Yesterday Marked the 10th Anniversary of Netscape Communications' IPO

[8/11] [Updated] Yesterday Marked the 10th Anniversary of Netscape Communications' IPO: Arguably, if it weren't for Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark's company, Netscape Communications, and their product, the Netscape Navigator web browser, that began with their public stock offering on August 9, 1995, the Internet's World Wide Web would not be what it is today. Netscape Navigator, with its easy to use graphical interface, allowed anyone with a computer and internet connection to browse the Web. Netscape Navigator, actually available in 1994, was the commercial rendition of the university-developed graphical Mosaic Web browser.

In 1995, when Macs Only! started, there were only some 20,000 web pages and now there are over 11 billion. There were the largely text-based internet services like CompuServe, where we served as a volunteer contributor on the only Mac forum helping Mac users connnect to the internet, and Prodigy and ultimately AOL which grew from eWorld, an initial graphic-rich internet service offered somewhat ironically by Apple. [Update: As reader Rod Everett pointed out, we used a bit of blur in our AOL statement. AOL stemmed from the provider of AppleLink, a contract service to Apple. eWorld replaced AppleLink at Apple and was developed with some assistance from AOL. See Scott Converse's web page. He is the Apple manager of AppleLink who subsequently developed eWorld.] But it was the Netscape Navigator Web browser that really opened up the Web's potential and the rest is history, as they say. Somehow, it seems like it's been much longer than 10 years. More... [Dana Baggett & Bill Fox]