The Netscape Dorm (1994) (opens in new tab)

And then there is this one and some other that's from 2007.

I think that's pretty much a good ratio. I'm sorry that you've read this particular article already but sticking just to a new content wouldn't completely solve that anyway (unless Hacker News is your only source).

Personally, I've found the log both fascinating and illuminating. And for the record, I honestly didn't even know I should "have an interest in the rise and fall of Netscape". Maybe a critical flaw on my part, but there you go.

I haven't found this article 5 years ago because I didn't know I was supposed to be looking for it.

You can never fill Hacker News in a way that would please everyone and where all the articles would be fresh and worth reading. As long as there's a decent quality threshold and a sensible new/old ratio, it's all right.

I haven't seen anywhere near the same set of stories in "modern" companies like Facebook, Google, or Twitter. We do get the occasional nugget like how Instagram started or how Flickr came about as not being the original idea.

John Ramey w/ iSocket is one that has been good about talking about his current process. But a lot of times, stories of "start up experiences" aren't much more than "lolz, i was up all week hackin' on some ruby, can you rate my site?".

Fact is, writings like JWZs should be brought up now and then. I wonder who the equivalents from the last couple of years would be.

No, it's not unique to hackerdom, I know.

Looks like someone messed that up later. From a telnet session to home.mcom.com:

HEAD / HTTP/1.0

HTTP/1.1 200 OK

Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2011 07:57:27 GMT

Server: Apache

Last-Modified: Fri, 21 Oct 1994 19:00:00 GMT

ETag: "10400d9-f1-2c7ebe95f4c00"

Accept-Ranges: bytes

Content-Length: 241

Cache-Control: max-age=31536000

Expires: Tue, 14 Feb 2012 07:57:27 GMT

Vary: Accept-Encoding

Connection: close

Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

Not that these are very useful, since SSLv2 is obsolete and disabled on many servers because of several flaws in it.

Unfortunately, he was one of the few in the mid 90s that were pretty active in writing (now referred to as blogging) about their experiences. His writings are both amusing and informational, I wish more had.

A good deal of the early Netscape crowd did quite well. Many are still involved in startups to this day -- Andreesen doing VC work, Montulli/Treuhaft doing some cloud storage, Tom Paquin @ OnLive, etc.

(The key phrase that links the two together for me is "my one and only youth"; he both writes that in a diary entry and speaks it during a video interview in Rush.)