Fortune Magazine:
Remembering Netscape: The Birth of the Web Picture a world without Google, without eBay
or Amazon or broadband, where few people have even heard of IPOs. That
was reality just a decade ago. The company that changed it—bringing us
into the Internet age—was a brilliant flash in the pan called Netscape.
For the tenth anniversary of its IPO, FORTUNE recruited dozens of
players to tell the story of the startup in their own words... It
was the spark that touched off the Internet boom. On Wednesday, Aug. 9,
1995, a 16-month-old Silicon Valley startup called Netscape tried to go
public, but demand for the shares was so high that for almost two hours
that morning, trading couldn't open. The stock, which had been priced
at $28 a share, zoomed as high as $75 that day and closed at $58.
Measured against the market frenzies that came later, its rise might
have seemed predictable. But it blew the minds of people in the tech
world like Sun Microsystems co-founders Andy Bechtolsheim (now back at Sun) and Bill Joy (now a venture capitalist).
Until then, Silicon Valley was just a place where microchips were
made, not the fountainhead of global commerce. The public was oblivious
to the Internet; "surfing" meant catching a wave in the ocean or
mindlessly flicking the TV's remote control.
But Netscape mesmerized investors and captured America's
imagination. More than any other company, it set the technological,
social, and financial tone of the Internet age. Its founders, Marc
Andreessen and Jim Clark—a baby-faced 24-year-old programmer from the
Midwest and a restless middle-aged tech pioneer who badly wanted to
strike gold again—inspired a generation of entrepreneurs to try to
become tech millionaires. Executives with old-economy experience
thought they could stake a claim to startup riches by quitting their
jobs and following the example of Jim Barksdale, the former McCaw
Communications chief who came in as Netscape's CEO. And Netscape's
practice of openly sharing technology so that other programmers and
their companies could build upon its ideas helped give rise to a global
technology community, the open-source movement.
By Adam Lashinsky
Filed Under: TECHNOLOGY
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