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Speeding the Net
Speeding the Net is a thrilling read, and Quittner and Slatalla revel in their storytelling. The excitement and informality of the early browse-design sessions is apparent and infuses the book with a dynamic, raucous energy. The book tells the story of the creation of the Mosaic browser, the precursor to the wildly successful Netscape Navigator. Speeding the Net presents a thorough and compelling history of the programmers and business minds behind Navigator. Along the way, the authors also place ongoing developments in the universality (up until the explosion of the Web) of LANs, the creation of Microsoft's Internet Explorer, the release of Java by Sun Microsystems. Speeding the Net is the best of all part biography, part primer on Web history, and part journal of the history of an infamous and revolutionary start-up company. --Jennifer Buckendorff
323 pages, Hardcover
First published July 20, 1998
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 24, 2023
This book is about the creation of one of the first web browsers and the founding of a Silicon Valley company to market, sell, and eventually give away for free an early web browser based on it. It describes the early days of the World Wide Web when computers were just starting to get connected to each other all around the world, largely through academic institutions but also through some companies. In 1992 at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois a group of programmers created Mosaic, a web browser which was available for free to download to anyone connected to the Internet. It was not the first but it quickly caught on and became one of the most popular tools to use to surf the Internet.
Among the programmers who worked on Mosaic was Marc Andreessen, a programmer who would come to represent the archetype of the nerdy, Silicon Valley techies who were out to change the world during the 1990s. After he graduated from college he connected with James Clark, a former Stanford professor who had started a successful computer company in the valley and was looking for the next big thing. Along with a former telephone company executive, Jim Barksdale, the three founded, grew, and launched an Initial Public Offering for the company that came to be known as Netscape Communications. Netscape’s chief product, the Navigator web browser, was based on Mosaic (the company hired many other programmers who worked on Mosaic besides Andreessen) and quickly became the most popular way to surf the Internet in the 1990s, catching Microsoft, then one of the largest desktop software companies, flat-footed in its failure to recognize the importance of the World Wide Web to the future of everything from computer software, to commerce, to entertainment.
As a teenager in the 1990s, I can remember venturing out onto the Internet through AOL and using the Netscape Navigator web browser and this book is a very nostalgic story and it’s fascinating to learn everything that was going on behind the scenes of this really important though short-lived company (the book ends around March 1998 so it doesn’t cover its acquisition by AOL later that year followed by a slow decline). The authors seem to have interviewed a ton of people who were present at the creation, from bureaucrats at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications to everyone from the executive suite down to the facilities office at Netscape. It really feels like you are getting the whole picture. And what a story it was. This was really the beginning of the network effect taking place on the Internet. By giving away free browser software, it led to more people getting online, more people getting online meant that more companies needed to get online to be there for their customers or their future customers, which meant that more businesses needed to get online, which led to more people getting online. It just grew and grew as the original viral phenomenon. This book is full of fascinating facts like this one: “Within four months of Navigator’s launch, more than 75 percent of the people on the Net would use the Netscape browser.”
This also led to similarly unbelievably fast changes in the business. In April 1995 Netscape did a round of financing to media companies that valued the company at about $100 million dollars. By August, Netscape had its IPO and was valued at $4.4 billion. That’s ‘billion’ with a ‘b’. That same month, Microsoft released Windows 95, containing its own browser, Internet Explorer, launching the browser wars. Less than 3 years later, Netscape went back to its roots which sprang from an academic institution that distributed its software for free online and it gave away both its browser and the underlying source code to try to keep Microsoft from taking over the web.
In addition to the splendid research done by the authors of this book, they seem to have a grasp of technology that I think is lacking in some other business histories of tech companies. Their narrative features, and in a way in which they seem to understand what all this is, such things as HTML, URLs, applications programming interfaces or APIs, ftp, E-Mail, listservs, LDAP, and computer programming languages like JavaScript. They don’t get into the technical details a lot - the book reads like a long, thoroughly researched magazine article aimed at a general audience - but they do mention some technical details, and I really enjoyed such tales as the invention of the
tag in HTML, and the story of how Jon Mittelhauser, a programmer who worked on both Mosaic and Navigator, came up with the idea to change the cursor into the shape of a hand in a browser when you hover over a hypertext link. “That symbolized how a user could grab hold of the information in the hyperlink just by clicking on it.” Hover over a link in your browser - it still works that way!
Netscape was a company that pioneered so many things we take for granted nowadays, even as we have moved on to Social Media, Artificial Intelligence, and other new technologies. They pioneered using the Internet for commerce, started a craze for giving stuff away for free online as part of a business plan to profit off other ancillary products, and they produced really great, groundbreaking software. This book is a fascinating business history and a fascinating technology history. It’s well-researched, exciting, and actually feels very contemporary because the story of this company would be repeated over and over again with the likes of Facebook, Google, and many others. Netscape was one of the original Silicon Valley success stories that would become a template for many other smart, ambitious people.
Among the programmers who worked on Mosaic was Marc Andreessen, a programmer who would come to represent the archetype of the nerdy, Silicon Valley techies who were out to change the world during the 1990s. After he graduated from college he connected with James Clark, a former Stanford professor who had started a successful computer company in the valley and was looking for the next big thing. Along with a former telephone company executive, Jim Barksdale, the three founded, grew, and launched an Initial Public Offering for the company that came to be known as Netscape Communications. Netscape’s chief product, the Navigator web browser, was based on Mosaic (the company hired many other programmers who worked on Mosaic besides Andreessen) and quickly became the most popular way to surf the Internet in the 1990s, catching Microsoft, then one of the largest desktop software companies, flat-footed in its failure to recognize the importance of the World Wide Web to the future of everything from computer software, to commerce, to entertainment.
As a teenager in the 1990s, I can remember venturing out onto the Internet through AOL and using the Netscape Navigator web browser and this book is a very nostalgic story and it’s fascinating to learn everything that was going on behind the scenes of this really important though short-lived company (the book ends around March 1998 so it doesn’t cover its acquisition by AOL later that year followed by a slow decline). The authors seem to have interviewed a ton of people who were present at the creation, from bureaucrats at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications to everyone from the executive suite down to the facilities office at Netscape. It really feels like you are getting the whole picture. And what a story it was. This was really the beginning of the network effect taking place on the Internet. By giving away free browser software, it led to more people getting online, more people getting online meant that more companies needed to get online to be there for their customers or their future customers, which meant that more businesses needed to get online, which led to more people getting online. It just grew and grew as the original viral phenomenon. This book is full of fascinating facts like this one: “Within four months of Navigator’s launch, more than 75 percent of the people on the Net would use the Netscape browser.”
This also led to similarly unbelievably fast changes in the business. In April 1995 Netscape did a round of financing to media companies that valued the company at about $100 million dollars. By August, Netscape had its IPO and was valued at $4.4 billion. That’s ‘billion’ with a ‘b’. That same month, Microsoft released Windows 95, containing its own browser, Internet Explorer, launching the browser wars. Less than 3 years later, Netscape went back to its roots which sprang from an academic institution that distributed its software for free online and it gave away both its browser and the underlying source code to try to keep Microsoft from taking over the web.
In addition to the splendid research done by the authors of this book, they seem to have a grasp of technology that I think is lacking in some other business histories of tech companies. Their narrative features, and in a way in which they seem to understand what all this is, such things as HTML, URLs, applications programming interfaces or APIs, ftp, E-Mail, listservs, LDAP, and computer programming languages like JavaScript. They don’t get into the technical details a lot - the book reads like a long, thoroughly researched magazine article aimed at a general audience - but they do mention some technical details, and I really enjoyed such tales as the invention of the
tag in HTML, and the story of how Jon Mittelhauser, a programmer who worked on both Mosaic and Navigator, came up with the idea to change the cursor into the shape of a hand in a browser when you hover over a hypertext link. “That symbolized how a user could grab hold of the information in the hyperlink just by clicking on it.” Hover over a link in your browser - it still works that way!
Netscape was a company that pioneered so many things we take for granted nowadays, even as we have moved on to Social Media, Artificial Intelligence, and other new technologies. They pioneered using the Internet for commerce, started a craze for giving stuff away for free online as part of a business plan to profit off other ancillary products, and they produced really great, groundbreaking software. This book is a fascinating business history and a fascinating technology history. It’s well-researched, exciting, and actually feels very contemporary because the story of this company would be repeated over and over again with the likes of Facebook, Google, and many others. Netscape was one of the original Silicon Valley success stories that would become a template for many other smart, ambitious people.
October 20, 2015
what sort of book about jwz entirely omits to mention about:jwz anyway
January 8, 2025
When browsers ruled the Earth
I got this book after it was mentioned by Jamie Zawinski, an Internet personality, in his entertaining blog. Zawinski was one of the first employees of Mosaic Communications (the original name of Netscape) in 1994 - specifically, he worked on the port of the Mosaic browser to the various flavours of Unix which were then extant. At that time, I was somewhat familiar with the origins and development of the Web, was intrigued by Jim Clark leaving Silicon Graphics in order to start Mosaic Communications with Marc Andreessen, and remember using Mosaic (the first browser to display images inline with text) in my first steps across this alien land, which has since become as much a part of our world as the air we breathe.
This is a detailed account of the origins of Mosaic at NCSA, how Andreessen and his team were hired by Clark for his nascent company which was looking for commercial (as opposed to research) applications of the Web, and how their successes awoke the "sleeping giant" which was Microsoft, spurring it to develop their own browser - Internet Explorer - which they gave away for free in order to undercut Netscape's business. The way Netscape - under the direction of CEO Jim Barksdale - tried to evade Microsoft by switching its focus from the browser to the server, and then to the notion of groupware for collaboration is described clearly here, along with the US government's consideration of whether to prosecute Microsoft for its monopolization of the browser market (which was to go ahead a couple of months after this book was completed). Before reading this book, I didn't know much about Barksdale, apart from his pithy statement that "In business, the main thing is to keep the main thing ... the main thing"; this is now joined by his introductory address to his senior managers upon taking the helm at Netscape: "I love facts, and I love data, but if we're going to use opinions and we can't agree, them we'll just use mine" [p198].
Published in 1998, this is a nice account of that tumultuous period of history, which - although lost in the increasingly dense mists of time - is worth reading about.
I got this book after it was mentioned by Jamie Zawinski, an Internet personality, in his entertaining blog. Zawinski was one of the first employees of Mosaic Communications (the original name of Netscape) in 1994 - specifically, he worked on the port of the Mosaic browser to the various flavours of Unix which were then extant. At that time, I was somewhat familiar with the origins and development of the Web, was intrigued by Jim Clark leaving Silicon Graphics in order to start Mosaic Communications with Marc Andreessen, and remember using Mosaic (the first browser to display images inline with text) in my first steps across this alien land, which has since become as much a part of our world as the air we breathe.
This is a detailed account of the origins of Mosaic at NCSA, how Andreessen and his team were hired by Clark for his nascent company which was looking for commercial (as opposed to research) applications of the Web, and how their successes awoke the "sleeping giant" which was Microsoft, spurring it to develop their own browser - Internet Explorer - which they gave away for free in order to undercut Netscape's business. The way Netscape - under the direction of CEO Jim Barksdale - tried to evade Microsoft by switching its focus from the browser to the server, and then to the notion of groupware for collaboration is described clearly here, along with the US government's consideration of whether to prosecute Microsoft for its monopolization of the browser market (which was to go ahead a couple of months after this book was completed). Before reading this book, I didn't know much about Barksdale, apart from his pithy statement that "In business, the main thing is to keep the main thing ... the main thing"; this is now joined by his introductory address to his senior managers upon taking the helm at Netscape: "I love facts, and I love data, but if we're going to use opinions and we can't agree, them we'll just use mine" [p198].
Published in 1998, this is a nice account of that tumultuous period of history, which - although lost in the increasingly dense mists of time - is worth reading about.
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