Valley of the Boom

[Push The Button]

Docudrama about the browser wars of the 1990s. The first episode is available on Amazon Prime Video, and on Nationalgeographic.com

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/tv/valley-of-the-boom/

 

[137th Gebirg]

Been watching it. I lived and worked through those formative times, and am still a professional web developer - this is an interesting take on the history of the web back in the 90's. I visited the Netscape offices in Northern Virginia back in the late 90's when they were at their peak and it was definitely the very picture of Silicon Valley excess. They had a hot chocolate dispensing machine that was unbelievably awesome. Still have one of their hats!

This show reminds me of Pirates of Silicon Valley, which to me was one of the more thorough docudramas (compared to the ones that have been done more recently) on the war between Apple & Microsoft in the macro, and particularly between Jobs and Gates in the micro. Very well done and a great nostalgic visit to the beginning of everything. It was a magical time to be alive back then... before the dot com bubble burst a few years later, anyway. Then it all went to shit.

Definitely going to keep watching.

 

[Push The Button]

Been watching it. I lived and worked through those formative times, and am still a professional web developer - this is an interesting take on the history of the web back in the 90's. I visited the Netscape offices in Northern Virginia back in the late 90's when they were at their peak and it was definitely the very picture of Silicon Valley excess. They had a hot chocolate dispensing machine that was unbelievably awesome. Still have one of their hats!

This show reminds me of Pirates of Silicon Valley, which to me was one of the more thorough docudramas (compared to the ones that have been done more recently) on the war between Apple & Microsoft in the macro, and particularly between Jobs and Gates in the micro. Very well done and a great nostalgic visit to the beginning of everything. It was a magical time to be alive back then... before the dot com bubble burst a few years later, anyway. Then it all went to shit.

Definitely going to keep watching.

Pirates of Silicon Valley was good. Noah Wiley’s portrayal of Steve Jobs is the benchmark, it was better than Michael Fassbender’s, and much better than Ashton Kutcher’s. It was also a little gutsy, since Jobs was alive and kicking when Pirates was produced.

I was a big Netscape Navigator fan back in the late 90s, I even bought an official copy of V2.0 from them for $50 back in 1996. Microsoft was the Evil Empire that had to be stopped, or so many of us believed, and I was doing my part by refusing to use their shitty (at the time) Internet Explorer.

 

[137th Gebirg]

Sad thing is, it's still a shitty browser. Over 20 years later, it's still uses a non-standard rendering engine and Microsoft's crippled "Jscript" variant of JavaScript. Edge really isn't any better, IMO. They went in the other direction and made it way too lightweight and feature-bereft.

Unfortunately, Mozilla Firefox (which derives its pedigree from Netscape) has become bloat ware in the past couple of years. I'll still take it over Chrome or Safari, though.