people who remembered college days upon seeing this, please queue here
I remember walking into the college library in late 94, seeing all the real computer geeks standing around one of the newer 486s, they were installing Navigator Beta 1.1.
We had been using FTP, Gopher and Telnet for a while, but this was the first time that any of us had actually used a web browser.
Of course, there was no search yet, so while sites did exist, it took them a little time to dig through enough IRC and Usenet to find things to visit.
I have used the same web browser, in terms of ideology, codebase, and heritage, for nearly a third of a century, now.
NCSA Mosaic -> Netscape -> Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox.
I now hew more to alternates such as LibreWolf and Floorp, but I still run Firefox EME-Free as my default.
Peak internet 1.0:
Peak Internet is when Mozilla (the kaiju mascot) showed up in the loading animation near the end of Netscape’s lifespan
I remember thinking Netscape was way cooler than IE based purely on the throbber animation
“Throbber” animation? 🤔
in case you didn’t know: the animated icon (usually the cursor) that indicates background processing is called a throbber.
Normal people say hourglass yeah even when it’s not a hourglass yeah even when they design them yeah even when they can be confused and the reason is not that throbber would be a useful word, it’s that it’s extremely sexual and now I get to feel sexual too for saying it back and have to take a shower
I’ve seen that some dude on here has the Netscape throbber (for Gen Z: that’s what the animated doohickey in the corner that shows your page is still loading and your computer has not frozen is called) as his profile icon.
Maybe you’ve just summoned him up, Beetlejuice style.
Nah… Netscape Navigator Gold was peak. Netscape Communicator was too bloated and took forever to load. Sure it had an email client, HTML editor, etc. but these should have been separate programs, not all built into a single thing. The original mozilla browser was also this way until
PhoenixFirebirdFirefox pulled a browser out of the bloated mess.Agreed. 1999-2000 was also peak internet for me. Netscape, Napster, Neopets, Newgrounds, and Nick.com (and StarCraft multiplayer). It didn’t get any better than that.
Limewire… downloading all your favourite songs, wait no… typing in names of any song you could think of in hopes you’d find it. Then you did find it and it turned out to be the same damn song you can’t stand with the file misnamed. A whole generation grew up confused about who sang their favourite songs, and found constant frustration in waiting like 12min (on a great day) for Smells Like Teen Spirit to download, only to find they got Weird Al Yankovich’s parody instead… like 4 times in a row from four different files. Ahhhh memories.
The fake named porn videos could be way worse.
Ah yes web 2.0 was also a thing. I remember.
I’ll never forget watching pictures roll in line-by-line on dialup back in 1995 or so.
For some reason this gif gives me nostalgia of listening to artbell.com on Netscape - Good times.
I still find listening to old Coast to Coast episodes cozy.
It had the best loading animation with the comets flying by. Much better than IE rotating and becoming the planet earth. This was back when you actually had to wait for pages to load.
Yes, of course. We also had a notebook (these paper-based thingies, not a digital one) in the terminal room where we collected interesting web site addresses back then before Altavista and bookmarks.
I had a Popular Science magazine that included the 50 coolest websites you should visit. That was mine. I still get hit with so much nostalgia about it. They were legit so cool that they still put most websites I see nowadays to shame.
…well? You can’t just not share the sites?
I left it in the terminal room when I left university decades ago. Maybe it is still there.
That’s really cool. Many of them are still there–some of them unchanged.
Yeah, I noticed that too! It would be cool to make a more easily accessible collection of these kinds of things.
That one text file what was a copy paste of all the neat things we’d read on the internet and wanted to save.
Was there porn ?
Of course. alt.binaries.pictures.erotica - not an internet address in case you wonder, but a NNTP group. Yes, we had social media back then, just not with Nazis, bots, and ads.
Yes, we had social media back then, just not with Nazis, bots, and ads.
We did have plenty of usenet trolls and usenet wars.
Yea, but most of them were rather harmless, especially if you contacted the network administrator of the site he came from.
We had killfiles back then. And clients that sorted/threaded conversations the way we wanted. And upstream operators that could often physically visit the offenders to tell them to knock if off. Those were the days …
Online porn existed before the internet
Do we count Bulletin Boards as pre Internet?
Most bulletin boards like fidonet existed in parallel with the internet, and even used internet bridges to transfer mail and files across long distances where a dialup connection could not be used.
NNTP actally was quite network agnostic, the messages did not care about the means of transport. I actually handled a NNTP link back then via floppy disk.
I was never a fan of Netscape. For whatever reason, it always felt like it was so much slower than ie and web pages would often be broken.
Well, that was way later when ie existed. NN is way older than ie.
Remember when we got excited about browser releases? What a time.
Going from Netscape 1 to Netscape 2 which supported animated gifs. What a day that was!
Ok, going to scream into the abyss here…
I had Netscape on my 486DX2-66 with a 33.6 modem. Win 95, along with ICQ, mIRC, some NNTP reader I can’t recall… You get the picture.
Everyone I’ve told this to thinks I must have been out of my mind. But for a period of time that I recall as months I had some sort of phenomenon where Netscape would stop loading a web page (could take 10s of seconds, you know) unless you MOVED THE MOUSE. Continuously. The animated “N” on would freeze and if you didn’t move the mouse the page would just be blank, or partially loaded. Move the mouse, it resumes. Stop moving the mouse, it stops. I used to have to move my mouse in figure-eights, cajoling the machine to not give up and keep downloading.
You’ll think I’m crazy, too. But when I share this story I keep hoping someone, somewhere had the same experience. And maybe, someone who knows what was going on will chime in on some obscure IRQ conflict in Windows along with some optimization used by Netscape in one iteration caused this bug for a brief moment in time.
Ahh…. I was there my friend. Similar setup, 486 DX4 100, USRobotics modem. I had the IRQ conflict. Me and my friend figured out how to change the channels by reading the mainboard‘s manual. I had to change some jumpers around. It was my first modem and I had never connected to the internet before.
On linux /dev/random will use inputs such as mouse movement to generate random data. If a program needs random data for something such as encryption it will seemingly hang whilst it generates enough. This isn’t good on servers without an active user so you configure it to use /dev/urandom instead. Perhaps windows had similar back in the day.
I remember reading somewhere that jiggling the mouse made windows progress bars move faster.
Were you by chance running a proxy, even on localhost? Here’s a good description of that issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29539106
That thread also mentions the Windows 95 requirement for randomization on mouse movement. A page you visited regularly may have been using this.
I’m pretty sure I had that same mouse movement thing happen. That was a deeply buried memory until you mentioned it .
I have Navigator 1.0 on a disk in my basement. Its my precious.
“We hates the AOL!”
Yes.
I even remember using Gopher which was the closest there was to HTTP and Browsers before they were invented.
(Also, don’t get me started on FTPmail).
And no, even with the enshittification of the last decade or so, I would still not call those “the good old days”.
Now, get out of my lawn you wipper snappers!
I was introduced to the web by a friend who told me about this new, gopher-like thing with hypertext.
I actually used NN to read stuff from Tim Barners-Lee’s original NeXT cube server at CERN.
Wow, gopher. There’s something I haven’t heard in many many years. It must have been around 95-96 the last time I used that. You sure know how to make a guy feel old.
The URL
about:mozillawas always full of fun :)Xul has entered the chat 👻
Yes, on top of trumpet winsock.
It’s all so much better now.
We had Hummingbird TCP/IP on the machine I used as a mail gateway. It felt odd to have not only have to install a TCP stack, but also have to pay for it.
You can download all the old Netscapes here - http://home.mcom.com/archives/
I found Mosaic 1 here - https://winworldpc.com/product/ncsa-mosaic/1
2.2? I only remember 1.9 and before.
