I recently built xmosaic on macOS with very little extra installed/modified. It was quite fun.
https://twitter.com/radiofreejohn/status/1132137894158618624
Before Netscape: Web browsers of the early 1990s (2011)
31–40 of 83 posts
Re: Before Netscape: Web browsers of the early 1990s (2011)
#32I think in those days all the well-known graphical browsers (Mosaic, Netscape) were proprietary, although free for personal use. I think I used a browser in Emacs for quite a while. There was also the Chimera browser mentioned elsewhere.
I believe NCSA Mosaic was BSD. Andreesen was hated at UIUC in the mid 90s for essentially taking the NCSA work and and then getting rich off of it. Then to add insult to injury he called his company Mosaic Communications. The university went after him for the trademark infringement (or whatever), but I don’t think there was anything legally wrong with him taking the code. Not only was Netscape, not the only company s…
I don't remember that, and can't find a source for it. The source code was released, but I don't think it ever had a license that allowed commercial use, and was it licensed commercially to many others.
Edit: including to Spyglass, for their browser, which was later licensed by Microsoft for Explorer.
Re: Before Netscape: Web browsers of the early 1990s (2011)
#33Looking at the second screenshot in this article (the one titled "An early CERN Web browser, circa 1990"), I feel this is what I'd like the modern web to be: crisp, clean, high density information, using colors only where it is relevant.
Modern web pages have become a seizure-inducing cacophony of colors, fonts, animations, ads, videos and intrusive modals ("please sign up", "subscribe to our newsletter", "do you accept cookies?", "please disable ad-block", "people in are excited about this new weight loss product!") etc.
Re: Before Netscape: Web browsers of the early 1990s (2011)
#34This maybe a little off topic but... wait what? CERN had their own OS? What was its name?
NeXTStep, Steve Jobs made a company NeXT after being kicked out from Apple. This OS became the foundation of the Mac OSX. [1]
Aside from NeXTStep, it was even before Linux was born. There were many historic BSD derivatives in that moment.
[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/473758/what-does-the-ns-...
Re: Before Netscape: Web browsers of the early 1990s (2011)
#35I first used SPRY Mosaic as provided by CompuServe (my first ISP). I had written an article for a late 1995 special edition of Doctor Dobbs Journal which still has my screen image captures of the SPRY Mosaic browser: http://www.drdobbs.com/web-development/clientserver-developm...
OMG I first used Spry via CompuServe too!
Re: Before Netscape: Web browsers of the early 1990s (2011)
#36Mosaic, gopher and text based one. Use the text to play go (WeiQi) and lost as refreshed under 19.2k modem is too slow.
Re: Before Netscape: Web browsers of the early 1990s (2011)
#37Lynx is still in use these days, and has been around since 1993.
Re: Before Netscape: Web browsers of the early 1990s (2011)
#38I clearly remember using the web browser bundled with early NYC ISP The Pipeline in like 94. Netscape eventually came and blew it away, but it wasn’t bad for what (I think) was the work of basically one guy.
Re: Before Netscape: Web browsers of the early 1990s (2011)
#39If anyone is wondering what was Netscape’s first big feature differentiator was, it was inline JPEGs. Mosaic could just display GIFs inline. JPEGs would require an external handler, typically LView on Windows, or xv on Linux.
Netscape's huge differentiator was running on 16-bit Windows. All the other browsers needed either NT or a Unix workstation. This was prior to Windows95 so regular folks were still running Windows 3.1.
Re: Before Netscape: Web browsers of the early 1990s (2011)
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe NCSA Mosaic was BSD. Andreesen was hated at UIUC in the mid 90s for essentially taking the NCSA work and and then getting rich off of it. Then to add insult to injury he called his company Mosaic Communications. The university went after him for the trademark infringement (or whatever), but I don’t think there was anything legally wrong with him taking the code. Not only was Netscape, not the only company s…
I don't remember that, and can't find a source for it. The source code was released, but I don't think it ever had a license that allowed commercial use, and was it licensed commercially to many others. Edit: including to Spyglass, for their browser, which was later licensed by Microsoft for Explorer.
I think Netscape was a clean rewrite of the source code of NCSA Mosaic, but with the benefit of past experience and being able to look at the code. Not illegal, but still somewhat dodgy, and understandable that people who worked on the NCSA version might get mad. I remember hearing that Andreesen was none too popular at UIUC after founding Netscape, and the lawsuit over the trademark; there's a source for that here: