On Being History
By Michael Swaine
It's doomed, they said. A lead sinker of technology and hype, headed straight for the abyssal ooze. It's history.
They were right, in a sense. The movie Titanic is indeed history, or anyway has made history, as the largest-grossing movie of all time. But you probably thought I was talking about Netscape Communicator. I could have been; the story's pretty much the same.
You know the Netscape story: how the company, its staff, and its browser all descended from the Mosaic project, which is the Rose Dewitt Bukater of browsers, older than God, still breathing, and still casting her jewels into the sea. How the Netscape Communicator browser (nee Navigator) rode the wave of the Web, how Netscape's fortunes rose with the tide of Internet use, and how the seemingly unsinkable company slammed into an iceberg named Internet Explorer.
And there the Good Ship Netscape might have foundered and sunk; might still founder and sink; but at this point the story takes a strange and wondrous turn.
Marc Andreessen has been the point man on this turn, out there on the prow of the vessel, seemingly suspended in space. If he sometimes gets carried away and proclaims himself the king of the world, we can forgive him his exuberance.
Here's the picture as the talented lad paints it. The bare facts, as it were: Netscape has opened up the Communicator source code-placed all of it that isn't covered by someone else's copyright on its www.mozilla.o
