Ah yeah Netscape! What a nostalgia trip it is to discover that Netscape was discontinued on December 28, 2007 and support will end in February.

My first web browser was HotJava on my colleague's Sun OS workstation (Yes kids, Sun was cool back then! Hope they become cool again! Tim Bray and Jonathan Schwartz are certainly trying!) back in the 90s at Nortel New Southgate, London, England where I was working at the time.

I wasn't one of the cool kids with a Sun OS workstation, so I was happy when Netscape launched and there was a version for my corporate boring HP Unix workstation.

I loved Netscape and used Communicator's email app and HTML editing app for many happy years until we were forced to use "even more corporate than HP" Dell PCs running Windows and Microsoft Outlook. Everytime I hear about Thunderbird and the great progress David is making with their re-vamp, I think of the fun times with Netscape's email. Cast your mind way back to when there was no V*agra and other unmentionable spam, back when email was actually useful and not a place to lose knowledge. For me, the golden age of email was 1985-1998.

Email for me as a truly effective messaging tool has been dead since then. I get more information and value of out of RSS (my current love; I've loved using RSS and subscribing to cool feeds since 1999) and IM and h*ck even walled gardens like Facdbook these days.

Good-bye Netscape, I'll miss you!