Internet archeology.
To tell the truth, my web experience started with the first version (I think it
was 1.2) of Netscape. But I well remember when one of my lecturers at Tel Aviv
University gave us a short glimpse into the developing web via his Mosaic browser.
It's only fitting that this was within the framework of a course devoted to the
uses of hypertext in education.
That was more than nine years ago, maybe ten. Traces of the way things were are
still available on the web, though finding them probably demands more searching
than it's worth. Since Mosaic was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing
Applications at the Urbana-Champaign campus of the University of Illinois, it's
rather logical that an
archive of Mosaic information is available there. An additional glimpse into
the past can be found here,
and Chuck Lau, who worked on the development of Mosaic and Netscape has posted
a wonderful archive
of that recent, but seemingly so-long-ago, past.
Lau tells
us that:
We were so caught up in learning how to use these empowering new tools that no one gave any thought about preserving the past. We were so quick at improving and overwriting anything old that once the dust settled, we realized that a lot of the history of the Net was quite literally gone.
He built the Netscape Museum for the purpose of "rediscovering and preserving
artifacts of an important time in the development of human communications".
Not enough preserving has taken place. Good screenshots of the original Mosaic
browser are hard to find. A couple of good ones can be found here.
Go to: Templates from hell.