Programming Windows: Netscape Navigator and JavaScript (Premium)

While Bill Gates and Microsoft were laser-focused on bringing Windows 95 to market in 1994-1995, millionaire entrepreneur and Silicon Graphics co-founder Jim Clark had left that firm and was looking for the next big thing. He found it at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. There, a small team had created X Mosaic, one of the first widely used web browsers, a new type of graphical application that combined previous Internet tools like FTP, Gopher, and NNTP with hypertext links, audio, graphics, and video. He recruited a Mosaic developer named Marc Andreessen, who with Clark saw that web browsers would serve the same role for the techie Internet as did GUIs like Windows for PCs.

“Windows had penetrated all the [PC] desktops, the Mac was a huge success, and point-and-click interfaces had become part of everyday life,” Andreessen said of those days. “But to use the Net, you still had to understand Unix. And the current users had little interest in making it easier. In fact, there was a definite element of not wanting to make it easier, of actually wanting to keep the riffraff out.”

(Fun aside. Clark and Andreesen originally sought to bring an online gaming network to the Nintendo 64, but delays in the console scuttled the deal. The web browser was Plan B.)

Andreesen brought along several other students and staff from the University of Illinois, Clark recruited some key hires from SGI, and the combined group formed Mosaic Communications in April 1994. After a legal threat by NCSA, which continued to promote Mosaic, the company’s name was changed to Netscape, and its initial web browser product---which was written from scratch in order to avoid Mosaic’s many coding mistakes---was codenamed Mozilla, for “Mosaic killer.” By the time the first version appeared in beta form, it has been officially named Netscape Navigator and there were versions made available for Windows (16-bit only at first), Mac, and Unix.

As evidenced by the application’s codename, Netscape sought to kill Mosaic, and it did so quickly, achieving market dominance by the end of 1995. But Netscape’s real innovations were related to its vision that the Internet, which was decentralized and not controlled by any one company, could be the platform that finally defeated Microsoft. And that a web browser could likewise replace Windows as the GUI through which users accessed that platform.

That was a bold vision for 1994, a time in which online connectivity was dominated by proprietary online services like CompuServe, America Online (AOL), and Prodigy, and access speeds were measured in Kbps and were served over unreliable dial-up networking connections. Too, Netscape immediately and explicitly positioned itself as a direct rival to Microsoft, which by then had defeated every competitor, including mighty IBM, and had established itself as the de facto standard in personal computi...