@jwz

I remember this well. I'd put up my first web site a year prior (using MacHTTP and BBEdit Lite).

@jwz that was a good day.

Kinda massive indictment on 30 years of subsequent software development that it's still so memorable.

These days I use Neomutt for email because everything else is so bad. 2025, TUI email 🙁

@jwz Happy 30th!

I had just started studying at the university, so this was the hot new thing that autumn and it was rocking all over the Sun workstations!

(I have no idea what the first version I used was.)

@jwz

First browser to have tabs, yeah?

@jwz I loved the 2.x/3.x mail/usenet client, despite plenty of fellow nerds urging me to go all out GNUS or terminal.

I might need to set up a POP3 server/proxy to reminisce…

@jwz what version added background images? I remember shortly after that was added you could override *all* web page backgrounds with a custom image.

I had a CD that was a collection of big cat wallpaper jpegs. You bet your ass I surfed the web for a few months with every web page set to an awesome lion photo background.

@jwz JavaScript was a mistake.

But man progressive JPEG and Netscape Mail & News were life changing!

@jwz cheers Jamie.

I loved the comment about your previous boss - and I learned something new about him.

@jwz

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q7FTjhvZ7Y

PS: jung jwz can be seen :-)

@jwz wrote:
> In our defense, if we hadn't done [JavaScript], MICROS~1 would have done something far, far worse.

No aspersions against you, sir, but if I had been there, I would have said NFW.

"But Micros~1 will do something worse."

"Let! Them! The ads write themselves! 'If you thought Word macro viruses were fun, then you'll *love* Microsoft's VBasic for Internet Explorer! Infect your machines at Web scale!"

@jwz somewhere around here I have my website button done as a reaction to Netscape and its tendency to try to force the use of nonstandard "stuff," it simply read like the NNow! button, except "Netscape Noway!" and I kept writing to standard HTML.

It was better than MSIE, though. I refused to write for MSIE, too.

@jwz There's some memories. I seen to remember that RealAudio worked quite well for the time, however, RealVideo wasn't so impressive. There was also another streaming video format called Vivo(?).

Because both formats used their own streaming protocols, I remember using tools to download the streams so I could watch and keep the media. In fact, I just remembered, I had several episodes of season one of Family Guy in RealVideo first. Wow! I wonder what the resolution was...

@jwz

where has the time gone

@jwz hey you reminded us, we probably should have thanked you years ago for writing https://www.jwz.org/gruntle/rbarip.html - it was really helpful in our Google labor organizing back around 2017-2019, because it got everyone on the same page about how the law works in that area

also, all the Google organizers got a good chuckle out of the fact that both you and we had to deal with Kent Walker. the more things change, the more they stay the same......

@jwz

The cool thing about Netscape is that even though it was commercial software anyone could get it free by downloading the beta versions and as a bonus have the most up-to-date version. I never had any issues with the beta versions.