Type Subsidiary of AOL | Founded 1993 | |
Industry Internet, Software, Web Server, Web Publishing Headquarters Goleta, California USA
(as an independent company)
Dulles, Virginia USA
(after becoming part of AOL) Key people Linda Dozier (CTO) and
David C. Cole (CEO) Products Web Server, Web Publishing, Web Hosting | ||
NaviSoft was a web server, web publishing and web hosting company based in the United States that was the first company to offer an integrated solution that combined a high-performance programmable web server, NaviServer, with a WYSIWYG HTML authoring tool, NaviPress, and a public web site for hosting published pages, public.navisoft.com. NaviSoft was acquired by AOL on November 30, 1994.
In 1993, Linda Dozier set up NaviSoft Inc. in the basement of her Goleta, California home with business partner David C. Cole. In that Goleta basement, network publishing, for which Dozier holds the patent, was invented. The invention described the ability to edit a web page shown in the browser and save the changes to a URL, including the URL from which it came.
Under AOL, the products and hosting service were rebranded AOLpress, AOLserver, and AOL PrimeHost, and AOL continued to offer those products and services through AOL's Internet Services Company. In 1995, AOL also acquired the Global Network Navigator (GNN) and offered NaviSoft's products under the GNN brand. as well.
AOL eventually stopped offering the WYSIWYG HTML authoring tool and web hosting services, but they continued to use AOLServer internally to run AOL's web services. In 1999, AOL released the source code to AOLServer as open-source under the GNU or AOLServer Public License. A friendly fork of version 4.10 of the AOLServer source code was released, and is still being developed and maintained, as NaviServer.