MACINTOSH ROMS. JOHN PERRY BARLOW SOFTWARE

The stakes had just been massively raised, and the entire Internet was about to become much more crowded and hectic. It was now a sure thing that other tech IPOs would follow. The markets had spoken, and the hard-fought battle was suddenly over: the Internet would be a business-friendly place. New Media, we all knew our world had just changed. Netscape’s historic success took a lot of Wall Street experts by surprise, and made a few smarter experts and early insiders instantly rich. It certainly didn’t happen to a new corporation with a shaky business model and no visible source of revenue. But, before Netscape, this kind of thing didn’t really happen. This might not seem like a stunning IPO when looked at backwards, because the Netscape IPO would be the first of many, many, many Internet IPOs that would shoot to the skies on their first days of trading. Who cares about the haters? The stock opened at $28 (already a remarkably high price for an initial stock offering), and shot quickly to a peak of $74.75 before closing its first day at $58.25. Few expected a runaway success amidst all the controversy and negativity about Netscape’s business plan, but the actual investors that Wednesday morning were apparently not listening to the haters on USENET who swore that the Internet’s open and cooperative culture would never embrace a for-profit corporation. The successful IPO wasn’t a sure thing, and in fact up until that morning there was some suspense as to whether their controversial stock market debut would happen at all.

I was in Pathfinder’s midtown Manhattan basement office on Wednesday, August 9 when word trickled around that Netscape’s first day of trading had begun - with a bang.

MACINTOSH ROMS. JOHN PERRY BARLOW SOFTWARE

I had stumbled onto USENET and the World Wide Web in 1993 via my software job, and in early 1995 I joined Time Warner’s new media venture - like Netscape, a corporate attempt to capitalize on the free and open Internet (though unlike Netscape it was doomed to fail from the start). I was, it happens, one of those newbies at the time.

These newbies were not always welcomed by the old-school academics who’d previously ruled the space, and Netscape was the brash new corporation whose mission was to accelerate this popular trend … and make a profit by doing so.

This population had only recently begun to strain with the arrival of curious newbies who managed to gain access through their jobs or schools, or via dial-up services like America Online and CompuServe. Netscape was controversial from the moment it was born, because up to the early 1990s the Internet was a non-profit space used by academics, scientists, and government agencies. The first was a scheduled event: the initial public offering (IPO) by Netscape, a startup tech firm designed to make software to power the Internet. Two separate things happened on August 9, 1995, both by chance emerging from Northern California though they had little else in common. I’m talking about the craze, the delirium, the stock market booms and crashes, the “everything is changing” meme that turned out to be true. I’m not talking about the Internet itself, which was born in the late 1960s when two computers on two different university networks first exchanged messages, thus establishing a network between networks, an “inter-net”. The Internet Age turns 20 years old this weekend, on Sunday, August 9.

Macintosh roms. john perry barlow