So Long to a Pioneer
It’s hard to remember “pre-Internet” times, but the dark ages did exist. The light was turned on in 1993 when a team at the University of Illinois’ National Center for Supercomputing Applications released Mosaic, the first Web browser to integrate images and sound with words. But alas, the end has come for Netscape.
Before Mosaic, the web was mostly text. Mosaic turned into Netscape in 1994 when Marc Andreessen and others from the University set out to commercialize the browser, and had one of the first dot com IPO’s that led to the frenzy.
Netscape sold itself to AOL in 1999 after struggling against Microsoft’s bundled Internet Explorer, and it just never managed to recover its place. So AOL has announced they are pulling the plug.
In recent years, Netscape was really just a re-packaged version of the open source Firefox browser, so while missed for sentimental reasons, there is still a good browser out there, and the legacy lives on.
