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 * THE WORLD IS FLAT

Flattener # 2**
 * 8 / 9 / 95


 * When Netscape went public

During the mid-1900s, PC-Windows network had reached its limits and realized that in order to become really interconnected, it needed to evolve to the next step. The next step in order to flatten out our world "was to go from a PC-based computing platform to an Internet-based platform", as noted by Microsoft's Mundie. There were two applications that drove this new phase, and they were e-mail and Internet browsing. E-mail became driven by the rapid expanding of consumer portals including AOL, CompuServe, and eventually MSN. The new app, the Web browser, was what really captured the imagination of our society. The Web browser of that time could retrieve documents or Web pages stored on Internet Web sites and display them on any computer screen. The concept of the World Wide Web was originally created by Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist. The first web page was put up in 1991 by him, which was made in an effort to foster a computer network that would enable scientists to easily share their research. However, the first mainstream browser and Web browsing for the general public was called Netscape, and went public on August 9 1995. As John Doerr worded it, "The Netscape IPO (Initial Public Offering) was a clarion call to the world to wake up to the Internet. Until then, it had been the province of the early adopters and geeks." The phase of Netscape developed the flattening of the world process by giving us the first broadly popular commercial browser to surf the Internet, making the Internet accessible to everyone, and expanding the demand for computers, software, and telecommunications networks. These networks could easily make words, music, data, and photos digital by transporting them on the Internet to someone else's computer.