Web One

At one time back around 1996 or so, browsers were being updated an released at such a torrid pace. You had to practically download and update 2x per month to get all the features. Not least of which were all the multimedia plug-ins to get the latest viewers for all the multimedia being produced.

I say this because I saw on Mastodon someone had been trying to get a web-browser working on an old computer, showing an old webpage for a University “Campus Wide Information System” thats what some IT orgs called their websites back in teh day. Because sometimes things were made available via gopher:// links and sometimes through http:// links, it was an interesting wild-cat, frontier days atmosphere.

The biggest barrier to getting an old web-browser working an old OS to display an old webpage was the need for https:// and the support libraries on the OS and the browser pre-cluded some choicies of web browser. For instance you can get a web browser from Google in 2002 because Chrome didn’t exist. But Netscape Navigator Did! But the https:// and SSL certificates and their underlying OS support libraries (things like OpenSSL) don’t run against Netscape Navigator 4.0 very well, if at all. And no easy fixes to civilian types like myself or artists attempting to recreate an old experience like that.

But back to my original paragraph, about the rate of change, and flurry of activity as someone in EdTech say in 1996 days, was that Netscape Navigator released updates fast and furious to add new functions constantly. New plug-ins were released by various and sundry outfits trying to get their new media tech adopted and market dominant. And darned if Microsoft wasn’t trying to get a browser into people’s hands that would compete with Netscape. So much so, they had to build it into Windows as part of the OS to get people to start using it regularly. I haven’t seen before or since this level of the new, new thing hitting FTP servers (at the time) and amount of work being done by developers for these desktop apps. And it wasn’t even for security exploits, or anything it was just to have NEW things you could do on the web. <sigh!> A bit of nostalgia over the web that was.