The Netscape Dorm (1994)

http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nscpdorm.html

by vinutheraj • 15 years ago

98 28 15 years ago

tptacek• 15 years ago

Thanks for posting this! I just mentioned this article (but couldn't remember its name) to someone who called me for advice on bootstrapping a company. It's the best writeup I know on the feeling of dread that keeps so many of us from launching as early as we should.

vinutheraj• 15 years ago

More than that, the diary logs show the real face of a startup, with the veil of all the glamor removed. The guy was basically trying not to get killed doing his startup.

RobGR• 15 years ago

I wonder if he still thinks it was worth it.

It's sad to think of the enormous amount of human effort wasted by people who blindly copied that behavior in a cargo-cult like attempt to get rich.

dotBen2• 15 years ago

Given that Jamie _is_ relatively rich from his Netscape shares, I'm guessing he probably thinks it was.

jmspring2• 15 years ago

Jamie has done ok and has been great at documenting his assorted endeavors, be they at Mosaic (All Hail the Company) or Netscape/AOL/Mozilla. He also did pretty well in the process, enough to buy / renovate / and provide entertainment at the DNA Lounge and through his blog about that whole process. Oh, and he still runs it and has provided some fun musical mixes over the years.

Unfortunately, he was one of the few in the mid 90s that were pretty active in writing (now referred to as blogging) about their experiences. His writings are both amusing and informational, I wish more had.

A good deal of the early Netscape crowd did quite well. Many are still involved in startups to this day -- Andreesen doing VC work, Montulli/Treuhaft doing some cloud storage, Tom Paquin @ OnLive, etc.

chouck• 15 years ago

Praise. It was "All Praise the Company", not "Hail". It was a Doctor Who reference - http://www.drwhoguide.com/who_4w.htm

observer13• 15 years ago

Is it possible we could stick to relatively new content here? I read through all of the Netscape-related JWZ stuff more than 10 years ago. I suspect that anyone who has an interest in the rise and fall of Netscape has done the same.

TomasSedovic• 15 years ago

When I'm writing this, most of the articles on the top HN page are from today or yesterday. The rest are a few days old, a month tops.

And then there is this one and some other that's from 2007.

I think that's pretty much a good ratio. I'm sorry that you've read this particular article already but sticking just to a new content wouldn't completely solve that anyway (unless Hacker News is your only source).

Personally, I've found the log both fascinating and illuminating. And for the record, I honestly didn't even know I should "have an interest in the rise and fall of Netscape". Maybe a critical flaw on my part, but there you go.

I haven't found this article 5 years ago because I didn't know I was supposed to be looking for it.

You can never fill Hacker News in a way that would please everyone and where all the articles would be fresh and worth reading. As long as there's a decent quality threshold and a sensible new/old ratio, it's all right.

mechanical_fish• 15 years ago

New people are born every day. HN is for them, too.

dotBen2• 15 years ago

Yes, with some of the dross that is beginning to make it to HN front page I'm more inclined to agree that there is "one born every minute".

dsimms• 15 years ago

Personally, I had forgotten most of these stories, so it's interesting to see how much everyone changed (and stayed the same).

No, it's not unique to hackerdom, I know.

jmspring2• 15 years ago

History is a good thing to study. As I mentioned in a previous post, JWZ was one of the few at the time that were prolific in writing about their experiences.

I haven't seen anywhere near the same set of stories in "modern" companies like Facebook, Google, or Twitter. We do get the occasional nugget like how Instagram started or how Flickr came about as not being the original idea.

John Ramey w/ iSocket is one that has been good about talking about his current process. But a lot of times, stories of "start up experiences" aren't much more than "lolz, i was up all week hackin' on some ruby, can you rate my site?".

Fact is, writings like JWZs should be brought up now and then. I wonder who the equivalents from the last couple of years would be.

wyclif2• 15 years ago

Not everyone here is a longbeard.

observer13• 15 years ago

So only a "longbeard" would have read something on the internet 10 years ago? I have news for you. Someday you will have a little bit of experience. At that point you will look back at your attitude and see how wrong it was. Karma.

arrel• 15 years ago

The value of writing things down - details about finger pain and waxy skin surely would have been lost memories, but are the things that make stories like this so great.

denimboy• 15 years ago

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u404SLJj7ig

Code Rush documentary from PBS. Details 98-99 when Netscape released their source.

damncabbage• 15 years ago

This is great. I'd read some of the pieces on jwz.org (including this one), but watching Code Rush and then reading this again really helps me relate to the stuff him and the rest of the team must've been going through.

(The key phrase that links the two together for me is "my one and only youth"; he both writes that in a diary entry and speaks it during a video interview in Rush.)

dkarl• 15 years ago

1. I do not like thinking about how badly they smelled.

2. I am very much enjoying OhLife's ability to make me write about my day, and this gives me a standard to shoot for.

Saturday, 17 September 1994, 2pm. If I hear someone imitate Beavis and Butthead one more time...

3. I've got bad news, Bea- I mean, Jamie.

SeoxyS• 15 years ago

It blows my mind that this is the same person who created and owns DNA Lounge.

(Btw, DNA lounge is way cool. Tho it could use some nicer bouncers!)

thought_alarm• 15 years ago

Here's a fun bit of trivia: you can download the original Mosaic Netscape 0.9 beta today and experience for yourself what it was they shipped way back in October 1994.

http://img46.imageshack.us/img46/9341/netscape091.png

http://img171.imageshack.us/img171/3833/netscape092.png

http://img145.imageshack.us/img145/6576/netscape093.png

Details on how to set this up are here: http://www.jwz.org/blog/2008/03/happy-run-some-old-web-brows...

Now excuse me while I go play Mille Bornes, Glider Pro, Lemmings, and Oregon Trail...

nostrademons• 15 years ago

Heh, I remember when the recommended practice for <script> tags was to put the contents inside an HTML comment  so that it was hidden from browsers that didn't recognize the <script> tag. I believe it was even special-cased in the JavaScript parser so that it wouldn't cause a JS error. I wonder if that's still the case...

yuhong4• 15 years ago

Yea, in fact, have you seen this: <![CDATA[//><!]]>

XHTML required the <![CDATA[, old browser compatiblity required the <!--.

yuhong4• 15 years ago

"The web server also had to be configured to not send a "charset" parameter on the "Content-Type" header, because the old browsers didn't know what to make of that. "

Looks like someone messed that up later. From a telnet session to home.mcom.com:

HEAD / HTTP/1.0

HTTP/1.1 200 OK

Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2011 07:57:27 GMT

Server: Apache

Last-Modified: Fri, 21 Oct 1994 19:00:00 GMT

ETag: "10400d9-f1-2c7ebe95f4c00"

Accept-Ranges: bytes

Content-Length: 241

Cache-Control: max-age=31536000

Expires: Tue, 14 Feb 2012 07:57:27 GMT

Vary: Accept-Encoding

Connection: close

Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

yuhong4• 15 years ago

It is fixed now.

yuhong4• 15 years ago

"and the "non-exportable"-crypto versions of almost all of them."

Not that these are very useful, since SSLv2 is obsolete and disabled on many servers because of several flaws in it.

merubin75• 15 years ago

I've worked for three startups in my career so far. Besides working, a fair amount of time was spent interviewing potential new employees. All had some modicum of talent, but almost all had stars in their eyes from reading glamorous puff pieces about the allure of startup life (Foosball! Unlimited supplies of Jolt! No rules! Exclamation points everywhere!) They were so eager to leave their corporate lives that they had illusions about what they were really getting themselves into: shitty hours, cranky co-workers, and fixing your own goddamned wifi.

I wish I had been able to show them this before we hired them. Would've saved a LOT of trouble, tears, and heartache.

The Netscape Dorm (1994)

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