The Big Bang Of The Internet Era Is Called Netscape Navigator
2 min readJan 7, 2022
The aim of this page📝 is to share notes from Internet History Podcast Ch 1, Part 3 — Netscape’s IPO As The Big Bang of the Internet Era which claims that the “Internet Era” started with a “Big Bang” from an unexpected underdog Netscape Navigator. Netscape utilized unexpected networking technology called the Internet that was not interesting to big players of the early 1990s. The big players, including Microsoft, were expecting something like the Internet but to arrive from TV/Media/Telco walled environments and was called Information Superhighway or Information at your Fingertips. A good reminder of Survivorship bias when it comes to evaluating the promising technologies at any time.
1. notes
- 0h:3min 1995 Netscape IPO Interest was overwhelming after 16 months of existence as a corporation. Valued at 2.1 billion. Soaring valuation. Unheard of event. Blueprint for what arrived after.Big bang.
- 0h:6min 1996 Marc Andreesen on the title page of Time magazine Barefoot. Second Silicon Valley revolution and new gold rush
- 0h:7min 1982 Steve Jobs on the title page of Time magazine. Striking at rich signaling that the first Silicon Valley starts the first revolution
- 0h:8min 1971 Marc Andreesen born
- 0h:12min On IPOs and the business side of thing
- 0h:18min Insight is that the web is the information superhighway. It was already there. That is the next big thing itself. Sitting on it.
- 0h:21min On getting there first — and Netscape as the first true internet startup
- 0h:22min Stealing the team of Mosaic from NSCA into Netscape. Everything has to be written from scratch. Fast.
- 0h:27min On the Hardcore culture of Netscape Browser.
- 0h:34min On the Open Source nature of Netscape exemplified by SSL to become ubiquitous and a platform for others to build on. This was the imitation of Microsoft that others follow to this day.
- 0h:37min On the marketing of narrative — Andreesen becomes a poster boy
