Another 10-year anniversary coming up

Ten summers ago, I quit my job at Pure Software and drove cross-country, moving to Boston for grad school. Shortly after I got here, Netscape Communications went public on the same day that Jerry Garcia died. It's weird that I remember being here when I heard about Jerry (where Governor Weld was a Dead-Head), but I remember being at work when I heard about the Netscape IPO. I guess I'm just confusing it with other memories about the rise of MCOM/NSCP; my officemate at Pure, Stan Lanning, had been jwz's officemate at Xerox PARC, so we had been getting some of the inside scoop for a while. Also, Pure was scheduled to go public the week after Netscape, although we had scheduled it long before they had; back then, the rule of thumb (among our executives, at least) was to be profitable for six consecutive quarters before filing for an IPO, so it had been in our business plan for a long while (pretty much since I started there in June 1992). I also hung out a lot on JHM, where people had been ahead of the curve about the World Wide Web (remember gopher? probably not) and Marc Andreesen dropped by from time to time. I even rubbed elbows with Pei Wei, the inventor of Viola, at the XCF. (How did I manage not to get rich and famous purely by osmosis? Oh, right, grad school.)

Anyway, I was reminded of all this because of jwz's post about a Fortune commemorative of the NSCP IPO. It's interesting to revisit that time, but also sad, and sad that the reminiscences are still missing the point. (Or maybe there was no point?)