Mathew Ingram has posted some smart reflections inspired by Netscape’s thirtieth birthday:
I don’t think an ancient serf seeing an illustrated manuscript for the first time in the 11th century would have been any more gobsmacked than I was at Netscape. Yes, there were things like America Online and Compuserve before that, and I had tried most of them. But I felt that they were like a children’s playground with 10-foot-high walls — you couldn’t even see the real internet from there, let alone actually interact with it.
That’s how I felt too. I was an active CompuServe user and had connected to a bunch of the local Bulletin Board Systems by the time I touched the internet; they felt both easy to grasp and constrained.
The web and I grew up together.
Our family was friends with John Rose, the proprietor of a local listings and classifieds broadsheet called Daily Information, who was a tech enthusiast on the side. He’d turned the Daily Info office (a creaky Victorian house in North Oxford that smelled of photocopiers) into a part-time computer café for the local students to use. My parents were both students at the University while I was growing up, and so I’d hung out at Daily Info since I was small. We didn’t have much money, but because of John, I grew up around daisy-wheel typewriters, which became dedicated word-processors, which became Macs and IBM PCs.
John had become excited about the idea of BBSes (possible because he’d seen that I was excited about BBSes), so hired me as a fifteen year old to start one from him. We had a single line: one person at a time could dial in and look at apartments to rent or get today’s movie times. I’d come in after school for £5 an hour and update the listings and make sure the BBS was working.
A BBS is a walled garden. You dial in, you’re presented with a menu (perhaps painstakingly built in ANSI characters by a teenager after school), and you can select a very small number of things to do. You might chat in a forum, upload or download a few files, or read some information. There’s no expansiveness: you’re logging into a limited information system that’s designed for a small number of people to interact with, likely run from a single computer under a desk.
The internet, of course, is something else entirely.
While I was building text-only interfaces on the BBS computer in Daily Information’s storage closet, the consumer internet was emerging. It wasn’t long before it entered my living room. My mother was a telecoms analyst for Kagan World Media, where she wrote a newsletter about the emerging internet, computer and cellphone industries. (Here she is quoted discussing CD-ROM penetration in Time Magazine in 1995, or in Communications International announcing the decline of the pager). She’d get to try out new tech from time to time, so we briefly got a very early version of commercial dial-up internet at home; I wowed myself with the Carnegie Mellon Coke machine and the Trojan Room coffee pot (the first IoT device and first webcam respectively). I found the internet much harder to use than BBSes, but it was clear that the possibilities were enormous. Family friends would come to our house to see it.
In that first year of running the BBS, John installed a 128kbps ISDN line at the Daily Info office. I’d already played with the internet a little bit at home; here I had more time and bandwidth to try web browsers. I’d been using NCSA Mosaic, an early web browser built at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign by student programmers Eric Bina and Marc Andreessen. When they graduated and started Netscape with Jim Clark, I eagerly downloaded every version: the one when it was still called Mosaic, before the University Illinois complained about use of the name; the version of Netscape with the boxy blue N in the top right that had a prominent role in the first Mission Impossible film; the one with the classy night sky logo.
It was a window into something entirely new. It was magic: a way for anyone to tell stories in practically any way they wanted. There was something about the slow speed which emphasized how special it was; a photograph that took a minute to download, coming into progressive focus or cascading down the screen line by line, felt like it was being delivered from half a world away. That’s been lost now that the web is instantaneous; it’s inarguably better now, of course, but it’s also easier to take it for granted.
With each Netscape release, I was also glued to every new feature that the web allowed. The HTML 2.0 release the next year introduced some major new ideas: a head and body tag, forms, inline images, a few basic styles. By the time I graduated high school, CSS had been invented, and people were beginning to add semantic details to the markup — but HTML 2.0 was enough to get started with.
John bought us some web space, and we created a website for Daily Info. The BBS was still functional, but now any number of people with an internet connection could view the listings simultaneously. It was very basic — this was 1995 — but it was possible for someone to see the listings and pay to add their own to the site on the same day, albeit with a real human dealing with it. The PageMaker files for the paper version of the sheet were still the primary source of truth, so ads were added there first, and then extracted back into files that I could convert into HTML and upload to the server.
I realized years later that the Daily Info website was online before either Craigslist or eBay, which are usually credited as being the first web classifieds sites. It was certainly more basic (built, as it was, by a teenager in a closet), although we progressively built more interactivity through Perl scripts. That fact speaks one of the most powerful things about the web: anyone can do it. You don’t need permission to publish. You just need to have something to say.
My excitement about the internet at Daily Info led to us finally getting the internet at home, through Demon, an early dial-up ISP that literally connected you to the internet with a static IP whenever you dialed in. It was the first to give every customer free web space, which felt like freedom: even though I’d been building at my after-school job for a while, having web space of my own meant I could do anything I wanted with it. I began to experiment with my own homepages, and narrate my life through a kind of online diary (we have a different word for that now). All the while, I continued to update the Daily Info website, which is still running today, with a very different codebase.
I thought I was going to be a writer; experimenting with the web meant that I chose to take the computer science route and learn more about building software. It radically changed the course of my life. I’m still a writer at heart — my love of technology stems from my desire to tell stories with it — but I’ve also been a developer, a startup founder, an advisor, and a CTO. So much of what I’ve been able to do, the people I’ve met, the things I’ve experienced, the work I’ve been privileged to take on, has been because of the magic of those first Netscape releases. I’m grateful for all of these influences — Netscape, John Rose, my mother, the permissionless experimentation that the web itself made possible. That spirit of magic and possibility is still what I’m chasing, and, despite the exploitation of big tech and the corrosive nature of unequal funding and the politics and everything else, is still what I think is magical about the web.
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