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Mozilla The Internet

Netscape 1994 Time Capsule 144

Posted by CmdrTaco from the jog-down-memory-lane dept.
jenkin sear writes "Netscape Time capsule site- original splash screens, and much of the original netscape site, including the release notes for version 0.9. Definitely a trip down memory lane.... I saw this link on scripting news" Warm fuzzies. Sure was simpler then. An interesting similiar and unrelated article also popped out recently, a history of microsoft.com.
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Netscape 1994 Time Capsule More

Netscape 1994 Time Capsule

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  • First MS site ran on FreeBSD? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I seem to recall vaguely that the first MS site ran on FreeBSD. If that's true, then the Microsoft story glosses over this rather important detail for some reason :-)

    Rich -- Play xracer! [annexia.org]

  • Some things never change (Score:4)

    by Smack ( 977 ) on Tuesday December 28, 1999 @02:26PM (#1437709) Homepage
    Look at this page in the MS timeline:

    http://www.microsoft .com/misc/features/features_flshbk_hp2.htm [microsoft.com]

    It describes their "Collage" design from August of 1995. Take a look at one of the most prominent links on the graphic. Yes, your eyes don't deceive you; it does say "Microsoft Reacts to the DOJ". Like I said, some things never change.
  • iCab is cool
  • Hey, yahoo.com doesn't display properly anymore! ;)
  • Netscape has copies dating back to their first release available on their ftp site. I can't give you a direct link right now, as all three of netscape's ftp servers seem to be down... how cute.
  • This was way too funny to pass up. In their 'snapshot' of what the web site looked like in 1995, they have a rather prominent button on their main page that says "MICROSOFT RESPONDS TO DOJ."
    Check it out:

    http://www.microsoft .com/misc/features/features_flshbk_hp2.htm [microsoft.com]
  • And you've got to love "A vendor who had only a passing knowledge of microsoft.com coding policies delivered the first Windows CE site. The first test on the site with Weblint, a tool used to check validity of HTML, returned 100 pages of errors."

    I suppose Microsoft coding policies specify a maximum of 50 pages of errors :-)
  • A little heads up:
    "I'm stunned Microsoft, et. al., aren't trying to add their own proprietary extensions to the English language and wrestly the whole thing under their proprietary control."
    Ummm, Microsoft Encarta Dictionary. You can buy it at any bookstore in paper or computer form....

    "At least Mosaid waits for the dust to settle before adopting new features. Is mosaic still developping its browser? "
    Mosaic became Netscape. Same people, new code. Mosaic died shortly after Netscape.

    Joseph Elwell.

  • Code Link on Slashdot is outdated. (Score:4)

    by jelwell ( 2152 ) on Tuesday December 28, 1999 @01:59PM (#1437716)
    For those of you that keep posting "The code is available already" Why don't you download the code that Malda puts out and see for yourselves whether that code is for real. That code is version 0.3 which is way outdated. For some reason slashdot won't cvs their code. Probably because Malda prefers security through obscurity over peer review.

    Anyways, both code bases are based on flawed licenses. (Assuming the writers wanted the code to be free) :)
    Cheers.
    Joseph Elwell.
  • While we're all flashing back, here's another great flashback to what www.microsoft.com looked like back in 1993. Enjoy!
    www.microsofttimecapsule.com

    ROTFL!!! I don't believe I actually fell for it! It should have been moderated UP not down. I hope this one shows up for meta moderation!

  • Some "time capsule"

    I distinctly remember the original Microsoft website used a single image logo from the early 1980's (Circa 1981, IIRC). It was far cheesier than the "original" they posted in the story.
  • I am sitting here at Stream right now. They still have staffing problems, but most of it is hiring people with NO computer experience, giving them a week of training, and then throwing them on the phones.

    I know of people getting less training than that at Stream. Kind of sad because that model of support could work very well.

    The big question is: Do they still support Netscape or did that change in the AOL takeover?

  • Boy does that revive some horrific memories (Score:5)

    by Black Art ( 3335 ) on Tuesday December 28, 1999 @02:13PM (#1437720)
    When Mosaic Communications Corp (AKA Netscape) first went public, they outsourced their support to a company called Corporate Software (now known as "Stream" (as in "What end of the Stream are you one?").

    There were six of us back then, supporting the PC, Mac and about 9 flavors of Unix. I lasted the longest, until the 2.0 betas. (In fact, I still have my Mosaic Communications t-shirt (with the angry Mozilla) and a brochure from the first few months.)

    There were some good times and alot of bad. Since we were in Oregon and they were in California, they were willing to ignore us at times. It took a bit to get them to deal with the bugs we and our customers uncovered. (Leading to some very strange calls.)

    And then there were the staffing issues. Because many of the original team left for other jobs, we were whittled down to TWO people at one point. (Doing 70 calls a day for a while.) When 1.2 was released to Egghead stores, we had FOUR people on the phones. (And the typos and bugs were bad enough that we got lots and lots of calls.) The staffing problems were not all Netscape's fault though. Corporate Software did not staff for the load that they expected out of a weird power play trying to keep Netscape current on their bills. (Which they were holding back on because Corporate Software was playing these games.)

    There are a whole lot more stories I could tell. It was an interesting time in my life. Not certain if I would want to do it again...

    And, yes, as far as I know, Stream is still doing support for Netscape. (At least since I talked to any Stream employees, but it has been a while.)
  • Oddly enough, I booted into Win95 today (for the first time in ages) to kill some time playing hockey, and I came across the 0.9 Beta.

    To my surprise, I found that the beta version information pages [mcom.com] are still availble on home.mcom.com.

    Much more fun than playing EA hockey, IMHO.

    And then it appeared on Slashdot. Wierd...

  • The search engine is screwed. Go to the search page and select the author senegan to see that. (He was at one time a prolific author but none of his old articles appear).

    Unless the Slashdot Kommisarriat has managed to erase all my memories of someone going by a subtly differently spelled name:

    http://slashdot.org/search.pl?query=sengan [slashdot.org] yields plenty of his stories. You just had an extra 'e' in there.

    Sengan kicked off one of the bloodiest wars of the time on Slashdot with his classic US and UK unilaterally attack Iraq [slashdot.org]. It garnered 748 comments and earned Sengan a special fan club of his very own.
    ------------
    Michael Hall
    mphall@cstone.nospam.net

  • Netscape 0.94 (Score:4)

    by David E. Smith ( 4570 ) on Tuesday December 28, 1999 @03:13PM (#1437723)
    I know I'm just asking for all kinds of trouble here... but I've made a copy of Netscape 0.94 for Windows available for download. (My ISP won't be happy, I expect.) Relive the good old days, before JavaScript, before frames, before the TEXT BGCOLOR tag. (And if it runs under WINE, let me know.)

    http://scribers.midwest.net/dsmith42 /ns094.zip [midwest.net] is where it is now -- mirrors are welcome. :)

  • No, the problem is that Netscape up to 1.0 used to crash on nested tables.
  • Nobody likes a smart ass! :P
  • No, AFAIR www.microsoft.com always was NT. Their internal mail servers, though, were UNIX (SCO Xenix?) for a LONG while.
  • Does the search engine in "older stuff" really stop after a few months? I haven't tested it in any depth, but it would suprise me if it didn't go back all the way; and a quick search just now took me back to May this year. I know that one can get back to the beginning of this year at least, if one knows the URL: e.g. here's one I saved [slashdot.org]. Another quick test: searching for "UnixWorld" gives two stories, that one and one from April 98. Wouldn't it be nice if a member of slashdot staff were to pop up now and tell us whether or not the archives do in fact extend back to the beginning?

  • Re:Slashdot (Score:4)

    by paul.dunne ( 5922 ) on Tuesday December 28, 1999 @01:44PM (#1437728)
    All the old stories are archived, which I suppose works as a sort of simple time-capsule. Check out those older stories for a glimpse of a different slashdot: when 50 comments was a lot, before /. started being used as a PR/hype machine... and before it was September all year long ;-)

    Dragging myself manfully back on-topic, I loved the phrase in the announcement of Netscape 0.9 about it being "optimised for 14.4 modems". Those were the days.

  • There's an effort getting started to bring the current Slash code up to snuff. The homepage is here [zevils.com].
  • The 0.3 code that code.shtml links to has many known bugs. A lot of those have been fixed in 0.3-3.7, available here [zevils.com]. There is a mailing list, slash-help [asu.edu], for help with Slash problems.
  • just as good are:
    "Rolling out IIS to microsoft.com prior to releasing it to customers has always been an important requirement," noted developer John Ludeman. "There's no testing that can be done that's equivalent to the environment of live Internet traffic. That motto still exists -
    all of microsoft.com was running IIS 5.0 before Windows 2000 was released."
    (emphasis mine: Win2K isn't released yet.) and this trio makes a great combo...
    "The Windows 95 group didn't have much faith in us, probably rightly so - [....]"
    with
    "We had no idea what we were up against."
    and
    "We know what we're doing."
  • there is. look at that code link on the left side.
  • The search engine is screwed. Go to the search page and select the author senegan to see that. (He was at one time a prolific author but none of his old articles appear).

    Much old stuff is still accessible
    eg "Linus on KDE vs. GNOME flame wars" at
    http://slashdot.org/articles/older/980711108243. shtml
    which is from mid '98.

    At one point in time slash dot articles didn't have the date embedded in them at all, the articles were just numbered according to an incremented counter. For fun I went back as far as I could articles 000000000003 and 000000000005 were quite a laugh, with Rob fooling around saying stuff that he never expected people to see. I can't find those really old articles anymore.
  • Here is the oldest article from March 23 1999 (pre Chips and Dip stuff):
    I meant March 23 1997 of course.

  • From the beginning (Score:3)

    by Midnight Coder ( 8953 ) on Tuesday December 28, 1999 @09:10PM (#1437735)
    Here is the oldest article from March 23 1999 (pre Chips and Dip stuff):
    http://slashdot.org/articles/older/00000001.shtm l

    And it was actually articles
    http://slashdot.org/articles/older/00000005.shtm l
    and
    http://slashdot.org/articles/older/00000004.shtm l
    that were funny.

    First non Malda comment:
    http://slashdot.org/articles/older/00000017.shtm l

    First post by Hemos, Chips and Dips lives!:
    http://slashdot.org/articles/older/00000018.shtm l

    Mandrake says Xfree 4.0 out soon (this in Oct-1997!)
    http://slashdot.org/articles/older/00000028.shtm l

    Who new KDE and Gnome were so old (Oct-97 again)
    http://slashdot.org/articles/older/00000048.shtm l

    First flame war, things were pretty civilized then
    http://slashdot.org/articles/older/00000054.shtm l

    First fan?
    http://slashdot.org/articles/older/00000072.shtm l

    Not just XFree can fall behind schedule, NT5 Ship Date Delayed, probably won't ship until 1999.
    http://slashdot.org/articles/older/00000114.shtm l

    Wow it's a good thing these things tags aren't allowed in comments anymore :-)
    http://slashdot.org/articles/older/00000137.shtm l

    Slashdot has been renamed to Slashdot, "5000 hits per day, and that isn't slowing down yet" it's unstoppable:
    http://slashdot.org/articles/older/00000150.shtm l

    Last of the old posts, then the format changes to yy/mm/dd/millsec and becomes untrackable :-(
    http://slashdot.org/articles/older/00001079.shtm l
  • .. with the 0.9 version . its actully quite a nippy little program :)
    although nothing looks right :)

  • Not Really. BU is Boston University, a unrelated school in Boston, across the river from MIT. Although it is somewhat near the school with the dead server, we at BU have absolutly nothing to do with there server, or anything else for that matter. Yet.
  • I seem to remember that at some point MS was using Xenix as its internet presence, but this article basically says that it began with NT (which I am sure in the greater sense they would have you believe). Am I totally off my rocker here or is that the way it really was?

  • Netscape 0.97beta + LINUX = M$ competitor (Score:3)

    by mathboy ( 10519 ) on Tuesday December 28, 1999 @01:44PM (#1437739)
    Man those were heady days. I had been running linux at home for a few months, and had seen Mosaic at school in the lab a few months before. When I got Linux, X (of course) and Netscape finally running on my home machine, I swore I'dnever use Windows (or DOS, back then!) as my front end ever again!

    Truly those were the founding days that solidified the potential in my and many of my fellow students' minds of OSS software, and of Linux in particular as a competitor to Window.

    Since netscape is really the only true big browser available for Linux, it history is very closely tied to Linux's. Netscape helped linux along back then and we should pay hommage to them!

    I hope everyone's tried the new Mozilla milestones! :)

    Math
  • I remember sitting down looking at that thing and thinking, "Can't they do better than that? The thing's horrid, take it away."

    D

    ----
  • You can also check out my Sucakge.com code. It'll be posted online in a few days and is/will be a lot like the Slash engine, except written in Java as servlets.

    --hunter
  • I am not sure if these have already been mentioned, but those of you are having trouble with the site can find mirrors here:

    http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/mozilla/ [ucla.edu]
    http://www.dotnetat.net/mozilla/ [dotnetat.net]
  • MS had a FTP site up long before their WWW site. Does anyone know what that ran on? (OS/2 perhaps?)
    --
  • Actually, I think this Idea has some merit. A time capsule of different format, popular stories, the meta-moderation debate, etc. I think it would be good to show the progression of not only the community that is Slashdot, but a progression of just what you can do with Perl Scripting, bailing wire and duct tape.

  • Cool idea.

    I for one would love to see the original "chips and dips" which preceded /.


    --------------------------------
  • Wow! He predicted something that has been known by anyone interested in Mozilla since the opening of the source code...

    Yes, his whole argument was silly. He had "facts", but those facts didn't have anything to do with his conclusion. It's like me saying that the sun will go down Dec 31, it'll be dark, and people will drive with their headlights on. Because of that, there will be no Y2K problems. All of those were facts, and all will be true, but they have nothing to do with Y2K.

    So, if anything, this should be marked up as "Funny", but having a few facts in a post that has nothing to do with the facts presented, is *not* "Informative".

    -Brent
  • "Two weeks later, they hired a capacity planner for the download program so we wouldn't have the same fiasco for Internet Explorer 4.0."

    Yeah, they're *still* rebooting. You just can't tell it anymore because they've added enough servers so they aren't all rebooting at the same time :)

    -Brent

  • MS History: Funny as hell (Score:3)

    by tekan ( 12825 ) on Tuesday December 28, 1999 @04:25PM (#1437748)
    I expected the "Reflections on microsoft.com from Birth to 'Middle Age' [microsoft.com]" to be a PR extravaganza, but, although there was the prerequisite amount, parts of it where generally funny (if not hilarious).

    "The predecessor to MSNBC, known then as MSN News, was first published prematurely when a member of the production team, sitting up on a desk to study a schematic, clicked a mouse button with his derriere. The team watched in horror as the content went live to a public server before it was ready."

    "Mark Ingalls recalls how he mistakenly deleted the live default.htm file that served as the microsoft.com home page, in the days before staging servers. While home page visitors were receiving File Not Found errors, Ingalls rooted around in his browser cache - where the cache filenames did NOT map to their real names - to find and restore the page to active duty."

  • The above AC is an anti-Netscape dissenter with a well-articulated view and a high signal-noise ratio. Facts even.

    I like what Netscape tried to do but this guy should be moderated up.

  • Netscape decided to trust the free software movement and open source their browser. When will Slashdot show the same faith and release its own code?

    Cheers,
    ZicoKnows@hotmail.com

  • suck.com (Score:2)

    by mcc ( 14761 )
    i'm really kind of fascinated by this kind of thing..there's just something really cool about seeing something now commonplace in its early stages. Which is why i have a copy of the linux 0.01 source on my hard drive..just to look through, even though i don't understand 99% of it and i sure as heck can't compile it on my mac.

    one thing i'd REALLY like to know about is the changing layout of suck.com. they seem purposefully quiet about this, and the only reference they have to the fact their logo originally looked totally different is hidden deep in the contributor profiles.. even teh back issues hae the new header image plastered on. yes, i realize the layout was never more than marginally tooled; i'm still really curious for some unknown reason.

    oh, and real quick, cuz i haven't seen any other posters mention this: that "netscape time capsule" site is BEAUTIFUL from a layout standpoint. Whoever is responsible for the web design there is amazing.

    but good LORD.. look at that clean, usable, uncluttered NSCA mosaic layout. i had no IDEA. i am amazed by what a gigantic step backward netscapes 0.97-4.7 are.. i mean a "stop" button is nice but not worth 12 other buttons that are never used.. esp. if the one ("security") next to "stop", the one you constantly hit by accident, opens up a slow-to-open dialog with a nonfunctional close box an.. sorry, i'm ranting again

    -mcc-baka
    listen to your heartbeat delete beep beep BEEP.
  • Is it just me or does this seem like an obituary, rather than a time capsule.

    I remember the days when I was using version 1 under windows 3.1 with trumpet winsock....

    I still use it every day under linux, in fact I still swear by it. After all, it is realistically the only viable browser under linux.

    I have been playing with mozilla, and I like it, but it is still a bit too grungy for everyday use.
  • I get -1 sorry off topic and you get a 2. I agree with your sig. So moderate me down.

    Anyway, maybe every first post should be the DeCSS source code.....ooops off topic again..... now what were we talking about? Oh yea netscape, the story of how someone took someone elses code, made some money, and sold out to AOL of all things. My god....AOL....the "you've got mail" idiots. Now what was the AOL keyword for slashdot....oh yea..."first post".
  • Error 403: Access Forbidden

    The URL you requested:

    http://www.eng.buffalo.edu/~clau/mozilla

    is restricted, and cannot be accessed. Please do not repeat the request.


    The Slashdot effect is truly a sight to behold. I hope the Slashdot effect is always used "for niceness instead of evil" (as Maxwell Smart would have put it). There's not much difference between it and a distributed denial-of-service attack - and let's hope the lawyers of affected sites don't notice the similarity.

    For some reason, "please do not repeat the request" reminds me a lot of the "French person" in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where he says "now go away, or I shall taunt you a second time."
  • I chatted with the creator of the Netscape Time Capsule, Chuck Lau, and setup a mirror for him on my employer's servers:

    http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/mozilla [ucla.edu]

  • PHP4 is only under the PHP License, which is essentially the apache license. GPL was dropped to make it easier to use/distribute PHP for commercial purposes. Some people just like to spread FUD. PHP4 is "free". The confusion comes from the fact that the Zend engine, which is integrates into PHP4, is licensed under the QPL. However, this only applies to Zend as a standalone product, withing PHP4 all you have is the PHP License and no worries.
  • Not even 5 minutes after the article is posted, the website is unreachable. You guys should do consulting for testing out how much webservers can handle a massive spike in server usage ;)
  • From the article:

    Six years may not sound like a lot of time, but in "Internet time" that's almost half a lifetime. Internet time is sometimes likened to dog years - the first year is like 14, and every subsequent year is roughly equivalent to seven virtual years. By that reckoning, microsoft.com is pushing 50.

    Apparently we can all look forward to microsoft.com being a corpse in about 5-6 years..
  • From the microsoft time capsule:

    How the site got where it is now in just six high-velocity years is a story of smart decisions, some very public snafus, and all in all, a story we thought you might like to read as we close out 1999.


    i'm telling you, if they publicly snafus me again, i'm gonna give billyg a pop in the nose!

    *remove tounge from cheek*


    -confidential
  • "There's no testing that can be done that's equivalent to the environment of live Internet traffic. That motto still exists - all of microsoft.com was running IIS 5.0 before Windows 2000 was released."


    Windows 2000 was released? i thought they said "maybe febuary"?


    -confidential
  • I don't know how load could cause a system to reboot except for software problems though. You can throw as much work as you want at a CPU or RAM or hard drive, and as long as your drivers and core OS are good, they aren't going to be rebooting.

  • Microsoft did good (Score:3)

    by toastyman ( 23954 ) <toasty@dragondata.com> on Tuesday December 28, 1999 @08:58PM (#1437764) Homepage
    As much fun as it is to rip apart Microsoft, I found their history article a good thing. I honestly never thought I'd live to hear:

    "[Engineers] were literally in front of the FTP and download servers for an entire day rebooting them to keep them up because there were too many users for what the boxes could handle."

    come from a Microsoft spokesperson.

    No, this isn't a new story to laugh at Microsoft with. Having them admit to being mortal is an important step in becoming less of the conceived monster that they appear to be.

    In case you're missing the big deal: Microsoft admitted that something they made didn't work. Perhaps this is just a fluke, or this article didn't get cleared by their PR people, but maybe this is a sign that they're going to start being more forthright when it comes to bugs?

    Or am I reading too much into this?
  • MS's public face is one thing, but my experience has been that in private meetings their culture is one of pretty heavy self-criticism. I'm no MS advocate, but in my work life I interact with folks at MS pretty regularly, and they can be brutally honest internally. I'm guessing it's one of the reasons they've been successful.

    As to the article, I'm guessing the PR people rightly guessed that there's not a lot of risk admitting something didn't work due to unexpected popularity. "Why, there were many more users than even *we* could predict!"
  • Works under wine just great for me. Neat...

  • Ah... Good 'ole Micro$oft quality... (Score:4)

    by Borken ( 29326 ) on Tuesday December 28, 1999 @02:12PM (#1437767)
    ;)

    I quote:

    "Steve Heaney and Mark Ingalls were literally in front of the FTP and download servers for an entire day
    rebooting them to keep them up because there were too many users for what the boxes could handle," said
    Todd Weeks, now microsoft.com's systems operations manager. "Two weeks later, they hired a capacity
    planner for the download program so we wouldn't have the same fiasco for Internet Explorer 4.0."

  • Further back in the past (Score:4)

    by David A. Madore ( 30444 ) on Tuesday December 28, 1999 @05:10PM (#1437768) Homepage

    Another time capsule I very much like: go to ftp://ftp.digital.com/pub/DEC/sim/ [digital.com] and download the PDP emulator from the sources/ subdirectory. Then download the files from the software/ directory: uv5swre.tar.Z is an image of a PDP-11 disk running Unix version 5. That's really something worth trying out. You can also download Unix versions 6 and 7, and some old version of RSTS/E, and a few other dusty programs of the kind. Including a copy of the Lisp interpreter (with source), by L. Peter Deutsch, for the PDP-1.

    One thing I would also very much like is to be able to run ITS, the fabled hackers' operating system that ran on the PDP-10. I found the sources, but I don't have a PDP-10 emulator capable of running that thing.

  • I think you're reading too much ... they admitted that the boxes couldn't handle the load. That sounds more like hardware to me.

  • Yea but who added HTML extensions first? Netscape :) Who passed on making their scripting ECMA compatible? Netscape. Grrrr such a royal pain to try to get a site to render in Netscape after their "bent" the standards.

  • In *theory* dodgy NICs I suppose :)
  • What makes it not free? This is what I get from phpinfo() for version 3.0.12:

    PHP License

    This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of:

    A) the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

    B) the PHP License as published by the PHP development Team and included in the distribution in the file: LICENSE

    This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

    You should have received a copy of both licenses referred to here. If you did not, or have any questions about PHP licensing, please contact core@php.net.


    Is PHP4B3 different?
  • From the "well-articulated view":

    I correctly predicted Mozilla source would lack SSL and lack JAVA when shipped.

    Wow! He predicted something that has been known by anyone interested in Mozilla since the openning of the source code... (And if you don't know the reasons for the lack of SSL and how Java is supported in Mozilla, then find out [mozilla.org].)
  • What the hell program have you been using? Edit>Preferences>Advanced>Automatically load images check box. Works just fine, thanks.
  • ...sitting on my shelf. Back in the 1.1 kernel days, or maybe the early 1.2, my Quantum Empire 1 Gb SCSI disk died. It certainly still contain lots of historically valuable data in the netscape cache. Who remembers freshmeat.unreal.org? :)
  • For example, the sid=moderation [slashdot.org] might not be archived, and there used to be some really interesting stuff in there (like roblimo talking about slashdot's quiet period).
  • Wow, I just have to say that this is impressing! I started to use the Web in late 1995 and I have to say that this is fascinating to see how it all came to this. Even some of the old links on Netscape/Mozillas "What's New" -page is still working! :)

    Those were the days when the Web wasn't yet commercialized...

  • Wow, I am reading Slashdot on Netscape 0.93! It works and even looks quite good. I think this is how a web browser still should look like! :)
  • Hey, yahoo.com doesn't display properly anymore! ;)

    Many, many moons ago I remember the day when Yahoo! switched to using that newest of web inventions, tables. There had actually been a fair amount of discussion about it: they sent a lot of early users emails asking if they should include tables or not, since very few web browsers supported them. (I voted yes, although table support in the version of Mosaic I was using was poor.)

    What really irritates me: I was a grad student at the same school at the same time as Filo and Yang. All of my friends and I collected web site addresses and indexed our favorites: there were no search engines at that time. Then we found the precursor to Yahoo and more or less stopped: we sent our lists to them and just let them do the indexing. Now I teach chemistry and they're gazillionaires. Sigh....

    Eric

  • Ah, yes, Stream... I remember those days. I was there for a few months in late 95 - early 96, just about the time 2.0 came out. I remember the joys of figuring out how to set up Win95's DUN; supporting the Netcom logins; all sorts of stuff.

    It was insane; it was crazy; it was amazing. I remember when the agency told me I had the position, but they couldn't tell me what I was supporting. Then we got there and we weren't supposed to tell anyone what we were supporting. Netscape didn't want anyone to know what was going on. (One Sunday there was a hellish ice storm, I showed up along with about 4 others, and we just took messages 'cause we didn't have the people for it, and had some interesting questions about WHY we weren't fully staffed...)

    Would I do it again? No. Would I change having done it? No. A few months later I got a job for an ISP based on my experience at Netscape. And it's been pretty much uphill since then.

    Someone did steal a book from me while I was there, which annoys me... but it was years ago and the book's way outdated now. So.

  • Ah, no, dammit! You have to preserve the beautiful formatting they put on it...

    Error 403: Access Forbidden

    The URL you requested:

    http://www.eng.buffalo.edu/~clau/mozilla

    is restricted, and cannot be accessed. Please do not repeat the request.

    See? /. doesn't do H1 tags, but the extra emphasis on the "do not" makes such a difference... :)

  • Whoa, ya... erm, I'd better start writing a script right now to try to get this one. er, ah, get a friend who knows how to do that to write a script for it...

    I predict a very large spike in posts surrounding midnight that day, assuming of course that all the necessary computers continue running over the date change. Naturally, the more people that respond to this post, the more people will attempt to get first post of the new millenium (first post of the first year in which the first digit in a four digit year is '2').

    Happy posting!
  • daveo remembers deleting some of his most important files (in the not-so-new days of the internet) and having to call up friends to look in their cache to try to restore the site.
  • Well, I got nothing but a 403. And... that's one hell of a mean 403 the University at Buffalo has!

    "The URL you requested:

    http://www.eng.buffalo.edu/~clau/mozilla

    is restricted, and cannot be accessed. Please do not repeat the request."

    ------------

  • Seems like all they were doing all the time was rebooting..

    The article is filled with quotes like:

    "Steve Heaney and Mark Ingalls were literally in front of the FTP and download servers for an entire day rebooting them to keep them up because there were too many users for what the boxes could handle,"
  • Welcome to 1999:

    First, the web admin 403-forbids the site 10 minutes after slashdot links to it.

    An hour later the server, http://www.eng.buffalo.edu/, is completely crashed.

    Pinging confucius.eng.buffalo.edu [128.205.25.7] with 32 bytes of data:

    Request timed out.
    Request timed out.
    Request timed out.
    Request timed out.

  • Microsoft remote administration history (Score:3)

    by mwalker ( 66677 ) on Tuesday December 28, 1999 @02:27PM (#1437787) Homepage
    While reading Microsoft's history of www.microsoft.com...

    Did you notice that Microsoft's picture of the first Microsoft web server ever also shows the first pioneering implementation of Microsoft's proven PTKAMRFA remote administration tool, still the only remote administration option to ship with Windows NT to this day?

    (PTKAMRFA: Put The Keyboard And Monitor Really Far Away (tm) (c) )

    Some linux people seem to think that telnet or ssh is superior but they're just stupid longhairs.

  • You can find PHPSlash here: http://phplib.netuse.de/download/index.php3 [netuse.de]

    Be aware that it is pre-alpha software (v 0.5.2). A website will exist at phpslash.org, but it is not there yet.

  • Mirror (Score:2)

    by Duxup ( 72775 )
    http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/mozilla/
  • Did anyone notice how one of the headlines on the 1995 page screenshot is "Microsoft responds to the DOJ" ?

    Hehe... This has been going on for quite some time, it would seem.

    1995: Msft responds to the DOJ
    1999-2000: The DOJ has lain dormant for too long...
  • You mean this? ftp://archive:oldies@archive.netscape.com/archive/ index.html


    I don't even see v0.94.

  • Listen to the history (Score:3)

    by mitd ( 81156 ) on Tuesday December 28, 1999 @02:19PM (#1437792)
    There is a superb documentary produced by Canadian Broadcasting Corporation called 'The Archaeology of the Internet'. The show includes interviews with some of the Netscape crew as well as many others. The CBC has generously posted the show on thier site. (RealAudio). So hunker down with some popcorn for an hour and take a great trip down memory lane. It can be found at: http://radio.cbc.ca/programs/ideas/shows/internet/ internet.ram (running time 54 mins.) mitd

  • Slashdot (Score:3)

    by scumdamn ( 82357 ) on Tuesday December 28, 1999 @01:33PM (#1437793)
    When are we going to see a Slashdot time capsule?
  • Reading the caption below the image on the front page of the Microsoft history, you see that the three rackmount servers in the photo served ftp, gopher, and web.

    a quick check shows that neither gopher://microsoft.com, nor gopher://gopher.microsoft.com work anymore :(

    You'd think Microsoft would still have one of those original servers sitting in a forgotten corner somewhere with the legacy gopher content still in place. :P
  • I wouldn't call it "rewriting history," but you're both right.

    The domain name 'microsoft.com' has been around for a LONG time, and was probably headed by a Xenix machine living in Building 11 on campus in Redmond.

    If you wanted to email someone at Microsoft, you added @microsoft.com to their internal email name. The internal culture was that your internal email name WAS your name, and you'd pronounce them as best you could; many people knew each other by email and not by face, even on the 52 acre campus. "Oh, YOU'RE edh! I'm toddla!" But that was pretty much the extent of Microsoft's "presence" on the Internet. It wasn't until Win31 shipped that they made their BBS of Windows Driver Library available by FTP, if I recall.

    Once they started making products that were Internet related, they shifted to using the WinNT servers that were replacing each departments' Xenix that year. It's a part of the corporate culture of "eat your own dogfood."
  • The code is right here [slashdot.org], depending on how you look at it. Rob's got a few million dollars, but apparently no time to update any of the pages that don't maintain themselves, let alone the code for the Slash engine. There's also PHPSlash, which probably works faster and better, but I don't have a link to it. PHP isn't free in RMS terms, more than close enough...

    Maybe Andover wants to keep that code a secret -- security by obscurity works, ya know ;)...
    --

  • I've had bad luck with the original and the mirror that was posted, so here [dotnetat.net] is a working mirror.
  • And now, thanks to Mr. Lau, the mirror on my site is back up here [dotnetat.net].
  • The mirroring script had some problems, and I've removed the mirror instead of leaving it wrong/incomplete. Sorry for the confusion.
  • what do you guys think would have resulted if they had opensourced their browser?! that could've changed history!

    bye,
    -jimbo
  • It may be just me, but I'm getting access forbidden errors on the site. I'm wondering if the site got slashdotted and the sysadmin changed the file permissions in order to save his servers. Anybody happen to get a mirror of this thing?
  • Man, oh man. Those boys over at Microsoft are trying to make it sound as if they invented the web "way back" in 1994! Can you believe that? They talk about one server sitting under a desk that some guy kept switching off by mistake. Hey, switching off a box running NT is no mistake; it is an honorable act. They have a screen shot of one of their early pages. It's pretty amusing. http://www.microsoft.com/library/images/gifs/stori es/flshbk_starmap.gif Now everybody together, let's slashdot 'em!
  • To : release@mcom.com
    Cc :
    Attchmnt:
    Subject : Re: Here it is, world!
    ----- Message Text -----
    Hi Marc,

    Sorry for the late reply, please send me an
    updated list of the mirrors, thanks!


    >An up-to-date listing of mirror sites can be
    >obtained at any time by
    >sending email to release@mcom.com.

  • I guess BU killed access due to bandwidth problems. Definition: Slashdot - Acceptable way to do a DOS attack.

  • Re:Already /.'d (Score:3)

    by GhostCoder ( 108387 ) on Tuesday December 28, 1999 @02:32PM (#1437808)
    Just want to point out that the Microsoft.com story is working fine. Now the question is posed: Can Microsoft.com really handle the Slashdot effect, or do people just not care about MS? :)

    Wait...don't answer that. :)
  • Visiting the URL posted for the Netscape time capsule reveals a 403 Error: Access Forbidden.

    "If you received this message from attempting to access the web site "http://www.eng.buffalo.edu/~clau/mozilla", please do not bother sending e-mail to the administrators; the site has been taken down due to overload problems."

  • Looks like it's back up now.

  • Microsoft Time Capsule (Score:3)

    by seaportcasino ( 121045 ) on Tuesday December 28, 1999 @01:51PM (#1437814) Homepage
    While we're all flashing back, here's another great flashback to what www.microsoft.com looked like back in 1993. Enjoy! www.microsofttimecapsule.com [microsofttimecapsule.com]

  • Re:Site Taken Down (It's Up Again) (Score:3)

    by Dave Yearke ( 130479 ) on Tuesday December 28, 1999 @03:01PM (#1437819)
    It's back up. I changed the server configuration so that only 60 simultaneous connections are allowed. So, it'll be slow, and may time out, but at least you can get to it eventually. It's a small server, and we never expected this kind of load on it.

    To anyone I may have freaked out on: I apologize. I was beside myself trying to get things working again, as this server is sometimes used for Real Work, and was totally useless during the initial onslaught. I'm better now ... :-)

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