The Whiz Kid – Marc Andreessen: "It's a lot more fun in retrospect. Startups are stressful, and Netscape was no different. The funny thing is, back then we thought the horse had already left the barn. Netscape's �predecessor, Mosaic, already had 1 million users. We thought the market might be saturated. Even as late as '95, the Net was populated by early adopters, defense contractors, techies, and academics. It was completely unclear whether it would spread beyond that to consumers and business users. People still thought interactive TV would rule the world."
– Interview by Jeff Howe
Timeline: 1995
Jan: The chair that launched a thousand bad business models: Herman Miller's Aeron seats the Valley.
Mar: Jerry Yang and David Filo incorporate Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle (Yahoo!) and raise $2 million in funding from Sequoia Capital.
Apr: San Francisco's Candlestick Park becomes 3Com Park, or "Stupid-Name Park" as it's called by local radio broadcasters.
Jul: "Earth's biggest bookstore" goes live. Founder Jeff Bezos drives Amazon orders to the post office in his '87 Chevy Blazer.
Aug: Microsoft introduces Windows 95 and gives away crappy new browser Internet Explorer 1.0.
Jibe ho! Reportedly needing money to buy a boat, Netscape cofounder Jim Clark takes the company public, inciting the Web revolution.
Oct: 45 percent of Americans have heard of "the World Wide Web."
Dec: AltaVista gets off the ground with 16 million indexed pages, making it the Web's largest search engine. Ten years later, Google indexes 8 billion pages.
Andreessen (left) with Netscape cofounder Jim Clark at their Mountain View, California, office in November 1995. William Mercer McLeod
10 Years That Changed the World
| Intro
A Decade of Genius and Madness
