Mosaic Netscape 0.9 was released 30 years ago today

computer history
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Jamie Zawinski reminds us that Mosaic Netscape 0.9 was released 30 years ago today:

According to my notes, it went live shortly after midnight on Oct 13, 1994.

I remember trying Netscape at the univerity towards the end of 1994. It was so much faster than xmosaic1.

Netscape, the company, was probably the catalyst of the first dotcom bubble with its IPO. Netscape Navigator was instrumental at boosting the web as an everyday technology. I was available on almost every platform that could run it, including on the plethora of commercial UNIX, and introduced a lot of “innovations” to the world-wide-web, including JavaScript2. Netscape was also yet another casuality of Microsoft monopolistic behaviour, and maybe the first major one, leading to the dominance of Internet Explorer.

Previously: The time of Netscape

  1. xmosaic was developed at NCSA by Marc Andreesen before he went to found Netscape. I often joke it’s the last sensible thing he wrote. ↩︎

  2. mistakes were made. ↩︎