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by AlchemistCamp 1534 days ago
> He seems like a caricature of a Silicon Valley programmer who got lucky and made a bunch of money who now thinks that makes him a genius

… okareaman typed into a web browser, the very technology Andreesen became wealthy pioneering.
1 comments
okareaman 1534 days ago
Right, Andreessen wrote it himself without the help from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and it was a totally new idea since three other GUI browsers didn't exist and he never saw the source code for these other browsers that didn't exist

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwise

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViolaWWW

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AlchemistCamp 1534 days ago
Andreessen worked at NCSA and was the largest contributor to Mosaic!

He was even responsible for how various parts of the web standard coming into existence back then. For example, Tim Berners-Lee shared a different proposal than the img tag we now have. But Andreesen suggested the img tag for embedded images and shipped working code in the Mosaic browser.

After starting Netscape itself, the shift towards building entirely new technology and features only accelerated. That was an intense team effort but one he lead.

Getting so “lucky“ required working very energetically and solving difficult problems, for years.

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okareaman 1534 days ago
> Getting so “lucky“ required working very energetically and solving difficult problems, for years.

A lot of people work very energetically and solving difficult problems, for years, and don't get rich. Sad but true. If you are one of them, I salute you and thank you for trying to make the world a better place. And if you did get rich but realized that "money doesn't make the man" so you did your good deeds in private, I also salute you. The world would be a much worse place without people like you. Frankly, the Marc Andreessens of the world are a dime a dozen and I don't mean to disparge Marc as a private person, I'm disparging the puffed up Wizard of Oz public image that people like him build on the advice of their PR people. It's good for business I hear.

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johnthescott 1534 days ago
i vaguely recall that mark is on record crediting eric bina with rendering engine in mosaic. at netscape bina prefered to stay away from sv, but he was quite active on usenet, as i recall.
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