The company:

Officially called Netscape Communications Corporation, Netscape was founded by James H. Clark and Marc Andreessen in 1994. It revolutionized the computer software market by giving away for free its popular Navigator Web browser until it had acquired an overwhelming market share for this category of software.

This strategy is now used by many other software companies, including Microsoft, which also distributes its Web browser, Internet Explorer, for free.

In addition to its browsers, Netscape also produces Web servers and tools for building intranets. Indeed, its in the server category that Netscape gets most of its revenue.

The Netscape.com Web site itself is now a portal (where you can still download versions of their browser for free), and the company, still based in Mountain View, California, was acquired by America Online.

The WWW browser:

Oficially called Netscape Navigator. The first beta-test version was released free to the Internet on 13 October 1994. Netscape evolved from NCSA Mosaic (with which it shares at least one author) and runs on the X Window System under various versions of Unix, on Microsoft Windows and on the Apple Macintosh.

It features integrated support for sending electronic mail and reading Usenet news, as well as RSA encryption to allow secure communications for commercial applications such as exchanging credit card numbers with net retailers. It provides multiple simultaneous interruptible text and image loading; native inline JPEG image display; display and interaction with documents as they load; multiple independent windows. Netscape was designed with 14.4 kbps modem links in mind.

Netscape Navigator was the dominating World Wide Web browser during the first years of the commercial Internet-from about 1994 to 1997, until Internet Explorer hit the screens/

You can download Netscape Navigator from www.netscape.com for evaluation, or for unlimited use in academic or not-for-profit environments. You can also pay for it.