The beginning of the people's Web: 20 years of Netscape

ZDNET ^ | October 14, 2014 | By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

[sopwith]

I was the first writer to cover the Web for a popular audience, and it did prove popular. I mean, it must have had hundreds of thousands of users in 1993! Today, Facebook alone has over a billion users. What's Hot on ZDNet

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You see the problem was that it was really, really hard to use the Web in the early days. Unix was the only operating system with real Internet support. If you wanted to use Windows 3.1 to connect to the Web you needed to use a program called Trumpet Winsock. It was an incredible pain-in-the-rump to set up properly.

Just getting an Internet connection was a major headache. There were very few ISPs in the early 90s. And, even if you did have a connection, you would be lucky to have a "fast' V.32bis 28.8Kbps connection. And those early Web browsers, such as Lynx and WWW well not as much a pain in the rump to use as Winsock were anything but easy.

[Defiant]

I started with a prodigy device in the late 80s that I think was 300. My first modem was a 2800 baud that I used to connect to BBS's. I ran a BBS for a while. I think that's how this site started. In 1993, I got an internet account, and used to get information via FTP, telnet, and the other protocols. Around 94 or so, the first browser was introduced. There was no search engine; the only way you found things was by going to a site that you already knew about, like a collection of law materials at Columbia, or a news site like newsnet. Email was cool, too, but no one else had email.

Around 1994, Mosaic came around, and boy was it awesome, even on a 2.8 baud modem. Clicking links to get to places, seeing pictures load (after a minute or two), and so on. I think Netscape was the successor to Mosaic. The next few years were like an infancy. Then, Yahoo came along, and it made things a lot easier, with its use of indices. But the next big advance was search, and that made the internet far more useful.

As bandwidth grew (in 1999, I was one of the first to have a cable modem instead of a 56k modem) the internet blossomed.

Hard to imagine that when I first logged on here, it was with either a 33.3 or 56k modem.

[Defiant]

I remember those telephone devices. When I was first starting out, in 1986 or 1987, I had a filing in another city that would have been close to the wire if sent by courier. The people in the secretarial department said, “no problem”, they had a newfangled way to send the document over the telephone to that other city, where one of our other lawyers could sign it and it would get filed no problem. They called it “telecommunicating”. To me, it was magic. My document, a wordperfect file, would get transmitted in data format (as opposed to a fax, which is a picture) to a place far away via the telephone line.

[minnesota_bound]

Facebook does not have over a billion users. Maybe accounts with a majority automated. Stock fraud.

[minnesota_bound]

I remember buying Mosaic at the new Best Buy and not having a clue about how to install and use it or how to get to webpages let alone create them. Different browser back in the old days.
http://www.techpaparazzi.com/how-web-browsers-looked-from-in-90s/

[zeugma]

My First Browser...

I eventually switched to Netscape.

I have managed to maintain my bookmarks.html file all this time. I have bookmarks to places that haven't existed for almost 20 years.

[zeugma]

You beat me by 2 minutes!

[minnesota_bound]

How “old” is the freerepublic website?

[Liberty Valance]

I want 1997 back

[cynwoody]

My first modem was an acoustical one that moved at a blistering 9600 baud.

That's really fast for an acoustic coupler.

The fastest one I can recall ran at 300 (or maybe 1200).

I remember when I first discovered BBS's in the late 80's. Ran thru several rolls of thermal paper. The paper (and the phone bill) was on the company.

[zeugma]

About 17 years. I figure JR’s signup date is about as far back as it goes.

[SunkenCiv]

I love this — I was online by 1984, 300 baud, with backward compatibility with 110 baud; Compuserve had been around for a while by then, but I was on using Mnematics Videotext, Genie, and Delphi after a year or two of BBS’ing. By 1986 there was AppleLink Personal Edition (which I think was from the Quantum online people), TYMNET, TELENET, PCPURSUIT, The Well, The Dorsai Embassy, etc. ALPE wound up turning into AOL, which supplanted Prodigy.

[SunkenCiv]

Nice!