
Netscape Flashback
Way back in 1995 Netscape was king. It was king because it was a direct descendent of Marc Andreessen's ground-breaking Mosaic software, one of the first cross-platform web browsers available to users on the newly paved superhighway. Those were the days. Sort of. Unfortunately for the Netscape company, who saw part of their future in the secure transactions business, a 27 year-old graduate student in France broke the security code that allowed their commerce server software to offer security to its customers. This, in the world of web server software companies, was a very bad thing. Up to that point, Netscape advertised that its security was bulletproof and would allow all types of sensitive financial transactions to take place over the internet without fear of credit card numbers and bank…