Ancient Web: Mosaic Communications Sold Netscape From a 1994 Homepage

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Before Netscape was a browser everyone knew, its makers were explaining why a web browser and a web server might be useful products at all.

Explore the mirrored 1994 Mosaic Communications homepage.

The Mosaic Communications Corporation homepage calls itself a "universe" and presents a set of linked tiles: free beta release, cool tricks, killer products, customer solutions, company information, and an Internet directory. Beneath the grand sales vocabulary is a modest HTML site with a 1994 copyright.

Its table of contents is even more revealing. Alongside Netscape 94 and Netsite 94 are the Amazing Fishcam, a jobs page, feedback forms, web guides, and a registered-user T-shirt gallery. Everything new about the Web seemed to deserve a hyperlink, including the fish.

The original product literature promises multiple simultaneous image loads, document caching, native JPEG decompression, bookmarks, and platform support stretching from Windows and Macintosh to several Unix systems. Features we now take for granted were once the selling points.

The Web before its business model was settled

The server side was not an afterthought. The Netsite product page describes a Communications Server priced at $1,495 and a Commerce Server at $5,000, with encryption and authentication marketed for online transactions. It expected companies to pay substantial sums for the ability to publish and transact on the Internet.

The surviving support page even lists a $50,000 annual developer-support program. A separate Netscape welcome page teaches readers that blue and purple words can be clicked. Both documents belong to the same extraordinary moment.

The queued address, mosaic.mcom.com, no longer yielded its original homepage during this review. This article therefore relies on a readable mirror of the company's contemporary home.mcom.com pages, not on an assertion that the original hostname remains live.

In 2008, Jamie Zawinski described restoring early mcom.com pages so obsolete browser toolbar links could lead somewhere meaningful again. That effort and later mirrors explain how these otherwise fleeting corporate pages remain readable.

The result is an unusually complete sales brochure from the moment the commercial Web was being invented in public.

Browse the 1994 company site map and product literature.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.