HISTORY's Moment in Media: The '90s Were All About Netscape

The internet used to be all monochrome text ran on mainframes and was the province of computer geeks and military squares who knew how to use the operating system UNIX The World Wide Web marked the beginning of what we know today as the internet an easytouse place where you could just point and click to access images links news and even pornWeb browsers were the key to that transition In October 1994 Netscape Communications Corporation released the first public beta version of its Netscape Navigator browser Twentyseven years ago this month the modern internet opened for businessNavigator wasn39t the first browser but it was the first commercial one and for a time it was the dominant player in the new world of the web Netscape was founded by Jim Clark who was already a Silicon Valley legend for creating Silicon Graphics in 1993 Silicon Graphics created the CGI dinosaurs for Jurassic Park and Mark Andreesen a 20something recent graduate of the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign UIUCAndreesen was one of those UNIX geeks In college he worked at UIUC39s National Center for Supercomputing Applications and it was there that he gathered some other coders to help him realize his vision for the internet a place where regular people from all around the world could easily access information whenever they wanted And so they created Mosaic the world39s first graphical browserAround the time Andreesen was graduating Clark was looking for his next big thing He joined up with Andreesen and they hired some of Andreesen39s coder pals from UIUC After an IP scuffle with UIUC Mosaic became Netscape By the middle of 1995 Netscape had 500 employees and controlled the new browser marketOn August 9 1995 the company went public and the stock took off quotIt had taken General Dynamics 43 years to be worth 27 billion in the stock marketquot wrote The Wall Street Journal quotIt took Netscape Communications Corp about a minutequot The startup that invented the modern web also invented the template for the modern tech IPOThe IPO however was probably the high point of Netscape39s existence The company changed the world but changing the world attracts attention Just two weeks after the Netscape IPO Microsoft released its muchhyped Windows 95 A part of the tech behemoth39s launch included Netscape39s rival Internet Explorer IE which ironically was built with software licensed from UIUCAt first Netscape was a much better piece of software than IE But the famous first browser war was launched and IE rapidly improved It also had the decided advantage later and ineffectually deemed illegal by the US government of being bundled in with Microsoft39s hugely popular and widely used productsThe intense competition for browser market share meant there was a winner and a loser and Netscape was the loser In November 1998 just five years after launching its first product and four years after its precedentsetting IPO AOL acquired Netscape Another five years later in 2003 AOL shuttered its Netscape unit and laid off most of its staffNetscape and IE may have died but the world Netscape created still lives on and the browsers we use to access it are continually refined When you surf the web and conduct your cyber adventures you39re using one of those pioneers39 successors Maybe it39s Google Chrome or Apple Safari Or perhaps it39s even Mozilla Firefox which was built from the opensource Navigator code Netscape released to the public before the AOL acquisitionClick the social buttons to share this content with your friends and colleaguesThe opinions and points of view expressed in this content are exclusively the views of the author andor subjects and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillagecomMyersBizNet Inc management or associated writers

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HISTORY's Moment in Media: The '90s Were All About Netscape

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HISTORY's Moment in Media: The '90s Were All About Netscape

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