Way back in 1996, when Safari wasn’t even a glimmer in Apple’s eye, Apple sent out this email to document explaining how to use the Netscape browser.
It’s pretty interesting reading a document in which what I would consider to be core modern computer concepts like hyperlinks and back and forth arrows are explained to a technical-minded audience for the first time.
It just goes to show that everyone’s been a noob one time or another.
Do you remember the first time you used a browser? My first browser was Lynx on a dial-in Unix ISP. Which browser was your first, and what platform was it on?
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
39 responses to “This Is How Apple Explained How To Use A Web Browser To Its Employees Back In 1996”
haha that is brilliant! The description of the Back button is my favourite :) We all gotta start somewhere.Â
Mine was also the text-based Lynx on a dial up ISP at my city’s University, wow how times have changed.
I remember HATING sites that had too many rich graphics, and borders. Â It just took so freaking long to load w/ a 56K. Â
the email image isn’t showing up for me.
My business partner and I bought a second-hand Mac Performa to operate our books in our print shop (and run Adobe Framemaker . . .gahh!).Â
I remember dialing up the modem (after hours so as not to tie up the phone lines) and surfing the interwebz, what there was of it. mostly I downloaded Star Trek wav files from my brothers computer on the other side of the country.Â
I think it had Earthlink? Netscape? I don’t know, this was 1995 or so.Â
Lynx. Â But Mosaic was the first that had graphics. Â
I still miss the little animated do-hickies that told you the page is loading. Â One of the biggest drawbacks of Chrome for instance is that the page sometimes takes 5 seconds to load and you just have that slightly darker grey on light grey arrow to indicate anything is happening at all. Â It’s a really bad UI design. Â
Edit: also miss the forward button. At the beginning it used to be that lots of pages had a built in destination coded for the forward button. Now it just remains inactive unless you’ve previously hit the back button.
Summer 1997, Netscape 3.0, Windows 95 in the computer lab at Governor’s School. Â A bit late to the party, perhaps, but Juno email was still a big deal back then and AOL still charged by the minute.
They also had Macs running Netscape 2.0 on some version of System 7, but they were horribly slow.Â
to a 13 Â year old those Macs weren’t slow at all. Hell I thought it was awesome compared to AOL and the ugly UNIX browser on my dad’s office computer
It was lynx and bitchx on a 33.6 dialup for me in the 90s, i bought a book that came with linux 1.x; those were the days….
cool
Mosaic on a Mac in late 1993. Someone showed me a tarot deck online. While I have zero interest in tarot, I knew I was seeing something huge. I quickly added web development to the roster of my then print-based design firm (Go Media). We brought a lot of clients online, including Whole Foods, and I ended up selling Go Media to Excite in 1996.
arrrrrgh … it was the aol (excuse for a) browser, dialup, with an external 14.4bps modem on my very first computer, a hand-me-down Compaq running windows 3.11 for workgroups. Makes me want to barf thinking of it. I finally wised up (after going through and upgrading a couple of  Dell’s running w95b, w98, xp home, xp pro) and switched to Mac in 2008.  Took long enough!
tinyurl.com/2df4ccp
My favorite part is where it says “Once you have logged in with your SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER……Any information you submit is insecure”
I also used Mosaic in 1993. A year later Steve Andreesen turned it into Netscape. I remember finding a short movie and tried to load it. After 20 minutes I gave up and went on to something else. I was really impressed with the graphics though. …and I hated the Unix type e-mail, gopher, telex, ftp, etc. that each did specific chores. Come to think about it, they were apps…
IE5, Win95 :D
As the person who originally scanned & sent this PDF to TechCrunch, I’d like to point out that this article is unfortunately factually incorrect as written. The above PDF was never sent to employees as an e-mail — it’s just a scan of a paper from new employee orientation in July 1996 explaining how to sign up for benefits.
I’m guessing the editors just haven’t corrected the post (I e-mailed them a few hours ago), but hopefully they’ll do the right thing.
telnet://www.cern.ch:80 was my first “browser”.
1999 with IE on Windows 98. We all n00b at that time. :D
tinyurl.com/2df4ccp
tinyurl.com/2df4ccp