
Welcome to Netscape (1994) - shalmanese
http://home.mcom.com/home/welcome.html
======
burnte
See jwz's blog for details on how this actually still works.
[https://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/02/seeking-contact-inside-
aol/](https://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/02/seeking-contact-inside-aol/)

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elros
This is just gold:

view-
source:[http://home.mcom.com/home/welcome.html](http://home.mcom.com/home/welcome.html)

:-)

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
I thought something looked "off" but it may just be my memory lying to me -
I'm pretty sure the default (or maybe just the trend) in the mid-90s was for
gray backgrounds rather than white. I see from the source that this page is a
straight copy with no background set so in modern browsers it defaults to
white.

Or perhaps it's just me? I would've been 10 at the time but we did have
internet access at home (Dad needed it for work) so perhaps I'm mis-
remembering.

~~~
nissehulth
You're right, it should be a gray background. I don't even remember when the
browser default changed to white.

~~~
jayvanguard
Wasn't it Netscape 1.1? Everything looked so modern after that.

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mohaine
I miss the pulsing N.

~~~
adventured
Always really liked this one:

[http://i.imgur.com/0xn9DUF.gif](http://i.imgur.com/0xn9DUF.gif)

~~~
bshimmin
I remember spending hours (and hours and hours) downloading the latest
Netscape over a 14.4k modem in the mid-nineties, and somehow that awesome icon
really did make it all seem worth it. What a time to be alive!

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angersock
Almost all of the links on the "What's Cool" section are now, sadly, defunct.

[http://home.mcom.com/home/whats-cool.html](http://home.mcom.com/home/whats-
cool.html)

~~~
tcdent
I found it interesting that both Lycos and WebCrawler linked to university
domains and were in subdirectories. Those where my go-to when I was first
online, but I remember them having concise domains by that time.

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stuaxo
Wow, reminds me of visiting the first internet cafe in the UK.. it seemed
weird getting served coffee and cake while using a computer, + using very
early internet browsers and Gopher.

~~~
barking
Do you remember, Cyberia!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberia,_London](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberia,_London)

~~~
6502nerdface
Interesting, I wonder if the name was a bit of inspiration for Cyberdelia
[1,2].

[1] [http://letshang.tumblr.com/post/6801119158/cyberdelia-
hacker...](http://letshang.tumblr.com/post/6801119158/cyberdelia-hackers-
cyberdelia-was-built-from)

[2] [http://cyberdelianyc.tumblr.com/](http://cyberdelianyc.tumblr.com/)

------
wodenokoto
My favorite tidbit about this site is that Netscape was hard coded to randomly
hit a subdomain of that site, in order to distribute load on the servers.

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M4v3R
I think the best part is the "what's new" section:
[http://home.mcom.com/home/whats-new.html](http://home.mcom.com/home/whats-
new.html)

I imagine that today every minute more new stuff appears on the Internet than
in all of those what's new pages combined. Just shows how far we went from
there.

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eecks
That's really interesting. Especially the search websites and the internet
white pages considering what we have now.

The "what's new" section was good too. Do we have anything similar now?
Probably Reddit.. but it would be good to have a "what's new" about websites
and their content rather than news articles/pictures.

------
zhte415
And they IPOd for what, a little over $100mn?

An internet-connected connected, cat-enabled, SaaS, Bootstrap-themed, social,
app that does something, anything, can realistically imagine those numbers.

Certainly, from today's perspective (and at the time), these were internet
heavyweights. I write this using Firefox, to whom Netscape was a direct
ancestor. Visionary.

~~~
gaius
$2.9Bn

They were one of the last technology companies to produce, y'know, _actual
technology_ , a product, with a revenue model (originally the browser was a
paid-for product for corporate use, free for personal use, then they pivoted
to give away the browser to create a market for web servers - yes people used
to pay for web servers+). Nowadays there's no actual technology being
developed by the so-called "unicorns", just ways to trick you into viewing ads
or side-step regulation.

\+ I maintain to this day, having been in this business 20 years, that
Netscape Enterprise Server 2.1 is the best web server ever written

~~~
eecks
People don't pay for web servers now?

Who do we call "unicorns" now? (serious question)

~~~
gaius
It's the hipster term for "technology" companies valued at over $1Bn. But
AirBnB, Uber et al don't make money by making technology.

~~~
nsgi
They make money by solving problems using technology, just like Netscape.

~~~
gaius
What's the novel technology behind running an unlicensed minicab firm? Or
subletting a room in your house against the terms of your lease?

~~~
mindslight
Your point would be stronger (and just as valid) if you deemphasized the
moralization with respect to skirting laws. Yes, it's important to illustrate
where the "energy" is coming from, but most people will pigeonhole your entire
point as curmudgeonly anti-progress.

But indeed, our community is in a sad state of affairs. The technology
industry got taken over by the LA business model - hipster home runs. Money
and social recognition made it easy for us to look the other way, and to even
mislead our friends down this broken path of mass media 2.0. Most "startups"
purport to deal with technology but are essentially just creating CRUD CRApps,
inserting themselves as the new middlemen, and whitewashing it as empowering
individuals.

~~~
gaius
It's not a moral thing exactly; Uber's competitive advantage is that they
don't bear the cost of compliance.

~~~
mindslight
Sure, but that doesn't mean your argument won't be perceived as such. The knee
jerk reaction is to think "yeah but those laws are obsolete", and identify
with the direct connection between driver and rider (as the "sharing economy"
whitewash encourages).

I for one don't mind the obsoleting of taxi regulation by direct summoning
(which itself solves most of what taxi regulation was a response to), but I
also don't perceive Uber as looking to eliminate regulation - they are hoping
to _become_ the new middleman by owning the market, buying "appropriate"
public regulation to create a barrier to entry, and then enjoying the security
of a public organization with the accountability of a private one. Actual P2P
empowerment would consist of a bona fide application that directly interacted
with driver app, with appropriate reputation system etc. But of course there's
inherently no "scalable" profits (aka rent) to be made off of that, so
investors aren't lining up.

