Mosaic Netscape 0.9 was released 30 years ago on Sunday, 13 October 1994

“cityfarmer.org” went on-line on the World Wide Web October 15, 1994.

[City Farmer’s first website is still online. (www.cityfarmer.org) I built it with the help of University of British Columbia techies who then published it on the university servers. We are the longest running urban agriculture site on the internet providing daily news about city farming. In 2006 we moved our to our new address (cityfarmer.info). Michael Levenston]

By Jamie Zawinski
I worked as a programmer. I was one of the founders of Netscape and Mozilla.org, and have been involved in the free software and open source community since the mid-80s.
JWZ
Oct 13, 2024

Excerpt:

According to my notes, Mosaic Netscape 0.9 went live shortly after midnight on Oct 13, 1994. We sat in the conference room in the dark and listened to different sound effects fired for each different platform that was downloaded. At some point late that night I wandered off and wrote the first version of the page that loaded when you pressed the “What’s Cool” button in the toolbar. (A couple days later, Jim Clark would go ballistic in a company-wide email because I had included a link to Bianca’s Smut Shack.)

For those of you who are unaware of these finer details, 0.9 was the first release of the Netscape browser (which begat Firefox) available to the general public. This beta release was an unannounced surprise. Prior to this, everyone assumed that what we were doing was going to be a standard for-sale product where you sent off your $35 and then some time later got a disc in the mail with a license key. That we just said, “Here’s our FTP site, come get it, go crazy” was, at the time, shocking to people.

Read the complete article here.

See City Farmer’s instructions from 1995 here.

Setting Up Pages On The World Wide Web.

Excerpt:

Why Do It?

Michael Levenston
Executive Director
City Farmer
(C) Copyright: City Farmer 1995

Before you begin this adventure you must have an idea of what you want to share with the world. City Farmer, a non-profit society, started in 1978, promotes urban agriculture and has collected valuable information that is difficult to find in libraries, bookstores or at other information outlets.
For us to be able to post information about our resources in a place that is quickly accessible to people everywhere in the world is appealing. On the Web we can update our material as often as we like so that the latest information is always available. We can put up colour photos, pictures, sounds, and short movie clips to make our “publication” a multimedia event .

Links can be made from our pages to pages of other groups anywhere in the world so that readers get a broader picture of urban agriculture than just ours. And these links are accessed by simply clicking the computer mouse.

City Farmer doesn’t need a mailing list, a layout artist, a printer or publisher, a distributor, tons of paper or postage to produce this new publication. Readers can respond to our work effortlessly on the Internet using E-mail. And we can question our audience using “Forms”, a special feature, that will allow us to gather statistics and views on various subjects.

Unlike Usenet where postings are removed each week, World Wide Web pages remain up as long as the bills are paid.

All the above can be accomplished by just one individual working from home using a computer, colour scanner, modem and WWW account at a Web server. This author used a Mac LC575 (1995), Microtek ScanMaker IIxe and US Robotics mac&fax 14.4 modem.

Source: https://cityfarmer.info/mosaic-netscape-0-9-was-released-30-years-ago-on-sunday-13-october-1994/