Zawinski: mozilla.org's 25th anniversary [LWN.net]

Jamie Zawinski reminds us that the 25th anniversary of the Netscape open-source announcement — a crucial moment in free-software history — has just passed.

On January 20th, 1998, Netscape laid off a lot of people. One of them would have been me, as my "department", such as it was, had been eliminated, but I ended up mometarily moving from "clienteng" over to the "website" division. For about 48 hours I thought that I might end up writing a webmail product or something.
That, uh, didn't happen.

That announcement was the opening topic on the second-ever LWN.net Weekly Edition as well.

to post comments

Zawinski: mozilla.org's 25th anniversary

Posted Jan 23, 2023 20:55 UTC (Mon) by james (guest, #1325) [Link] (1 responses)

So, um, happy belated birthday, LWN.net!

Zawinski: mozilla.org's 25th anniversary

Posted Jan 24, 2023 3:50 UTC (Tue) by wtarreau (subscriber, #51152) [Link]

> So, um, happy belated birthday, LWN.net!

Yeah I was thinking the same. Reading these news about changes in 2.1.80 reminded me these good old days when many of us were running 2.1 in production because it included knfsd which allowed to recycle old hardware and turn it into a very fast local file server capable of saturating a 100 Mbps NIC. I did this at my first job with a 486DX2/66 with 8 MB RAM, it was awesome, it quickly became the development server for the whole team! Good luck trying to start /sbin/init with 6.2-rc on such a machine nowadays!

Zawinski: mozilla.org's 25th anniversary (and LWN's)

Posted Jan 23, 2023 21:59 UTC (Mon) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (3 responses)

I love this text from the first LWN Weekly Edition.

The best bet for folks looking for multiprocessor screamer systems is to wait until Spring or so when the "deschutes" (400 MHz Pentium II) comes out;

Zawinski: mozilla.org's 25th anniversary (and LWN's)

Posted Jan 24, 2023 8:45 UTC (Tue) by MortenSickel (subscriber, #3238) [Link] (1 responses)

This one from the 2nd is also pretty good:

There was also an article on Linux in SunWorld Online. It is reasonably complementary, though it does focus a bit on limitations. "Linux isn't Solaris". Well, we knew that, but not everybody thinks it's a disadvantage.

Zawinski: mozilla.org's 25th anniversary (and LWN's)

Posted Jan 24, 2023 10:35 UTC (Tue) by jem (subscriber, #24231) [Link]

The style of these early LWN issues is somewhat reminiscent of what the first issues of Dr. Dobb's Journal of Computer Calisthenics & Orthodontia looked like.

Zawinski: mozilla.org's 25th anniversary (and LWN's)

Posted Jan 24, 2023 14:57 UTC (Tue) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

I had two of those (sadly not in a single motherboard) as late as 2009. I wouldn't describe those numbers as a screamer today, but software was a bit more frugal back then...

Zawinski: mozilla.org's 25th anniversary

Posted Jan 24, 2023 14:42 UTC (Tue) by jani (subscriber, #74547) [Link] (3 responses)

Perhaps LWN should start a new section "Weekly Edition 25 Years Ago", with the best bits from quarter of a century ago!

History

Posted Jan 24, 2023 15:00 UTC (Tue) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (2 responses)

We used to do a "this week in history" section, many years ago, but kind of ran out of time and energy to keep it up. Perhaps it's time to revisit that...

History

Posted Jan 24, 2023 15:21 UTC (Tue) by jani (subscriber, #74547) [Link]

I'd forgotten about that! That was probably more effort than what I had in mind here.

History

Posted Jan 26, 2023 22:51 UTC (Thu) by claude.bing (subscriber, #127877) [Link]

Maybe a monthly schedule would prevent burnout on the issue. Not every week had notable occurrences either!

Zawinski: mozilla.org's 25th anniversary

Posted Jan 24, 2023 17:25 UTC (Tue) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] (5 responses)

<< I dug up the old CVS archive, checked out those old web site source revs, and then I had to run that website-generating perl script that I wrote 25 years ago.
...it worked without any modifications. Self-high-five.>>

Something need to be said about not breaking backward compatibility.

Zawinski: mozilla.org's 25th anniversary

Posted Jan 24, 2023 21:41 UTC (Tue) by mtaht (guest, #11087) [Link] (4 responses)

about:jwz doesn't work in chrome. :(

Zawinski: mozilla.org's 25th anniversary

Posted Jan 24, 2023 21:43 UTC (Tue) by mtaht (guest, #11087) [Link]

happy birthday, lwn. It's been great aging with you.

Zawinski: mozilla.org's 25th anniversary

Posted Jan 25, 2023 10:50 UTC (Wed) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (2 responses)

Doesn't work in modern firefox either

Zawinski: mozilla.org's 25th anniversary

Posted Jan 25, 2023 12:34 UTC (Wed) by mtaht (guest, #11087) [Link] (1 responses)

The modern internet has taken a lot of the fun out. I am really big on giving credit, and I miss the days when folk like jwz were the rock stars.

Zawinski: mozilla.org's 25th anniversary

Posted Jan 25, 2023 12:47 UTC (Wed) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]

Provide a browser extension!