The passing of an old friend... Yesterday AOL announced it would no longer
continue the development of the Netscape browser. Along with Mosaic and HTML,
the Netscape web browser (Mozilla-based) is what most of us thought of as the
Internet, even created the Internet as end users know it (though there is now
evidence that Al Gore worked on Netscape code early in its existence.)
It seems like only yesterday (if you close your eyes and squint real hard) that you were cool if you were using the Netscape Communicator server to develop web sites and products for the world wide web. (It's seems odd now to say "world wide web" instead of "the web".) My original business plan for BoldTech Systems was to be a web site development company. The business plan modeled out how many customers we'd have, how many sites web be developing per week, etc. Despite some early efforts with a few local companies and GNN who was bought by AOL, we instead became a telecom systems integration consulting company. (I think there's a connection there somehow, lol.)
Netscape created a lot of excitement, was new and cool, and marked the beginning of the '90s Internet hay day. It was a heady and hopeful time. You had the feeling that you were working on the forefront of a new generation of technology. Networking and software came together in new and interesting ways. Web sites led to web apps, delivery of all kinds of content, and new kinds of businesses. It also led to the market breathing a lot of its own exhaust, like startups whose business plan was to register domain names like furniture.com or pharmacy.com. While things did get way out of hand and then later suffer through a needed correction, you can't take away what Netscape did to lead the way creating a new generation of software and networking.
Hats off and a thank you to the Netscape browser for helping reshape the industry we work in today.
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