According to my notes, it went live shortly after midnight on Oct 13, 1994. We sat in the conference room in the dark and listened to different sound effects fired for each different platform that was downloaded. At some point late that night I wandered off and wrote the first version of the page that loaded when you pressed the "What's Cool" button in the toolbar. (A couple days later, Jim Clark would go ballistic in a company-wide email because I had included a link to Bianca's Smut Shack.)
For those of you who are unaware of these finer details, 0.9 was the first release of the Netscape browser (which begat Firefox) available to the general public. This beta release was an unannounced surprise. Prior to this, everyone assumed that what we were doing was going to be a standard for-sale product where you sent off your $35 and then some time later got a disc in the mail with a license key. That we just said, "Here's our FTP site, come get it, go crazy" was, at the time, shocking to people.
These anniversaries keep piling up, so I don't really have a lot to add, but check my NSCP tag or the Previouslies for more, particularly the links in this one.
I'd still like to find a way to run a mid-90s vintage Unix version of the browser under emulation on an M1 Mac. I asked about that a while back but was never able to Make It Go.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
I remember immediately installing it on our Sun servers and Macs.
I think I missed Bianca’s Smut Shack. Drat.
Yeah, I remember back when Marc Andreesen and Netscape used to be "the good guys" in the battle against Microsoft.
If only we knew...
A16z has become one of the most negative forces of the world. Batshit crazy and with a lot of money.
Meanwhile, the non-management part of Netscape, which AOL eventually spat out as the Mozilla Foundation, has a fine track record of jumping on tech fads, only to abandon them soon after.
Now excuse me, I need to look up some Pocket articles on how to get my Firefox OS smartphone working with my Firefox streaming stick. Hopefully Mozilla AI can help 😂
My VPzn said Firefox was compromising my Pc
OMG this, so much this. I was a Netscape Solutions Expert certified consultant in the late 1990s, when everyone was hot to be a Microsoft Certified Solutions Engineer.
Happy 30th birthday Mosaic Netscape 0.9! 🥳🎉
> I'd still like to find a way to run a mid-90s vintage Unix version of the browser under emulation on an M1 Mac. I asked about that a while back but was never able to Make It Go.
Don't know about a Mac version… but I've got some copies of Australian Personal Computer magazine CDs that would have Linux copies of Netscape from around that time…
I can dig one out and see if modern Linux will run it. It was Motif-based and I think largely statically linked, so we might be lucky.
Finding the binary is not a problem. Having an emulation environment capable of booting, like, Red Hat 5 or something is the problem.
Haven't got a M1 Mac for testing… but a quick look around revealed https://mac.getutm.app/ which shows MacOS 9 and Windows XP examples… so we're in the ballpark.
archive.org has Red Hat 5.0 apparently, but is down (some dick threw a digital brick at their windows). I might have a copy on CD though… I'll have a rummage at daylight and see if I can dig one up and rip an ISO for you.
I did find a copy lurking online… sadly not an ISO.
http://archive.kernel.org/redhat-archive/redhat/linux/5.0/en/os/i386/ -- you will find boot.img and supp.img floppy images in the images/ sub-directory.
The catch is, the installer does not support downloading over anything other than (possibly active) FTP or NFS… and that mirror does not support anything but HTTP. `wget` refuses to download due to `robots.txt` telling it to go bugger off.
QEMU's 'pcnet' network interface is recognised by Red Hat 5.0 though, as is the IDE interface, so if you can clear the FTP hurdle, that should get the environment up.
https://www.gnu.org/software/wget/manual/html_node/Robot-Exclusion.html
> If you know what you are doing and really really wish to turn off the robot exclusion, set the robots variable to ‘off’ in your .wgetrc. You can achieve the same effect from the command line using the -e switch, e.g. ‘wget -e robots=off url...’.
@jwz
That said, would this achieve your goal? https://oldweb.today/?browser=ns4-win#19960101/http://geocities.com/
@jwz
Maybe…
I dug out my old CDs… this is a lot less piss-farting around.
I wang netscape back! not mozilla, netscape. i want choice in the browser market. Not firefox and reskinned chromiums.
They grow up so fast.
it was a great day when my university installed Netscape 0.9 - a huge improvement over Mosaic! That was back in the days when you had to use the Internet before lunchtime because it would all ground to a halt when America logged on.
To be fair, Mosaic was already amazing. Netscape just made everything better.
Cheers!
I can't try this right now because annoyingly some idiots took archive.org down. However it seems like there's an older emulator for 32 bit intel chips. This guy has a pretty good guide on getting RedHat 5.2 running.
Not Irix, sorry. But if you have some RedHat 5.2 CDs around and a CDROM drive (I'm annoyingly missing the latter at the moment), this might work.
https://www.chrisrcook.com/2024/03/03/getting-red-hat-linux-5-2-up-and-running-on-86box/
I am grateful for your good works. But disappointed that the fishcam 404s
I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out how that animated compass logo on your home page worked
was it, server push animations? (I'm amused this still works!) https://pronoiac.org/misc/2009/10/server-push-animation/
pert near sure it was server push
If I remember correctly, you were still being asked to buy a license, which my employer back then did (I think 3 or 5 licenses). I don't remember how we managed to get the payment done from Germany (I think a US friend mailed a check). Unfortunately, I believe the licenses were lost in the shuffle (and the company does not exist anymore).
I remember how long it took to download it with my 14.4 modem, worth every minute.
RETVRN to the days of proper animated page-loading throbber animations. I feel like we lost something ineffable there.
Was there and used it. I also feel mildly responsible for a small part of the internet I built.
still my favourite of the spinner loader logos.
It sounds like you might want the project 86Box (latest) which aims to emulate 86x hardware (not software).
Note that if you want SATA support to put multiple drives, you'll presently need to compile from source; the latest build at time of writing has a bug in their PIIX3 code which flips a bit and causes pretty much anything to fail.
To spoonfeed, if this is a new project to you:
1) Grab latest binary or compile from source
2) Clone their roms project (https://github.com/86Box/roms) into a roms/ subdirectory next to the binary
3) Open 86box, go to Tools -> Settings and set up a valid 8086 machine.
I've reproduced my machine below, dropdown choices in bold:
Machine Type: Socket 8,
Motherboard: ASUS P/I-P65UP5,
CPU: Intel Pentium II Overdrive (@ 100 mhz -- if your actual cpu is faster then 2.5 GHz you might try going higher)
Memory: 256 MB (Linux at-the-time can handle 512 but there are some rom issues with handling this much memory that you'd probably wanna skip)
Display: Pick any PCI card you fancy -- My favorite is the S3 ViRGE Diamond 2000
Sound: Pick any plug 'n' play card. Popular choice is Sound Blaster 16 PnP, I think.
Network: SLiRP, change the adapter dropdown to AMD Pc-net PCI.
Hard disks: Add a single drive here for simplicity. Aim for 504MB as a max, the Socket 8 roms have trouble with higher dimensions. Make sure your hard drive is present at 0:0.
Floppy & CD-ROM drives: Add One ATAPI CD-ROM and make sure the channel is 0:1.
4) Click OK to save settings, 86box will automatically reboot and load the correct BiOS ROM
5) While your machine POSTs, right click your CD-ROM and load the iso or whatever you need in. If you're still at the boot-up screen then you finish, mash DEL to get into settings.
6) Change your boot sequence as needed in BIOS FEATURES SETUP.
7) Save and reboot, should try to load your CD-ROM once the POST passes.
Note that SLiRP emulates a modem and will piggyback on your *actual internet connection* so mind that if you connect an old linux machine to the internet you may have to handle linux virii. If that worries you, change SLiRP to Pcap and you can use standard pcap tools to moderate the machine's connection.
I'll also note that 86box is a fork of Qemu that's more user-friendly (but at the same time hides more stuff), so if you know how to follow these instructions in Qemu that's likely more preferable)
I still have a VHS copy of Code Rush.
I remember. It was amazing.
I don't remember Bianca's Smut Shack, but I do remember Paul Phillips' WWW Useless Pages
The choice and effort to keep browsers running on all three platforms back in the 90s played a huge role in Microsoft and Apple not completely replacing UNIX/Linux. To the extent that you were pivotal in ensuring the UNIX releases, I truly thank you.
Thanks, and I agree with your assessment. Killing off cross-platform was the first thing the Collabra reverse-acquisition pinheads tried to do.
"Remember, it's spelt N-E-T-S-C-A-P-E, but it's pronounced Mozilla."
Since I can still run Netscape on Red Hat 5.2 and Mosaic on Dell SVR4 on real hardware, and Dell SVR4 on 86Box, it seems it should be possible to get both browsers running on 86Box on Apple processors, but it will be a while before I pursue, if I do.
wild times. I was at a company that had a firewall, so we had to create our own websites internally to use Netscape.