i know i had an AOL account during high school (1994-1998), but I don’t remember when I started doing much web browsing.

i wanted to build the computer i brought to college (i’m not sure where i got that idea–i seem to remember maybe talking about it with jeff and ryan rodgers during our year long calculus class). by late spring/early summer of 1998 i must have been familiar enough with the web because i did all my research and ordering online. according to the netscape navigator version history I was probably using v4.0, presumably over a dial-up connection to AOL.

in august 1998 i left texas and traveled to north carolina to attend UNC. i didn’t get ethernet in my dorm until that november, but i remember it transforming my computer from a word processor i used infrequently to a dynamic communications device i used constantly.

i have faint memories of prefering the standalone version of navigator 4 to the bloated netscape communicator suite, but eventually i did switch to communicator as i became more interested in figuring out how to author html pages. otherwise my web browser memories during the first three years of college involve only netscape 4.7x. what’s amazing to me is that the browser wars were essentially over by the end of my first semester.

roughly parallel to the four years of my undergraduate education, netscape developers rebuilt mozilla from the ground up as an internet application platform, releasing the long-awaited v1.0 in June 2002, during the summer between my undergrad and grad school years. a year later AOL axed its netscape browser division and the Mozilla Foundation has since risen out of the ashes as an independent entity.