My first experience on the internet was using Win 3.11 with Winsock Trumpet and Netscape to surf the web.

More recently, I used the DOS browser, Arachne, on my 486. It wasn't pleasant. I did successfully post on another forum with it though but it would take over a minute to load each page.
Arachne was good because it had its own TCP/IP stack so you didn't need to load any DOS drivers.

ah yes, I remember trumpet winsock well.
I think my first win 3.1 browser was mosaic, so Netscape's ancestor. That was back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, and people dialed out on phone lines to read their email.

http://technolog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/08/ … ct/from/toolbar

I've never used a DOS browser myself either. DOS was for BBSing, Windows was for the web... it's actually kind of remarkable how the DOS->windows transition and the BBS->Internet one went hand in hand, it was pretty much perfectly concurrent. Two ages gone in one fell swoop.

well three, if you count the age when your mom wasn't hogging the family computer (aka the Pre-Solitaire Neolithic).

Used to be a heavy Netscape user back in the day (Win98 was the first OS I used to browse the net), until I got tired of it crashing on me. Switch to IE for a bit, then realized how buggy and insecure it was. Then used Opera for a little bit until I started using Firebird (former Firefox name) betas. Of course, at the time I still needed IE for that pesky Windows update (not sure if changing the user agent will work though).

Why the hell did AOL buy out Netscape anyway only to close it down? What a waste of money that was. The least they could have done was try to sell it on to someone else to continue, unless they were just looking for a loss to declare against their income so they wouldn't have to pay tax.

The Gecko wrote:

I actually legitimately use lynx from time to time. It's not quite DOS, but linux terminal is pretty darn close for a browser seeing real-world live use.

I thought w3m or elinks was the way to go for text-based browsers these days.

sliderider wrote:

Why the hell did AOL buy out Netscape anyway only to close it down? What a waste of money that was. The least they could have done was try to sell it on to someone else to continue, unless they were just looking for a loss to declare against their income so they wouldn't have to pay tax.

What makes you say they just "closed it down"? Netscape 6 came out after it was bought by AOL, no?

It was my understanding that the Netscape code was just such a horrible, tangled mess that it was nearly impossible to do anything with it anymore after Netscape 4. (I seem to recall that Microsoft put off the release of another version of IE after IE6 for similar reasons.)

The Netscape Communicator Gold packages were some of the best known Internet Browsers back then. At least, the name sounds "super professional". 😁

The "Gold" packages merely included some form of HTML editor, as I recall.