Mosaic's October 1994 Site Now Online

Through a random series of events, Jamie Zawinski sent me some very old archives of the Mosaic/Netscape sites and their beta browsers. It totalled over 900Mb of binaries and html files, which I offered space and bandwidth for.

Chuck Lau, the originator of Origin of a Browser: the Netscape Museum has cleaned up one complete archive and has just put October 1994's entire mcom.com site online. He had to do quite a bit of work to get it online, and I appreciate all he's done. This is pretty much every page a user could see if they fired up the brand new 0.9 Mosaic beta. A funny aside is that finishing the What's Cool page was thrust on Jamie at the last second before launch, so he put many of his personal bookmarks up, including Bianca's Smut Shack, one of the very first porn sites. The first "what about the children!" complaint letter soon followed, which made it all the way to Jim Clark himself, who personally apologized to the person that objected to that link.

Chuck's working on getting the others online, there's at least 5 or 6 more archives of the Mosaic/Netscape site at later points of 1994 and early 1995, in addition to some old archives of the UIUC Mosaic sites of 1993. It's very important to keep these historical documents intact and online, it's nice to be able to go back and see our origins.

We will also be putting up a page linking to an archive of the very oldest of Netscape/Mosaic's browsers. The browsers are currently sitting in dissarray on my workstation here. I tried out Mosaic 0.4 beta on my windows machine, about the only site that worked in it was Yahoo's. I can see some old betas, from 0.4-0.9, then the 1.1-4.0 Netscape series for windows machines, and a few old mac betas. If you can identify the other files in the browser archive (the ones that end in numbers, which I'm currently assuming are unix archives), please post a comment describing what you think is there, it will help Chuck and I get the rest of the Netscape archive online.