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The Original mcom.com Revived

Posted by Zonk on Tue Apr 01, 2008 10:45 AM
from the slice-of-the-interwebs-past dept.
Mozilla The Internet
saccade.com writes "For those of you that missed the emergence of the the World Wide Web the first time around, Mozilla co-founder JWZ has recreated it for you. In honor of Mozilla's tenth anniversary, he's recreated the original home.mcom.com sites in all their 1994 glory. He even has vintage browsers to go with them."
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Submission: Mozilla co-founder JWZ revives original mcom.com by saccade.com (771661)
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  • Ahh, the days.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Hyppy (74366) on Tuesday April 01 2008, @10:48AM (#22931114)
    Ahh, the days when changing your browser's "background" color to anything other than (off-)white meant most pages became unreadable.

    Oh, and good job, Slashdotters. The page is down already!

    • Re:Ahh, the days.. (Score:5, Funny)

      by dougmc (70836) <dougmc+slashdot@frenzied.us> on Tuesday April 01 2008, @10:49AM (#22931130) Homepage

      Oh, and good job, Slashdotters. The page is down already!
      I got the impression that that was part of the `early web experience'.

      (Seriously, it looks like the web server is patched to feed data as if you were on a slow dialup ...)

    • Re:Ahh, the days.. (Score:5, Funny)

      by Hawthorne01 (575586) on Tuesday April 01 2008, @10:53AM (#22931160)

      Oh, and good job, Slashdotters. The page is down already!

      Naah, they're just re-creating the experience of websurfing on a 14.4 modem.

        • Re:Ahh, the days.. (Score:5, Interesting)

          by electrictroy (912290) on Tuesday April 01 2008, @11:49AM (#22931708)
          In 1994 you probably though 28.8kbit was fast.

          In 1995 I was surfing the net with a 2.4 k modem. I had to select "don't load images" but it was still possible to visit my favorite sites like scifi.com even at that slow speed. If I would have had your Sporster modem (~20 times faster) I probably would have been in heaven! :-)

          Today I still use a 56k modem while traveling. With image compression the 56k is almost as fast as my 700k DSL w/o compression.

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by prockcore (543967)

            In 1995 I was surfing the net with a 2.4 k modem.


            In 95 my dorm was fitted with ethernet.

          • Re:Ahh, the days.. (Score:4, Funny)

            by Culture20 (968837) on Tuesday April 01 2008, @05:27PM (#22935670)
            I was using a 2400baud modem in 1995-1996 too, but I didn't have to select "don't load images" I was using lynx on a unix server I dialed into. My computer was an IBM 8086 with TWO 5.25 floppy drives. I could copy floppies like a mad man!
    • We managed to /. the original interwebs. The circle is now complete.

    • Re:Ahh, the days.. (Score:5, Funny)

      by twistedsymphony (956982) on Tuesday April 01 2008, @11:42AM (#22931640) Homepage

      Oh, and good job, Slashdotters. The page is down already!
      That's unpossible, slashdot readers never click to read the article.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Hyppy (74366)
        Well, I'm sure the 1.2 billion RSS readers and bots immediately preload every link that makes the front page.

        Don't blame the users, blame the technology!

    • Oh, and good job, Slashdotters. The page is down already!

      If only our modern browsers supported client-side load balancing like they did in the good old days.
    • Actually it was about that fast back in 94...

  • HYPE tag. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by thesolo (131008) * <slap@fighttheriaa.org> on Tuesday April 01 2008, @10:50AM (#22931140) Homepage
    One of Jamie's trivia questions is the origin of the HYPE tag. I remember the tag well, it was an easter egg that played a sound when it was used (only in certain versions of Mosaic/Netscape), however, I haven't a clue as to when or why it was implemented.

    Does anyone know? Google reveals nothing on the subject.

  • Bandwidth (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Kelson (129150) * on Tuesday April 01 2008, @10:50AM (#22931142) Homepage Journal
    The best part is the bandwidth throttling, back to 1994 dial-up speeds. I was looking at this yesterday, and it was weird to watch the interlaced GIFs load line by line. (Remember how Netscape used to have a LOWSRC attribute for images, so you could specify a low-res version that could be loaded quickly and displayed while it tried to download the massive, whopping 50K full image?)

    A flashback to the way I first encountered the web.

    Of course, it's probably even slower today, now that it's linked here.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by dkf (304284)

      The best part is the bandwidth throttling, back to 1994 dial-up speeds. I was looking at this yesterday, and it was weird to watch the interlaced GIFs load line by line. (Remember how Netscape used to have a LOWSRC attribute for images, so you could specify a low-res version that could be loaded quickly and displayed while it tried to download the massive, whopping 50K full image?)

      I remember switching to Netscape very early because it would load images asynchronously, rather than waiting for everything to be loaded before showing me any of it (what NCSA Mosaic used to do at that time). Of course, we now get that sort of annoyance anyway due to the vast gobs of (terrible) javascript inflicted upon us by websites and (especially) advertisers. (Which is one reason why I use NoScript; I don't mind ads too much, but don't slow down my browsing just to show them to me!)

      Of course, I can al

  • Can our modern browsers pass the 1994 test?

  • Unfortunately, it seems to be running on Netsite.

    • Re:That's not bandwidth throttling (Score:5, Interesting)

      by markjl (151828) on Tuesday April 01 2008, @05:18PM (#22935558) Homepage

      :) Netsite evolved into the Netscape Enterprise Server and I was there at Netscape when the web site cluster served over 100 million hits per day in 1996. Those were amazing times, many server manufacturers would bring in hardware and we would benchmark a portion of www.netscape.com's traffic on them, which usually led to discussions about how to tune or optimize the OS or the IP stack, I know we helped SGI at the time.

      The server and software engineering folks helped develop a dynamic DNS server that would help globally load balance web traffic based upon the inquiring IP address. They also helped hack SSL into rsync back in the day, so that is how we securely published web content updates out to the cluster.

      Sadly, we also pioneering web advertising at Netscape. My colleague Alan spec'd out the dimensions to the ad banners, in case you wondered where those 460x68 dimensions came from: it allowed a minimal amount of horizontal white space on each side of the web page when the web browser had a vertical scroll bar on a 640x480 laptop display running Navigator, IIRC.

      So those ad banners were physically changed on the docroot via a cron script in order to rotate them. The joy of hacks in a funded start up, but it made money! In fact, unlike most corporations today (e.g.: Microsoft), there was a strategic decision *not* to create an advertising server, so we helped create an industry and did not compete in it. Well, didn't complete until TW/AOL acquired Netscape -- but that was the day Netscape really died (it could be argued that bought Netscape solely for our web site traffic and advertising revenue since they didn't know what to do with the browser and server software. Witness the eventual release of the browser software to the mozilla.org project (thanks also to jwz!) and iPlanet/Sun eventually selling the server line to Red Hat, who continues to open source the directory and certificate servers today).

      I wrote the plug-in finder, could it have been the most used CGI on the web at the time in 1996 -- who knows? I went on to become a technology evangelist at Netscape.

      Good days indeed, thanks for the memories!

  • Next up (Score:3, Funny)

    by i_ate_god (899684) on Tuesday April 01 2008, @10:54AM (#22931166)
    revive gopher and geocities
    • I kinda liked the Geocities neighborhoods. The old URLs still work for individual sites, but the index pages for blocks and neighborhoods are gone, so you can't wander around and meet your neighbors. Too bad, I guess it was MySpace 0.1 - before its time, or before critical mass.
      • Geocities was effectively killed by Yahoo with unrealistic daily bandwidth quoats. You could literally hit refresh a few times on a page, and it would be locked out for the day.
  • Be sure to use this link [mcom.com] to have the "Resolution Controller" switched to L to "reduce download time" and give the server a little breathing room.
  • Welcome back to 1994, for real.
    • If you had a 28.8 modem in 1994 you were from the future, man. IIRC, 28.8 modems didn't hit the streets until sometime in mid-1995, although the spec was ratified in mid/late-1994.

  • Is it just me? (Score:3, Funny)

    by kabocox (199019) on Tuesday April 01 2008, @10:57AM (#22931186)
    That looked like a clean myspace page to me.

  • When it's not Slashdotted ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Daniel Dvorkin (106857) * on Tuesday April 01 2008, @10:58AM (#22931190) Homepage Journal
    ... the site loads instantly. It's easy to navigate. There's just enough information near the top of each page so you know immediately what the page is for. The text is easily readable with default browser settings, even on a small screen.

    Modern web developers could take a lesson from this.

    • Re:When it's not Slashdotted ... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Reziac (43301) * on Tuesday April 01 2008, @11:09AM (#22931276) Homepage Journal
      mcom, if it exists, seems to be slashdotted, but the livejournal page was quick... I agree, there's just too much sheer JUNK on the average page today. Most modern sites are now so gunked up that they perform on broadband about like the most primitive 1994-era sites did on 14.4 dialup.

      One of the major reasons why on every site that still halfway works with it, I still use (are you sitting down?) Netscape v3, is because it strips most of the sheer JUNK, making web speeds tolerable. The same page can take 10x as long to load in Mozilla (not only because Moz is SLOW to render, but also because of all the JUNK).

      IMO, NS3 is still the best, most stable, fastest, and most bug-free of all browsers. It's too bad source code is not available (I asked JWZ about that a while back, he said he'd tried to get it and no joy) as if user-optionable modern features were implemented atop this fast, lean old browser, we'd really HAVE something.

      • Try a modern lightweight browser, like Dillo or Links2. I like Links2, myself.

        They are both amazingly fast.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Reziac (43301) *
          Yeah, figured there was a lot of third-party stuff that couldn't be tracked down/licensed/released. Goes to show that if there's any chance you may =ever= open your source, best not use 3rd party closed libraries.

          Of course the trouble with the rebuild from the ground up is that it threw away all the lean functionality of old NS3. ISTM they'd have been better off to strip out the 3rd party code and rebuild just THOSE parts, rather than try to start over entirely (thus losing their formerly dominant marketsha

  • the /. effect, 1994-style (Score:5, Funny)

    by downix (84795) on Tuesday April 01 2008, @11:04AM (#22931228) Homepage
    Well boys, we sure killed that connection fast.... feels just like the old days!
  • If you're going to pull an April Fool's joke like this, at least roll out servers that can handle the load. Or maybe it's the pipe, It's not like serving static web pages is hard, even on that era of equipment.
  • It figures some duschebag media mogul would sell off a historic domain name to the highest bidder than to give it to someone who actually would be willing to maintain the historic content.
  • Time to fire up Mosaic and OmniWeb on the Next Cube at home!
  • The site is obviously pretty Slashdotted at this point, so I was not able to download some of the Mosaic versions he links to.

    Since I already have a copy of NCSA Mosaic copyrighted 1-27-1994, I decided to fire that up and load the page.

    A screenshot [flickr.com] of mosaic.mcom.com that I was finally able to load. It had issues with some of the .gif files on the page. I am not sure if that is de to the client or if the transfer timed out from the load.

    This is Mosaic v1.0.3 under System 7.6.1, running in BasiliskII.

    Strange timing. Just last night I started playing around with some gopher servers, so I fired up Basilisk and downloaded TurboGopher. I got my first access to Usenet feeds in about 1992, and was able to get more online in the fall of 1993. Gopher, FTP, and email were huge. I remember downloading Mosaic sometime in early spring of 1994 and playing around with it.

    Ahh, the memories...

    • Re:NCSA Mosaic 1.0.3/Mac chokes on the site (Score:4, Interesting)

      by raddan (519638) on Tuesday April 01 2008, @11:54AM (#22931760)
      In the early 90's, my dad used to bring me to work every now and then when he worked at BBN. Since BBN was an early internet pioneer, they had some really big pipes (er, tubes?) to the arpa/internet. I was in high school at the time. I would fill my backpack with blank floppies and spend the day on gopher and FTP (anyone remember Anarchie?) just filling those disks up with freeware/shareware and every other cool thing I came across. Their offices had an interesting mix of phonenet (Appletalk) and BNC ethernet. Lots of Macs around back then, and those networks were fast, but crashed all the time.

      Anyway, one day I came across this image [wikipedia.org] and my brain just about exploded. Keep in mind that I was a high school aged male. Yep, that was the beginning of the end for me... ;^)

      As for the "web", I remember an MIT postdoc excitedly showing me this new "world wide web browser called Mosaic", and he just couldn't get me enthused. "You mean it's read-only?" I remember asking. I just couldn't see the point.

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