We’ve become so content with what we call “the Internet” today, that we don’t even think about its origin. I know this because I personally did not care about what or who created these online spaces for us until I watched the “Browser Wars” documentary in my digital media literacy class.
Think about it, before the Internet and World Wide Web became so widely accessible, only computer nerds, or in other words, white, tech savvy males, were able to navigate across it. But now, almost everyone is able to make their digital footprint somewhere on the Internet.
Side Note: Something I learned from the documentary that stuck with me is that although they are often used interchangeably, the Internet and the World Wide Web are not the same thing! The World Wide Web, commonly known as the Web, is an information system where documents and other web resources are identified by Uniform Resource Locators, aka, URLS (for example: https:/nyahtm.school.blog.com) which may be interlinked by hypertext, and are accessible over the Internet.
But anyway….
The “Browser Wars” documentary began with talking about the come up of the first most widely used browser, Netscape Navigator, and then went into detail about Microsoft and the competition between Bill Gates and other browser companies.
Just to highlight how intense this Browser War was, Gary Reback who was Netscape’s lawyer spoke on a meeting Netscape had at Microsoft once Bill Gates explicitly announced that he was targeting the company and planned to take a new aggressive approach to the Internet Explorer.
Reback states, “A group of Microsoft executives came down to Netscape and had a meeting, and the Microsoft people in effect said that if you’re going to make a browser that can serve as a platform for new applications it’s going to be all-out war with us.”
So to say the least, Bill Gates was extremely passionate about making sure his company would be the one to remember.
The fact that the name “Netscape Navigator” probably doesn’t resonate with you, just goes to show which company came out on top in this war.
Also, Bill Gates and his story inspired me more than anything did in this documentary. The fact that he was able to create a multibillion dollar company from scratch, as a college drop out, just showed me as a creative, that IT CAN BE DONE. And it’s funny because I’ve heard the Bill Gates story before, I even remember reading a book about it in middle school, but now that I’ve heard it again, at the age that he was when he dropped out of Harvard to pursue his dreams, it’s become more applicable and relevant now.
What Gates was able to do was amazing and we cannot take that away from him, but we also have to recognize that there was a certain level of privilege that played its part in helping his company get to the point it is at now. He was a white male from an upper-middle class family, who graduated from an exclusive preparatory high school; but if he was a black man from a low-income family who had an insufficient secondary schooling experience, his story would not be the same!
Regardless, his passion and determination is commendable—he was still able to turn a company that initially produced a software for computer hobbyists, into something that paved the way for the browsers we have today.
His story also made me realize how I, and probably a large sum of the younger generation, have become complacent with how the Internet and World Wide Web operates. It’s no surprise that the Internet is becoming, if it isn’t already, the main source of information and entertainment, so why aren’t we taking risks like Gates, and contributing to these digital spaces?
In a way I think it’s because we are almost privileged when it comes to social platforms and the Internet. We love to use it for entertainment and leisure, but tend to forget that we can educate ourselves on anything and build a brand and business for ourselves with it! And when I say “we,” I’m mainly talking and preaching to myself, because there are Generation Zer’s out there who are doing amazing things through social platforms and the Internet, its just time for me to become one of them!
In Black and Write 