Cybercultural
Cybercultural
Richard MacManus
Cybercultural chronicles internet history and its cultural impact, from the pre-web era to the dot-com boom, Web 2.0, and beyond. Written by pioneering tech blogger Richard MacManus.
Latest Posts
This post is to honour the one-year anniversary of the passing of Bill English, at age 91, on 26 July, 2020. English was Doug Engelbart’s right-hand man in the Mother of All Demos in 1968 and a key developer of the oN-Line System (NLS)....
By the start of 1998, Netscape was preparing to make a drastic move. Not only was its arch-nemesis Microsoft rapidly catching up in the browser market, Internet Explorer was also arguably a superior technical platform for web...
As we saw in the previous post, 1997 was a year of growth for JavaScript. However, it was also a year in which its limitations were recognized and a new term was coined that both embraced and extended JavaScript. DHTML, or Dynamic HTML,...
By the start of 1997, JavaScript had become a regular topic for tech reference websites and books. Nick Heinle was perhaps the epitome of this, as he began 1997 with a column on WebReference.com called JavaScript Tip of the Week,...
If CGI scripts were the start of interactive programming on the web, then PHP was the natural next step — at least on the server-side. Just a month after Brendan Eich created the JavaScript scripting language at Netscape, an independent...
CGI logo created by the NCSA at the University of Illinois; via Wikipedia. A couple of years before JavaScript was invented, a specification called the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) enabled an early form of interactivity for web pages....
After Microsoft upped the ante in the browser market in 1996 by integrating Internet Explorer 3.0 into Windows, Netscape began the new year with a renewed focus on the open web. Co-founder and CTO Marc Andreessen, along with the Netscape...
Bill Gates at PDC 1996. In March 1996, at Microsoft’s annual Professional Developers Conference (PDC), Bill Gates announced a set of internet technologies called ActiveX. “Part of the unique thing that Microsoft is doing,” he said...
It’s the evening of Friday the 1st of December, 2000. Nearly 32 years to the day when Douglas Engelbart presented the mother of all demos. Now 75 years old, Engelbart is at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC. It’s a black-tie...
Marc Andreessen at Netscape's second Internet Developer Conference, October 1996. Netscape launched interactivity into web pages in 1995, via a new scripting language called JavaScript. This heralded the start of the multimedia era of...
It’s Monday the 9th of December, 1968, and Douglas Engelbart, a 43 year old Silicon Valley engineer, is about to give the biggest presentation of his career. He’s at the Fall Joint Computer Conference, in downtown San Francisco, and he’s...
“Hi, I’m Brendan Eich, welcome to my homepage.” Via Wayback Machine. The Netscape Navigator 2.0 browser was finally released in March 1996, almost a year after Brendan Eich joined Netscape with the express purpose of creating a scripting...
Netscape Navigator 2, which featured the first version of JavaScript; image via Wikimedia. JavaScript was invented in a two-week flurry in May 1995 by Brendan Eich, at the time a newly hired developer at browser company Netscape. The...
The writer and cultural critic Clive James died last November, at the age of 80. I mainly knew of James from his 1980s and 1990s tv shows, such as Clive James on Television and Saturday Night Clive. I’d also read some of his essays and...
“It feels like the internet’s impact on culture is just beginning. A world in which culture is based on the internet, which is what I think is happening, is just the very start. Right, ’cause it had to get universal before it could set...