• laranis@lemmy.zip
    3·
    1 hour ago

    Ok, going to scream into the abyss here…

    I had Netscape on my 486DX2-66 with a 33.6 modem. Win 95, along with ICQ, mIRC, some NNTP reader I can’t recall… You get the picture.

    Everyone I’ve told this to thinks I must have been out of my mind. But for a period of time that I recall as months I had some sort of phenomenon where Netscape would stop loading a web page (could take 10s of seconds, you know) unless you MOVED THE MOUSE. Continuously. The animated “N” on would freeze and if you didn’t move the mouse the page would just be blank, or partially loaded. Move the mouse, it resumes. Stop moving the mouse, it stops. I used to have to move my mouse in figure-eights, cajoling the machine to not give up and keep downloading.

    You’ll think I’m crazy, too. But when I share this story I keep hoping someone, somewhere had the same experience. And maybe, someone who knows what was going on will chime in on some obscure IRQ conflict in Windows along with some optimization used by Netscape in one iteration caused this bug for a brief moment in time.

    • zebbedi@lemmy.world
      1·
      10 minutes ago

      On linux /dev/random will use inputs such as mouse movement to generate random data. If a program needs random data for something such as encryption it will seemingly hang whilst it generates enough. This isn’t good on servers without an active user so you configure it to use /dev/urandom instead. Perhaps windows had similar back in the day.

    • 9point6@lemmy.world
      9·
      4 hours ago

      I remember thinking Netscape was way cooler than IE based purely on the throbber animation

    • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.world
      7·
      5 hours ago

      I’ve seen that some dude on here has the Netscape throbber (for Gen Z: that’s what the animated doohickey in the corner that shows your page is still loading and your computer has not frozen is called) as his profile icon.

      Maybe you’ve just summoned him up, Beetlejuice style.

    • Great Blue Heron@lemmy.caEnglish
      2·
      3 hours ago

      Yep - me too. I had to go to our “mainframe room” where we had our only Sun workstation - the only thing that would run the first versions.

      • tankplanker@lemmy.world
        1·
        3 hours ago

        Mosaic and Lynx on Sun workstations was how I started as well. Back then, there was a ton of open ftp access as well, wild.

    • imvii@lemmy.caEnglish
      2·
      2 hours ago

      Going from Netscape 1 to Netscape 2 which supported animated gifs. What a day that was!

  • hedgehogging_the_bed@lemmy.world
    5·
    4 hours ago

    I sure remember the HOURS it took me to download that sucker on my 14.4kb modem. I was blessed by the gods with a parent in the computer industry even then so we had a 2nd phone line that I could monopolize for a day of agonizingly watching and praying not to lose connection again.

    • hedgehogging_the_bed@lemmy.world
      2·
      4 hours ago

      Yes, if all had been perfect it should have only taken about an hour but dialup internet was ditzy and unreliable so I spent a huge chunk of that weekend getting a full download.