Timeline of Events that Made the Spectacular Netscape IPO Possible
The Floridant/10313132

NEW YORK - Floridant -- We're coming up on the 30th anniversary of the Netscape IPO, which, as everyone knows, was the launch of the Internet economy and ecosystem we live in today.

Here are some of the key, sometimes surprising and off-radar, events that made the IPO's spectacular "overnight success" possible.

The Tech Nerd Days

May 1990 - Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau write a proposal to develop something called the World Wide Web for their employer, CERN.

August 6, 1991 - After Cailliau successfully lobbies CERN to formally declare the code and concept behind the Web public domain, Tim Berners-Lee makes the Web available to the public.

November 1992 - University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign undergraduate Marc Andreessen, working at the school's National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NSCA), asks co-worker Eric Bina if he'd ever seen the Web. He hadn't. Mutual inspiration leads them to develop a point-and-click graphic user interface for it.

January 23, 1993 - Andreessen and Bina launch an "alpha/best version 0.5" of Mosaic.

Faint Rumbles

March 1993 - After a successful debut at the January 2, 1993, Macworld conference, the first issue of Wired Magazine hits the newsstands. The Web is not mentioned, but web addresses appear on some of the pages.

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April 21, 1993 - Tech reporter John Markoff writes an article about Mosaic for the New York Times.

The Web Gets Down to Business

January 1994 - Jim Clark sees a demo of the Mosaic browser and immediately reaches out to Andreessen. The two meet and decide to go into business together.

January 1994 - Jerry Yang and David Filo begin work on "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web," a hand-built directory of websites. (They don't incorporate the name "Yahoo" until March 2, 1995.)

April 1994 - Wired Magazine approves a proposal by Andrew Anker to start an ad-supported online publication on the Web called HotWired.com

April 4, 1994 - Mosaic Communications (later renamed Netscape) is formed.

June 11, 1994 - Ken McCarthy of E-Media.com gathers Internet commercialization pioneers, including Mark Graham, who helped put AOL on the Internet, and Marc Fleischman, the world's first full-time web consultant and web site developer, for a private meeting at 3220 Sacramento, the San Francisco tech incubator where Apple worked on touchscreen technology.

The topic: "How to Make the Web Pay for Itself." McCarthy introduces the idea that becomes the foundation of digital advertising: put "little squares" on web pages that take people to ad pages and calculate the ratio of page views to clicks, later known as the clickthrough rate. A non-industry guest, Rick Boyce, a media buyer for Hal Riney & Partners, takes notes.

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July 5, 1994 - Jeff Bezos founds Amazon to sell books online. Amazon doesn't expand beyond selling books until 1998 and doesn't show its first annual profit until 2003.

October 27, 1994 - Rick Boyce, who left Hal Riney & Partners to join Hotwired as sales director a few weeks after attending the June 11 meeting at 3220 Sacramento, leads the team that sells the first banner ad. The $790 billion a year global digital advertising industry — the first activity that generates meaningful profits on the Web — is born.

November 5, 1994 - In San Francisco, McCarthy hosts the first large-scale conference ever dedicated to the idea that the Web could be a self-supporting commercial medium.

23-year-old Marc Andreessen is the keynote speaker. His presentation was video recorded in full and is the only extended documentation of Andreessen from this era.

August 9, 1995 - Netscape launches its IPO. The initial offering price is $28, but demand for shares is so ferocious that the first sale goes off at $71. The high of the day was $74.74, and the price closes at $58.25. Wall Street, the news media, and the public at large start to realize that something large is afoot.

More about the Web's critical transformational years can be found in the new book How the Web Won.