Whoa, I have not watched this documentary in a loooong time — very interesting to watch in the future this company helped to create, for good and very, very bad.
Code Rush is a documentary following the lives of a group of Netscape engineers in Silicon Valley. It covers Netscape's last year as an independent company, from their announcement of the Mozilla open source project until their acquisition by AOL. It particularly focuses on the last minute rush to make the Mozilla source code ready for release by the deadline of March 31 1998, and the impact on the engineers' lives and families as they attempt to save the company from ruin.
Interviews in the movie include Ellen Ullman, Kara Swisher, Jamie Zawinski, Jim Barksdale, Marc Andreessen, and Brendan Eich. (via robin sloan)
Jamie Zawinski, one of the developers responsible for the early versions Netscape Navigator, has declared that today is Run Some Old Web Browsers Day. In celebration, he's hosting an archive of old Mosaic/Netscape broswers and rolled back the clock on the original mcom.com domain.
home.mcom.com and all URLs under it just redirected to netscape.com, then redirected a dozen more times before taking you to some AOL portal page. The old URLs that were baked into the toolbar buttons of the original web browsers didn't work any more. But now, if you fire up a copy of Mosaic Netscape 0.9, and click on the various toolbar buttons, they will work again! For example, in the old browsers, when you clicked on the "What's New" toolbar button, it went here.
home.mcom.com is now a snapshot of that web site from 21-Oct-1994.
mosaic.mcom.com is now a snapshot of that web site from July 1994. That's from just after the company was announced, but before the first browser beta was released. I think that by Oct 1994, both mosaic.mcom.com and www.mcom.com were redirects to home.mcom.com, but I can't remember any more.
Evolt also maintains an extensive archive of browsers old and new. I have a smaller archive that I put together for an episode of 0sil8 more than 10 years ago.
Surprisingly good list of the top 10 Web 2.0 losers. It's too early to pass judgement on Netscape (the site has shot to the top of Google search results for current events keywords because of the site's high PageRank) and SixApart's inclusion is wrong. The top four spots are right on; the Odeo situation is sad (I thought they were really onto something), but Flock, Edgeio, and Squidoo seemed not quite equal to the hype right from the beginning.
When the Fortune article on the Netscape IPO came out, I wondered why Jamie Zawinski wasn't in it...figured it was something like this. "The article is out now, and I see my instinct was exactly correct: it's not accomplishments or culture or technology, it's just about price tags. And to this day, every time I read Mike Homer's name my stomach clenches up."
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