A blast from the past -- Internet stuff from the mid 90's

I've been cleaning my office since I'm now, temporarily, working from home with my full work setup here... I've come across a whole bunch of old stuff that I never threw away... Most of this was collected at Internet World in 1994, but some is as "new" as 1996.I'll start off with the cool one:

Ahhh... the days when it was still called Mozilla in something other than the User-Agent and the moz was all over their gray site. Them's the days. In cleaning out my office I've collected up seven of these guys. I might be convinced to give away a few of these pins. :-)

Oddly, I've not even been able to find another picture of one of these online. Strange.Back then the Internet wasn't the killer app yet -- you still had to sell it.Speaking of Mozilla, er, Netscape -- I remember when I ponied up my $10 for a legit copy of the software. You were supposed to pay for it back then.

Copyright 1995...I still have a computer or two built that have a floppy drive in it. Not that they're turned on or anything -- or that they could even run the software!This is from the era when Microsoft shipped IE1.0 for a few brief months.More buttons from the show:

I'll close up with a collection of various ISP disks I dug up -- and a special disk that I managed to mess up a bit...

Remember Mosaic? Did you know it could come in a box?

Who hasn't spilled something on a floppy... I remember those days if something untoward happened to a floppy the first thing to do was exactly what they told you not to do: wash it off. If I recall I was able to get the data off the disk before it went poof forever -- if you look closely you'll see the clear tape that's now holding it together.

The Pepsi spilled on in and I immediately pried the case open and washed it off under some running water; both the case and the floppy inside were cleaned. I gingerly patted it dry with a paper towel and reassembled it. It read one last time. But one time was enough. :-D

I'll close out with an anachronism:

This was likely around '96 or so. Microsoft was integrating cryptography into their OS for the first time and I was selected to be part f the beta program. I think I still might have the disc, but it's long been separated from the case. Back then, and even now, strong cryptography is treated like a munition. It's dumb because everyone has access to the algorithms, but somehow the compiled bits are magic.

Grrr...

Stupid DOD.