Do you remember… Netscape's meteor shower?

Long before the spinning wheel, there was the Netscape meteor shower. Up in the top corner of the browser stood a big letter N on a little planet, and while a page loaded, meteors streaked across the sky behind it. When they stopped, your page was ready. Or the connection had died. You learned to tell the difference.

The animation arrived with Netscape Navigator 1.1 in 1995, replacing a plain pulsing N, and it stayed through version after version. Programmers called that busy little corner a “throbber”, which is a wonderful word for something people spent so many hours staring at.

On dial-up, the meteors were the soundtrack to the whole internet: you clicked, you watched the sky, you waited. Some of us waited long enough to learn every streak by heart.