Some time around late 1994, a friend and I were in a computer lab, poking around the glacial internet. We were alone in the lab, because everyone else had worthwhile things to do.
With a flourish, my friend fired up a new program he’d found, and showed me the home page for the Mosaic Netscape 0.9 browser. Then he showed me a primitive search engine… I think it might have been Lycos Search?
At the time, I thought it was less useful than gopher, and said so. I also said that I didn’t think it would last, because nobody really needed another useless clicky toy on the internet.
That is why I will never be a thought leader.
Weeks later, I was staying up late to get access to one of the five experimental SLiP/PPP-emulation-through-shell-access dialup lines, so I could click around the web, using Mosaic Netscape 0.9.
Now, on the ten year anniversary of the Mozilla project, the original mosaic home page has been resurrected, complete with the dedicated IP setup requred by the primitive web browsers of the day. All of the long-dead pages linked to by the browser toolbar buttons of Mosaic Netscape 0.9 now work, and you can run the web as it was in 1994.
…If your computer will run the program. Good luck with that. See Jamie’s notes on how to get it to work.
And that’s your tech nostalgia for the day.