We each have a favorite browser. Someone is used to Chrome with its synchronization of "favorites" and saved passwords through Google services, someone is closer to Opera with a built-in VPN that allows you to easily browse LinkedIn, Rutracker and thousands of other blocked sites. Makowodi traditionally use Safari, there is an army of fans and "firelis" with its widest range of all kinds of plugins. But even a little over two decades ago, there was, in general, nothing to choose from. As part of Microsoft Windows 9x / NT4, there was Internet Explorer, competing with a browser called Nescape Navigator, which received the affectionate nickname "Netcabinet" in the user environment. This evening of memories is dedicated to the history of this legendary program.
Back to basics
The Internet has not always been the way we are used to seeing it now. The distant 1986 can be taken as the starting point for the evolution of the World Wide Web. It was in this year that the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) approved the universal standard SGML - Standard Generalized Markup Language, based on the GML language that appeared seventeen years earlier, which was created by an IBM specialist Charles Goldfrab in order to unify the electronic presentation of technical documentation ... Like its predecessor, SGML was developed based on the ideology of structural markup of electronic documents. Within the framework of this ideology, it was assumedthat all the directives of the language describe exclusively the hierarchical relationship between the elements of the document and demonstrate the logical structure of the text described using such markup, without in any way affecting its visual presentation.
Any program that "understands" SGML will be able to independently "assemble" text from separate logical blocks stored in an SGML file and display it on the screen exactly as dictated by the corresponding markup commands. The successor to SGML, HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language), which was born in August 1993, incorporated almost all the ideas of the previous technology, which at that time was successfully used to present information on the Internet for more than two years. It is quite obvious that due to this approach, the first applications for viewing electronic documents in SGML and HTML formats were exclusively text-based. I thinkIt was this monotony in the presentation of electronic content in applications that prompted Mark Andreessen, a researcher at the National Center of Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois (NCSA), to write the world's first graphical browser that would enable users “ see the Internet ”not only as a monotonous“ sheet ”of text.
A browser for IBM-compatible computers, called NCSA Mosaic, was released in 1993, and a few months later a version of this program for the Apple Macintosh appeared. In addition to traditional text, Mosaic allowed displaying graphic illustrations, document backgrounds, sound reproduction, headings and text paragraphs themselves using fonts of various typefaces. Not surprisingly, this app found unheard-of popularity in no time.
NCSA Mosaic Browser
Founding Fathers
Founder of Silicon Graphics, Inc. Among his colleagues, James Clark has always been considered a person with a keen sense of new trends in business. Having appreciated the prospects of a young, but extremely rapidly developing field of electronic technologies - the Internet, he considered it necessary to stake out a niche in the production of software for working on the World Wide Web before his competitors did.
Any successful business starts with a team of talented professionals. And the brightest talents, not yet spoiled by the ossification of large corporations, ready to stage even crazy, but quite viable experiments, with flexible and receptive thinking, live in a student environment - Clarke was perfectly convinced of this from his own experience, when a group of Stanford University students headed by him out of nothing created the technology that became the foundation and foundation of the success of Silicon Graphics Corporation. That is why Clarke decided to start a new business at his desk - he wrote and sent letters to all the young geniuses who showed themselves in the field of networking, with a proposal to combine promising scientific research with making money.
James H. Clark
James Clark
Born in 1944 in Plainview, Texas. At the age of 16, he left school to enroll in the US Navy, later graduated from the University of New Orleans and received a Ph.D. from the University of Utah.
James Clark was born into a very poor Texas family, his parents divorced when he was 14 years old and the boy grew up on tiny by American standards money: for himself, as well as for education, food and clothes of his two older brothers, Mrs. Clark could only allocate 225 dollars a month (now the mother of James lives in the house donated to her by her son, and has a good monthly income from the stake in AOL, which James gave her). James Clarke was a very energetic, but obstinate and rebellious teenager, as his teachers have repeatedly noted. When, at the age of sixteen, he blew up a smoke bomb on a school bus, the patience of the teachers came to an end, and he was kicked out of school. James enlisted in the United States Navy. There he received an education equivalent to graduating from high school, became interested in electronics,and began to actively earn "leftist" money to continue his own training, giving new recruits loans at the rate of forty percent of the profit. History is silent about the reasons why Clark left the fleet, it is only known that his military command found out about the financial machinations of his subordinate and was very upset, realizing that they had forgotten to share with him.
Clark moved to New Orleans and went to college, graduating from which, became a student at a local university, got a wife and two daughters. After graduating from high school, James moved with his family to Utah, where he began his career as a teacher, soon earning a doctorate. His scientific work, in which a group of Stanford University students participated under Clark's leadership, was the Geometry Engine technology, which allowed the creation of three-dimensional graphics and computer animation of the highest quality. After borrowing $ 25,000 from a friend, James founded Silicon Graphics. Inc., which by 1986 was generating a stable income of $ 40 million. Thanks to the technologies developed by Silicon Graphics, it became possible to create any three-dimensional models: from projects of bridges and airplanes, to computer graphics used,in particular, during the filming of the films Terminator II and Jurassic Park. The firm grew, the number of shareholders contributing to the management of the company expanded, and the explosive Clark, who was striving for a model of “free business management,” began to realize that investors were beginning to “stifle” his initiative in making decisions. Conflicts with employees have become more frequent. Unable to withstand the pressure, Clark sold a controlling stake in Silicon Graphics in 1994, and on the same day wrote an email to Mark Andreessen, which resulted in the birth of Netscape Communications.aspiring to the model of "free business management" began to understand that investors are beginning to "stifle" his initiative in making decisions. Conflicts with employees have become more frequent. Unable to withstand the pressure, Clark sold a controlling stake in Silicon Graphics in 1994, and on the same day wrote an email to Mark Andreessen, which resulted in the birth of Netscape Communications.aspiring to the model of "free business management" began to understand that investors are beginning to "stifle" his initiative in making decisions. Conflicts with employees have become more frequent. Unable to withstand the pressure, Clark sold a controlling stake in Silicon Graphics in 1994, and on the same day wrote an email to Mark Andreessen, which resulted in the birth of Netscape Communications.
Clark's restless nature also made itself felt here: in January 1995, James left the post of president of Netscape, handing it over to Jim Barksdale, but retaining, however, the right of the decisive vote in the company, after which he founded a new firm called Healtheon, which provides remote medical consultations ... And this undertaking by Clark quickly brought him success, making James one of the most successful businessmen of the 20th century.
Now James Clark runs two commercial companies, and spends his free time at the helm of his own yacht worth $ 30 million.
The first key figure in Clark's business was Mark Andreessen, a talented graduate programmer at the University of Illinois, who created a fun program called Mosaic that became so popular that other developments simply could not compete with it. The second to respond to Clark's appeal was Lou Montulli, the guy who wrote a simple text browser for UNIX-compatible platforms called Lynx, which in its popularity among UNIX users was in no way inferior to Andreessen's invention. Soon, Clark was joined by Robert McCool, a specialist who independently developed the software package that formed the basis of the popular Apache http server created a little later, and Eric Bean, who wrote his own hypertext interpreter for programs with a graphical interface.The team was formed and in April 1994 James Clark founded a new company focused on developing software for the Internet. The company was named Netscape Communications.
Marc Andreessen
Mark Andreessen
Born July 9, 1979 in Cedar Falls, Iowa, USA, graduated from the University of Illinois. Co-founder of Netscape Communications. Mark grew up in New Lisbon, Wisconsin, where he graduated from high school. At the age of nine, he began to study BASIC with the help of a book borrowed from the library, and soon he was writing programs on his own on a personal computer TSR-80 - the best machine that was available to him in the mid-80s. After entering the University of Illinois, he continued his study of programming.
Having become interested in the Internet, the possibilities of which were available to students of this educational institution in the early 90s, Mark considered that there is a fundamental opportunity to significantly improve the quality of presentation of information received from the Web, making it not only meaningful, but also beautifully designed and, accordingly, better perceived user. To bring his idea to life, Andreessen assembled a group of programmer students, with whom, out of sheer enthusiasm, began the development of the world's first graphical web browser, later called Mosaic. For two months, 80 hours a week, young programmers worked on their development, eating cookies, Coca-Cola and chocolate, and the result was not long in coming:soon this free program was already used by about two million people, quite enough to draw attention to this product of a talented and enterprising businessman James Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics Corporation.
Clarke sent Anressen an email inviting him to meet and discuss potential collaboration. Initially, Clarke envisioned founding a new company that, like Silicon Graphics, would be engaged in the development of video technologies, in particular, interactive television, but after a bottle of wine Andreessen managed to convince his future partner that the Internet was more promising as a media and quality. source of income.
After reaching an initial agreement, the partners founded a firm called Mosaic, Inc., but the American National Center for Supercomputing Technology at the University of Illinois (NCSA), which owned the rights to the Mosaic browser, strongly objected to the naming. The company was hastily renamed Netscape Communications. To avoid copyright infringement lawsuits, Andreessen, on Clark's advice, hired all the programmers who worked with him to create Mosaic for $ 6.85 an hour and instructed them to rewrite the Mosaic code. The resulting product was named Netscape Navigator. The program was distributed free of charge from the Netscape website, but after installing it, users were asked to voluntarily pay for the cost of the browser, which they gladly did. The commercial success of the enterprise was quite expected.Already in 1995, according to Netscape Communications documents, 25-year-old programmer Mark Andreessen was worth 56 million US dollars.
In 1999, when Netscape Communications was acquired by America On-Line, Marc Andreessen, who often criticized AOL for its marketing policies, was removed from his post and appointed to an honorary position of strategic advisor to the company, which was inherently exclusive. a formality. Anressen was banally thrown out the door. After moving from Silicon Valley to Washington, Andreessen bought himself a 7,000-square-foot home, where he now lives with three Bulldogs. Having virtually lost his job, in October 1999, Marc Andreessen founded his own company Loudcloud Inc., which develops solutions for e-commerce on the Internet.
The beginning of a long journey
Netscape announced its first commercial product to the market just sixteen months after its founding, making Netscape the fastest growing software company in the United States by US analysts. However, the explanation of this phenomenon lay literally on the surface: all the specialists invited by Clarke came to Netscape with their own developments, and Netscape Navigator, a browser created by the newly-minted corporation, was largely based on the NCSA Mosaic algorithms. Over the next two years, the popularity of Netscape's browser surpassed all imaginable boundaries. Mosaic has been enhanced and supplemented with a host of new features, and the new software product is fast, reliable and versatile.
Netscape Navigator 1.0 outwardly differed little from MOSAIC
Moreover: Clark developed a revolutionary mechanism for the time distribution of the software offered by his company. Namely, any user could download Netscape Navigator from the company's official website, install it on their computer, and, having tested the browser in action, make the final decision on its further acquisition. Already in 1995, Netscape's revenues were $ 85 million, and in 1996 they exceeded the amount of $ 346 million. The firm grew by leaps and bounds. In May 1994, the company's staff consisted of only 13 people, occupying an office space of less than a thousand square meters, but four months later, Netscape employees, under the onslaught of all arriving and arriving personnel, had to "settle" three or four people in tiny twelve-meter rooms.and the territories adjacent to the office were hastily asphalted - the newcomers had nowhere to park their cars. In July 1996, at the time of the release of Netscape Navigator 2.0, Clark already had 1,300 employees.
Netscape Navigator 2.02
Struggle for the market
As a talented businessman, James Clarke realized that time flies much faster on the Internet than in the world we are used to. The evolution of software and technology is happening so rapidly that many companies have gone bankrupt, simply not having time to keep up with this progress. Clark decided to be ahead of his time. Employees of the company were loaded with such a volume of work that the inability to go out for lunch and spend the night in the office became a habit for them. “ We had to do ten things at once ,” said Netscape manager Greg Sands, “ and we only had time to do five. Our guys even came up with a special term: Netscape time. They calculated that, due to the eternal rush, one year in Netscape is subjectively equal to four calendar years . "
In order to strengthen the company's position in the market, James Clarke and new CEO Jim Barksdale found a very original, albeit somewhat tough business approach. The next version of Netscape Navigator adds support for a significant number of previously unknown HTML tags, which significantly improve the visual presentation of web pages. However, since these tags were developed by Netscape themselves, they were only correctly recognized by the Netscape Navigator browser, which forced users to install this product on their computers and tightly tie them to Netscape software.
The creators of other browsers could only lag behind. The popularity of the program grew: designers eagerly used the new directives for html-document markup, users saw that web pages in Netscape Navigator looked much more attractive than in other similar applications (even often without understanding why), and the number of Netscape fans grew every day. In 1996, the number of client copies of Netscape Navigator was in the tens of millions. This ultimately led the developer of HTML, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), to de facto include Netscape-invented visual markup tags in the official HTML 3 specification. It was a clear victory. Meanwhile, the company was doing well: released in August 1995, 5 million.Netscape shares at $ 28 per share in December were already on sale at $ 174 per share.
Netscape Communicator, version 4.51
However, no one, even the most successful project, is immune to errors. Netscape's biggest strategic mistake was that James Clarke did not buy the exclusive rights to use Mosaic from the National Center of Supercomputing Applications. The NCSA, spurred on by the success of Netscape and the logical cooling of interest in the Mosaic browser in connection with this success, sold the rights to this program to Spyglass, Inc., which, in turn, assigned them to Microsoft Corporation. With the Mosaic source code at its disposal, Microsoft began developing its own browser based on it. The product was soon introduced to the market under the Microsoft Internet Explorer trademark. For Netscape, this was the beginning of the end.
Beginning of the End
The situation with the development of its own html tags by Netscape specialists, which allowed the company to confidently “hold the market”, could not satisfy the interests of the ambitious Bill Gates. Microsoft's blow was terrible: Gates began to actively fund the developers of the HTML language, and soon the W3C became an "obedient puppet" in the able hands of the Microsoft Corporation. Almost all of the innovations in the HTML standard were agreed with Microsoft, and many of them were initially focused on the further development of Internet Explorer. This policy was presented by Gates as the corporation's desire to provide active assistance to young, promising independent organizations developing the technologies of the future, against the background of which Netscape looked like a commercial enterprise, caring only for its own benefit and nothing more.
In fact, having received another standard in its hands, Microsoft immediately supplemented it with its own developments, which, under the influence of skillful financial injections, soon became an integral part of the standard, which allowed Microsoft to quickly establish control over the entire technology and this area of the market as a whole. And the user was faced with a difficult choice between two programs with similar functionality. And Microsoft helped the user make that choice. Revenues received by the corporation from the sale of other software products allowed it to distribute Microsoft Internet Explorer for free. From that day on, Netscape Navigator began to slowly but surely lose its position, more and more pulling the company towards the inevitable crisis.
The final blow for Netscape was the integration of Internet Explorer with the operating systems of the Microsoft Windows family used at that time on 90% of personal computers worldwide: by purchasing a box with Windows, the user automatically received Internet Explorer as a free add-on to the system. And Netscape Communications could not withstand the competition: the company's main facilities were reoriented to the production of server software and e-commerce solutions. The source code for Netscape Communicator (it was under this trademark that new versions of the browser were distributed) were published on the Internet. The creation of new implementations of the free browser from Netscape continued mainly for users accustomed to this particular software product, but their number gradually decreased.and by 2002 it was, according to various estimates, from 4.8 to 7 percent against almost 90 percent of the market in the mid-nineties of the twentieth century. However, long before that, at the end of 1999, Netscape Corporation ceased to exist independently, becoming a division of the American giant of the electronics industry - America On-Line Corporation (AOL).
The era of Mozilla
Even an attempt to restart its further development from scratch using open source code did not help the project. With the financial help of Netscape, a group of programmers called the Mozilla Organization was formed, whose task was to develop an updated browser engine.
Netscape Navigator, latest version 9.0
Read more about the history of the irreconcilable struggle between Netscape and Microsoft here .
The engine prepared by the Mozilla Organization was named after the group's name - Mozilla - and on its basis Netscape 6 was created. However, its former popularity could not be returned, and the Mozilla project took on a life of its own, laying the foundation for the Firefox family of browsers. Based on the "fire fox", several editions of Netscape Browser have been collected, the latest of which was version 9.0, which was released in 2007. The browser used the Gecko 1.9 engine, the same engine that was included in Mozilla Firefox 2.0.
On December 28, 2007, support for the Netscape browser was announced. This is where the story of one of the first successful Internet companies is over. Netscape is dead, but his business lives on - the Firefox browser enjoys well-deserved popularity on the Web, and many other interesting projects have been created on the basis of its code, including the legendary Tor Browser.
