Exactly 20 years ago, 4 April 1994, James Clark and Marc Andreessen founded the company Netscape Communications Corporation, which was the brainchild of well-known to many (but probably already far not all) of the web browser Netscape. The browser has been long been the leading web browsers, occupying up to 90% (!!!) market.
What happened then with the company? Appeared browser from Microsoft, Internet Explorer, Netscape which became crowded on all fronts. In 1998, Netscape Communications Corporation was sold to AOL for 4.2 billion dollars. The deal was done just in time, a couple of years dotcom bubble deflated. In the same year, 1998 was created by a non-profit organization Mozilla Organization, which in 2003 became a Mozilla Foundation. And as of the phoenix, was born many favorite browser Firefox.
And from February 1, 2008 the new owner of AOL officially ended support all browsers Netscape.
Although formally the company exists to this day, but there is just a name and it is engaged in the provision of services on the Internet as part of AOL.
The latest version of the browser, Netscape 7.2 (2004), can be downloaded here
.
A bit of nostalgia I would not be surprised if some of our readers do not know what was for us a Netscape 20 years ago.
In 1994 I was in high school, in which the American grant was conducted online. On the whole institution was channel 33, 6 kbit / s. Yes, dear reader, 3 kilobytes per second. When your mobile phone is very slow at a speed of 12-20 kb / second on GPRS, it's 4 or more times faster than we had then to all computers in all. A computer connected to the Internet, is not less than twenty, and often they are all busy.
We opened Netscape (other browsers did not know), was introduced in the prescription pad URLs that are usually discharged from the paper magazines (Yahoo appears only a year later, in 1995, about Google and I do not say). And waited. Waiting for three to five and sometimes ten minutes, until the page opens. For us it was a miracle - see web pages that you are thousands of miles away from us. We turned off the picture, so you can at least something to download. Video? Audio? Flash? This is something we never dreamed of.
I recorded a Netscape browser on a set of diskettes 3, 5 inches, brought it home and began to teach the language of HTML. I soon made my first web page, which still weighs on the archive site Geocities.
Yes, the internet was for us ... so warm, tube.
Our first steps in the Internet have been with you, Netscape, and many thanks to the company Netscape Communications Corporation for it! Have you used when something does Netscape? Yes, it started with Yes, I tried No, have not tried, but I heard about it No, have not tried or heard about it Only registered users can vote in polls. Sign , please. 1704 voted man. 66 people abstained.
Source: habrahabr.ru/post/218319/