Run Some Old Web Browsers Day is today (was celebrates the tenth anniversary of Mosaic Communications/Netscape - obviously not! I'm old.). JWZ celebrates by sharing a few bits of incredible trivia from the early releases. Among them:
home1.mcom.com through home32.mcom.com exist because the early browsers did client-side load-balancing: the browser itself had a special case where if it was loading "home.mcom.com" it would actually pick a random number from 1 to 32 and instead load "homeN.mcom.com"! Those were physically different servers in the Netscape data center.
JWZ also offers his archive of Netscape versions and shares the story of his attempt to reacquire the mcom.com domain from AOL. Screenshots of the old Mosaic & Netscape versions feel much older than 10 years to me.
Recent Comments