The first edition of Netscape was released twenty years ago, on 13 October 1994 while Firefox, one of its spinoffs after the split of the Mozilla Suite, came out ten years ago. The company itself, initially called Mosaic Communications then renamed Netscape Communications, was established by Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark six months earlier, on 4 April 1994.

Early web history and the role Netscape played in it was summarised by Bob Metcalfe in an article written for the issue of InfoWorld magazine published on 21 August 1995:

“In the Web’s first generation, Tim Berners-Lee launched the Uniform Resource Locator (URL), Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and HTML standards with prototype Unix-based servers and browsers. A few people noticed that the Web might be better than Gopher.

In the second generation, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina developed NCSA Mosaic at the University of Illinois. Several million then suddenly noticed that the Web might be better than sex.

In the third generation, Andreessen and Bina left NCSA to found Netscape…”

Netscape wrote history.