Today is Run Some Old Web Browsers Day!

It being the tenth anniversary of Mozilla, Jamie "Founder of Mozilla Project" Zawinski has declared today "Run Some Old Web Browsers Day!" He's mirroring a bunch of lovely old pages from "home.mcom.com, the Internet Web Site of the Mosaic Communications Corporation" for your antique browser pleasure.

* Trivia Question #1: Do you remember why home1.mcom.com through home32.mcom.com exist?
* Trivia Question #2: Do you remember the behavioral difference the browsers exhibited when they were talking to a Netscape web server?
* Trivia Question #3: When was the <HYPE> tag implemented, and what was its origin?
* I had originally planned on re-hosting these web sites on an SGI Indy running Mosaic Netsite Commerce Server, just for maximal comedic value... and to see how long it took before someone Ã˜wned it, since there must be someone out there who still remembers how to launch an assault on Irix 5.3. Unfortunately, that wasn't possible for political reasons explained below.

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I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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noen

I remember using Netscape 1.1 on my Mac Classic II with a 9600 modem and a whopping 500meg HD and 4meg RAM. I connected to my ISP pseudo shell account through a Z-Term script I wrote myself as they had no Mac support. I mostly used telnet, pine and rn. I was mostly into ASCII art at the time.

Hypercard, now that was the future there.
TheFool

Original sites are down, use coral cache:

http://home.mcom.com.nyud.net/
http://home.mcom.com.nyud.net/home/whats-new.html
http://mosaic.mcom.com.nyud.net/

Love the “design” including such amazing tricks as using to make the first letter in each word bigger than the rest… :D
TheFool

Also images thrown through the “emboss” filter in XV or whatever made them :)
hexmonkey

JWZ had a link to bOING bOING in his bookmarks list back then too!
Andrew W

Nostalgia or not, I think the Circle-M with rotating planes was the BEST THROBBER EVER.
dequeued

Wow, they even throttled their servers to 1994 speeds!
tikal2k

“New information is available every day on the Internet!”
http://home.mcom.com/home/whats-new.html
thegreenduck

heh, on Jamie’s Bookmarks page (http://home.mcom.com/people/jwz/.MCOM-bookmarks.html) he has this say:

bOING bOING
These guys never ever update their content.
Paul D

All I can glean about the HYPE tag is that it was some kind of Easter egg in Netscape and was supposed to play a certain sound file.
zish

I prefer to view my web sites as it they were from those pre-mozilla/Post Mosaic days of yore. I just throw Firefox together with Tobi’s Time Machine, and voila!
Oh, and skin your Browser with Netscape Windows 3.1 for the full effect.
Spikeles

It’s really fun looking through those bookmarks, even if most of the pages result in 404 errors, you can see what was interesting(to Jamie anyway) back in 1994 and what is still interesting today. Boing Boing, The weather, The Game of Life, Blade Runner, HP Lovecraft. Looking through the various what’s new news items is fun too.
Spikeles

Btw: Disclaimer: I was 12 years old in 1994, was probably still playing with my Atari and didn’t have a clue what the internet was.
darsal

@12: Just for fun I pointed XENU (the link checker) at JWZ’s archived bookmarks, and while most indeed are not answering now (or where the answer nowadays is nothing like it was back then), there are quite a few that have been in continuous use since then.

(This also prompted me to finally go ahead and set up my home network to use OpenDNS. It’s really hard to get an honest HTTP response code these days…)
foobar

It’s a bit disturbing how ephemeral the medium of our age is. How well will this period be remembered in 2094?
jphilby

Fun!

The tag in Trivia#3 is invisible!
jphilby

Hmmm! Let’s try .LT.HYPE.GT. tag.
mellowknees

Anyone running NEOPLANET ONLINE today? :)
djam

looks ancient but add some fancy css to it, and it would fit right in with todays websites. i guess not much has changed!
Sam

If you’re going to run lynx, allow me to suggest using GL Terminal to do it.

http://ldopa.net/2006/01/14/glterminal/