The Original mcom.com Revived

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."

HYPE tag.

[thesolo]

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

[Kelson]

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.

1994's anti-slashdotting technology

[Fast Thick Pants]

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.

Re:where are the ponies?

[Archangel Michael]

Seriously!

Re:When it's not Slashdotted ...

[Reziac]

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.

NCSA Mosaic 1.0.3/Mac chokes on the site

[singularity]

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:Next up

[crispin_bollocks]

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.

Re:Ahh, the days..

[electrictroy]

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:NCSA Mosaic 1.0.3/Mac chokes on the site

[raddan]

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.

Re:Ahh, the days..

[Hyppy]

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!

Re:When it's not Slashdotted ...

[Reziac]

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 marketshare in the confusion that followed).

Re:HYPE tag.

[montulli]

I guess it's a little unfair that I answer this question, since I was there when it was created.

The tag played a sound clip of Marca saying "What is Global Hypermedia?"

I'll stay mum about the why. :)

Re:That's not bandwidth throttling

[markjl]

:) 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!

Re:Bandwidth

[dkf]

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 also remember when getting anything (e.g. the Mosaic manual) over the Atlantic was an exercise in frustration too due to the shortage of bandwidth. Bandwidth boosts were the things that saved the internet, back then in '93.