Welcome to Mosaic Communications Corporation (1994) | Hacker News Reader

Welcome to Mosaic Communications Corporation (1994)

home.mcom.com

This takes me back. Enormous first letter caps, simple page design. Progressive GIF's that I can remember taking 10-20 seconds to load over a modem.

Makes me want to telnet into a gopher server so I can download Mac OS 6 updates via Xmodem at 1200 baud.

Came across this while looking up Rob McCool, an early Mosaic employee best known for his idiosyncratic spelling of "Referrer".

And it took my right back to my teenage years. When "landing pages" were seen as the right idea.

hah! I was just talking about this with someone who saw the spelling "referer" in my source code and thought it was wrong! That's fantastic!

I looked it up while working on my honours thesis -- "Referer" was red-circled by one reviewer and it was necessary to try and track down how it came to be spelled that way.

I got as far as the original RFC, but today I learnt who was responsible.

home.mcom.com is a snapshot from Oct 21, 1994. mosaic.mcom.com is from July 1994.

Why? Here's the story: http://www.jwz.org/blog/2008/03/happy-run-some-old-web-brows...

"Mosaic Communications' new Netscape provides cruise control for the information superhighway," said Tim Weil, senior systems engineer at British Telecom and an early user of Netscape.

I think it is just hilarious that people used to speak about the Internet and Web in this way without being derided as cranks or utterly clueless social scientists (e.g. GEB Kivistik in Cryptonomicon)

Funnily enough, some of these pages are nearly valid HTML5. This one, for example: http://home.mcom.com/docs/product/netsite.html

The only issues are a missing doctype and a couple of stray tags. This is because (parts of) the site were written before Netscape went wild with extending HTML.

I love Homepage Central: http://home.mcom.com/MCOM/mcom_docs/homepages.html

It's great that all of this has been preserved.

I wonder if the latest Firefox release contains any lines of code from Netscape 1.0? After almost 20 years and a couple rewrites, I doubt it.

And now Firefox feels old.

haha.. maybe it's because i was a kid then and the internet was the place were I hung out after school, but i have such nostalgia for the "cyber" age.

It's awesome that 17 years later I can properly browse that site with its ancient markup (not to mention the specs it was designed for back then).

Job well done internets.

Honestly, I forgot server-side image maps existed. Does anyone use them (or even client-side image maps) anymore?

CSS sprites :) Everything old is new again.

A good example of why my suspicions are raised when I see someone getting nostalgic for the "good old days" of the Internet.

So sad.

~$ whois mcom.com

Organisation Name.... AOL Inc. ...

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