNA/APPC)
and Windows had a couple of TCP/IP packages you could add. Neither operating
system was prepared for the explosion in TCP/IP networking in 1994-1995.

------
indescions_2018
Found this great Marc Andreessen keynote from the Netscape Developer
Conference in 1996. Netscape wanted to be everything simultaneously. Youtube,
Slack, Gmail, Amazon, AWS, Dropbox and about a dozen other businesses. Wonder
if they just focused on one product. Say "groupware for Fortune 500
intranets". They would have increased chance of survivability. Even
considering Win98 bundling its competing offering in their OS ;)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8wdc9qkkV4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8wdc9qkkV4)

~~~
forgotmypw
Did Netscape really die, or am I using its (wonderful) offspring to post this
comment?

~~~
pjc50
The company is dead and almost all the code has been rewritten. Is it your
grandfather's axe if you've replaced both the blade and the handle?

At least about:mozilla still works.

~~~
forgotmypw
>Is it your grandfather's axe if you've replaced both the blade and the
handle?

It might not be /his/ axe, but it is one that he /created/.

------
api
It's 22 years later. The presentation is infinitely better. The content is
infinitely worse... or at least the content that greets the average net user.

You really have to dig for good quality content today.

~~~
graphitezepp
It's disgusting how bad its gotten. It's assuredly partially nostalgia, but I
think also partially truth, but the internet of my younger years I remember as
being filled with labors of love, pasionately created content most places you
look. Now it's difficult to find much that isn't lowest common denominator
pandering or essentially white noise.

~~~
pucke
There are still plenty of labors of love all over the place, but my own
personal experience is that if you create something as a sincere act of self
expression or love for [x], people don't bother with it. I think a lot of what
the internet has turned into has also primed us as users to seek that sort of
stuff out. I've been trying to distance myself from a lot of services and the
meme-o-sphere in favor of occupying the types of sites that used to matter to
me (personal web pages, no social media, a couple blogs, rss from a few news
sites, SLSK). I have partly HN to thank for this, after reading everyone's
disgusting unsympathetic responses to Seattle's "homeless problem," I've
distanced myself from the site and don't regret it one bit.

Edit: it really did feel like we were on the verge of the future, but the rise
of communications technologies has hobbled all of us, and Idiocracy may be the
only future that's possible if we don't slow the ocean currents to a halt
first.

------
jack6e
This timeline is wonderful:
[https://www.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/hypetime.htm](https://www.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/hypetime.htm)

The IPO of Yahoo, the creation of MSNBC.

------
1_800_UNICORN
I read through most of the content, and the quality of reporting was top-
notch. The browser wars article, the reporting on the state of online privacy,
the discussion of IPOs... all of it turned out to be the major important
topics of the early web. Great post, OP!

~~~
bookofjoe
Thank you.

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sbussard
I love this! It's prophetic

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trumped
This reminds me of mirc 16bit for win 3.1

