No, I remember Opera 7/8 though. Well… the one with ads.
I seem to remember there being yellow…
You’re thinking of Netscape Navigator Gold 3.0
I have used the same web browser, in terms of ideology, codebase, and heritage, for nearly a third of a century, now.
NCSA Mosaic -> Netscape -> Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox.
I now hew more to alternates such as LibreWolf and Floorp, but I still run Firefox EME-Free as my default.
Yes, of course. We also had a notebook (these paper-based thingies, not a digital one) in the terminal room where we collected interesting web site addresses back then before Altavista and bookmarks.
Was there porn ?
Of course. alt.binaries.pictures.erotica - not an internet address in case you wonder, but a NNTP group. Yes, we had social media back then, just not with Nazis, bots, and ads.
Yes, we had social media back then, just not with Nazis, bots, and ads.
We did have plenty of usenet trolls and usenet wars.
Online porn existed before the internet
Do we count Bulletin Boards as pre Internet?
Most bulletin boards like fidonet existed in parallel with the internet, and even used internet bridges to transfer mail and files across long distances where a dialup connection could not be used.
NNTP actally was quite network agnostic, the messages did not care about the means of transport. I actually handled a NNTP link back then via floppy disk.
I had a Popular Science magazine that included the 50 coolest websites you should visit. That was mine. I still get hit with so much nostalgia about it. They were legit so cool that they still put most websites I see nowadays to shame.
…well? You can’t just not share the sites?
I left it in the terminal room when I left university decades ago. Maybe it is still there.
That’s really cool. Many of them are still there–some of them unchanged.
Yeah, I noticed that too! It would be cool to make a more easily accessible collection of these kinds of things.
That one text file what was a copy paste of all the neat things we’d read on the internet and wanted to save.
I have Navigator 1.0 on a disk in my basement. Its my precious.
“We hates the AOL!”
Peak internet 1.0:
Ah yes web 2.0 was also a thing. I remember.
I’ll never forget watching pictures roll in line-by-line on dialup back in 1995 or so.
I’ve seen that some dude on here has the Netscape throbber (for Gen Z: that’s what the animated doohickey in the corner that shows your page is still loading and your computer has not frozen is called) as his profile icon.
Maybe you’ve just summoned him up, Beetlejuice style.
I remember thinking Netscape was way cooler than IE based purely on the throbber animation
“Throbber” animation? 🤔
in case you didn’t know: the animated icon (usually the cursor) that indicates background processing is called a throbber.
Normal people say hourglass yeah even when it’s not a hourglass yeah even when they design them yeah even when they can be confused and the reason is not that throbber would be a useful word, it’s that it’s extremely sexual and now I get to feel sexual too for saying it back and have to take a shower
Agreed. 1999-2000 was also peak internet for me. Netscape, Napster, Neopets, and Nick.com (and StarCraft multiplayer). It didn’t get any better than that.
Limewire… downloading all your favourite songs, wait no… typing in names of any song you could think of in hopes you’d find it. Then you did find it and it turned out to be the same damn song you can’t stand with the file misnamed. A whole generation grew up confused about who sang their favourite songs, and found constant frustration in waiting like 12min (on a great day) for Smells Like Teen Spirit to download, only to find they got Weird Al Yankovich’s parody instead… like 4 times in a row from four different files. Ahhhh memories.
Nah… Netscape Navigator Gold was peak. Netscape Communicator was too bloated and took forever to load. Sure it had an email client, HTML editor, etc. but these should have been separate programs, not all built into a single thing. The original mozilla browser was also this way until
PhoenixFirebirdFirefox pulled a browser out of the bloated mess.For some reason this gif gives me nostalgia of listening to artbell.com on Netscape - Good times.
I still find listening to old Coast to Coast episodes cozy.
Peak Internet is when Mozilla (the kaiju mascot) showed up in the loading animation near the end of Netscape’s lifespan
Remember when we got excited about browser releases? What a time.
Going from Netscape 1 to Netscape 2 which supported animated gifs. What a day that was!
I sure remember the HOURS it took me to download that sucker on my 14.4kb modem. I was blessed by the gods with a parent in the computer industry even then so we had a 2nd phone line that I could monopolize for a day of agonizingly watching and praying not to lose connection again.
Yes, if all had been perfect it should have only taken about an hour but dialup internet was ditzy and unreliable so I spent a huge chunk of that weekend getting a full download.
I remember walking into the college library in late 94, seeing all the real computer geeks standing around one of the newer 486s, they were installing Navigator Beta 1.1.
We had been using FTP, Gopher and Telnet for a while, but this was the first time that any of us had actually used a web browser.
Of course, there was no search yet, so while sites did exist, it took them a little time to dig through enough IRC and Usenet to find things to visit.
this gives me goosebumps
14.4k baud modem download… yes… I also plastered this on old wepages… hahahaha
The URL
about:mozillawas always full of fun :)I remember using Mosaic.
Yep - me too. I had to go to our “mainframe room” where we had our only Sun workstation - the only thing that would run the first versions.
Mosaic and Lynx on Sun workstations was how I started as well. Back then, there was a ton of open ftp access as well, wild.
Oh yes, anonymous FTP and directories called “…” with interesting contents. Simpler times.
people who remembered college days upon seeing this, please queue here
