Today, Yahoo! celebrates their 10-year anniversary on the Internet. It is amazing to think that I have been running around the same networks for the same amount of time. However, in contrast to Yahoo!’s celebration, today I celebrate the end of an era.

I was reading some e-mail yesterday when my Netscape Mail Client went on the fritz. It kept scrolling up and would not act normal. I ended up ending the process manually and starting the client again. The restarted Netscape and it work fine, until I rebooted my computer. When I rebooted my computer, my Netscape profile disappeared. All the files were still there, but the js.prefs was missing and other important parts of the file– to Netscape the profile was dead.

After fiddling around with files for a while, I was able to import all my old mail into Mozilla Suite’s Thunderbird. Since Netscape and Thunderbird have the same core, porting the files manually worked. I was able to get a hold of all my e-mails from the past year and half. The only casualty was my sent mail, which I have archived. I synched Thunderbird with all my mail accounts and life is back to normal.

With Thunderbird up and running, it is time to put a good friend to rest. I first downloaded Netscape sometime in 1996. I think it took a while to upgrade my computer from 2.4Kps to a 9.6kps modem. High speed modems were expensive back then and to run the graphical client I think you needed something greater than 7200Kps or something like that. For many years, excluding the mission, I have booted up Netscape and retrieved my mail for the day. I did enjoy all those days with my Netscape client, but sometimes its time to put our favorite computer tools to rest.

Today, Yahoo! celebrates 10 years on the Internet, but today I celebrate the end of my Netscape decade.