Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Zeeky boogy doog!

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
I have no idea what your post is about.

Sadly, I think I do.

Netscape got cannibalised into a lot of other browsers, until they write it out, IIRC.
We were chuffed to get Netscape 2.0 at uni when it came out.

Netscape was also a lot more secure then Internet “Would you like me to download that virus for you?” Explorer. Same with Outlook. Microsoft was big on trying to make things easy, short of effective patches. I was working tech support at a college for most of the 90’s, and we used Netscape and Eudora.

Not that they were perfect, but better than the alternatives.

 chromedog wrote:
The internet itself grew out of ARPANET and is older.

If you want to be technical about it, ARPANET was what's today called a WAN (Wide Area Network, compare to LAN (local) or a MAN (municipal) in size). "The Internet" is a global collection of WANs speaking to each other; to merely have a single WAN region is not the same as "the internet", that's just the WAN.

 stanman wrote:
The younger generation will never know the pain of waiting 5 minutes to see half a nipple exposed one line at a time on dial up, then losing your connection because call waiting kicked in on the house line. Streaming video and smartphones makes things all too easy nowdays, an infinite world of smut portable and in your pocket.

When I was a kid, you had to go to the library and get a national geographic to see a boob.

The future is now, old man.

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
I have no idea what your post is about.

The comic depicts Internet Explorer girl (forget her actual name) a mascot for IE that Microsoft uses for marketing in Asia. The other I guess is a mascot someone made for Netscape Navigator, who went head to head against IE in the Browser Wars of the mid to late 90s and ended up becoming completely forgotten as Internet Explorer came to utterly dominate the market. The irony is that Netscape was the more innovative of the two. Though it's worth pointing out Mozilla Firefox was originally based on Netscape and today is arguably much more well regarded than IE.

See? If he’d said that without the weird manga image I’d have got that.

Now I go back and look again, I see the little badges on their breasts to indicate who they are, but it still only ales sense after it’s been explained. A picture is worth a thousand words, they say. Unfortunately, 990 of those words were “wibble”.

More innovative or not, I was always disappointed when the only free computers at uni were the Sun machines with Netscape. I just found IE easier to use.

The Internet is really really great...

For PORN!

 LordofHats wrote:

The comic depicts Internet Explorer girl (forget her actual name) a mascot for IE that Microsoft uses for marketing in Asia. The other I guess is a mascot someone made for Netscape Navigator, who went head to head against IE in the Browser Wars of the mid to late 90s and ended up becoming completely forgotten as Internet Explorer came to utterly dominate the market. The irony is that Netscape was the more innovative of the two. Though it's worth pointing out Mozilla Firefox was originally based on Netscape and today is arguably much more well regarded than IE.

Original Netscape went under because it became very very bad. I think 3.0 was last workable Netscape. 4.x got worse every release, I vividly remember cursing ever changing interface (to the worse) and constant crashing. It had comical poorly designed features, like say you wanted to change a value on a settings field, you COULDN'T, because as soon as you removed the old value to type a new one the program hit you with "Please insert a value between 0 and 72!" prompt.

More or less same thing has since happened with nearly all other browsers, though.

Fun internet factoid... I mastered the gold discs for one of the early Netscape Navigator releases. I don't remember which version but this would have been about 1995,

I've got no idea why they would have sent it over to London for mastering, except my boss at the time was American and maybe he had connections. Or maybe it was because CD-ROM mastering was still quite a Dark Art.

I also mastered MacUser magazine's first ever cover disc. (Scripted all the interactivity, too, as it happens. By the time I finished, I was actually dreaming in scripting language.)

We mastered a disc for Olivetti the same day as the Netscape disc. I sent them both out by DHL, one set to California, and one set to Italy. Amazingly enough, DHL mixed them up and delivered them to the wrong continents.

Another time I'll tell you how I saved Tomb Raider 3 from not being published.

You have my curiosity, Kilkrazy.

Well, this was when I was working at Sony PlayStation and my team did all the demo discs which were put on the cover of Official PlayStation Magazine throughout Europe. This was before network games, of course.

To submit a game to QA in those days, you had to supply 8 or more identical master discs (depending on the exact job.) These were put into various QA processes to verify them, archive them, and for the test crews to actually play the games.

In order to do this, my department had a number of high capacity disc burners which could rapidly duplicate from one master disc to 4 or 8 copies. These machines used to be very expensive, and we had the only set in the London offices.

One Friday afternoon quite late, a pal of mine came round from the developer support department next door. He had with him two guys from Core Design, who at that time were the developers of Tomb Raider. They had brought their code into Dev Support for some last minute crucial changes, and now needed to duplicate the master discs for submission to QA.

It had to get done right then, because they were already late and if they missed their slot at QA, the game would miss its slot at the Sony DADC factory where the discs were mass-produced, and miss its distribution slot, and so onl In fact it wasn't too much of an exagerration to say that the company was in danger of going bust if Tomb Raider 3 didn't get out on time for the holidays.

Anyway, I said of course we could help, and I gave them blank discs, and set it up and showed them how to work the machines and feed new discs.

However, it was already nearly 6 pm and I wanted to go home. I had to warn them, if they let the controller computer go into sleep mode, which had a password lock, they would not be able to control the duplicators and finish all the discs. So I said they would need to wait by the computer, and wiggle the mouse a bit every couple of minutes, to stop this happening. I couldn't give them the password because there was other stuff on the computers they weren't allowed to see.

Then I went home, and obviously those guys were attentive in their mouse wiggling duties because Tomb Raider 3 did get published on time for Christmas.

And that I how I saved Tomb Raider 3.

Thanks for sharing.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
[snip]
And that I how I saved Tomb Raider 3.

Fething awesome bit of history there, KK! I'm so glad you helped out.

I love hearing stories like this from the industry