Happy Birthday, Netscape

Hard to believe it's been 10 years since the seminal browser first made its appearance and changed forever the way we browsed the then-nascent World Wide Web. Yes, NCSA's Mosaic was technically the first real successful graphical browser. But Netscape took the concept and made it a reality for the rest of us. Until, that is, Microsoft weighed in with its ode to mediocrity and forced us into a desktop stupor from which we're only now beginning to emerge.

(For the record, the World Wide Web is NOT the Internet. It is a SERVICE that RESIDES on the Internet. In that respect, it exists on the same org chart level as e-mail, FTP, Usenet, Gopher, Archie, Jughead, Veronica, and WAIS; sort of like their prettier, younger sister. The Internet is the underlying infrastructure on which all of these services eventually evolved. It existed long before the Web came about. It - or some infrastructure like it, like Internet2/Abilene - will likely outlive them all. End of technical detour.)

Before Netscape, the few folks who even knew that a World Wide Web existed were more likely to be exploring it using a text-based browser known as Lynx. Once you got used to tabbing around the screen, you could usually find what you were looking for without too much difficulty. And since design hadn't evolved to the point that it has today, most web pages were efficiently designed (read small, fast, and with few or no graphics or other doodads.)

The last ten years have brought us bigger pipes carrying more data to faster computers, but that data is now choked with graphics-heavy blinking ads and other garbage. I seriously doubt we're more productive now than we were then. And back then, it still had a sense of wonder about it. Today, not so much.

If you want to go back to that time, to a simpler era when the screech of a modem marked the beginning of an online session - and a differently-pitched screech of a family member often marked the end of it - CNet has posted the original Netscape Navigator press release. It has also posted a comprehensive page of content devoted to this milestone. I know most of us don't give a second thought to what software we use to cruise the Internet. Indeed, we don't pay attention to our software at all - until it fails us. (That's usually the point at which my phone rings, but that's a story for another day.)

But taking a few minutes to think about what we use, how it came to be in the first place and how it evolved to the present can give us a greater sense of perspective on the sheer wonder of it all.