Before Chrome and Firefox, even before Internet Explorer and Netscape, the first steps on the 'new' World Wide Web were taken with the help of browsers known only to a handful of users. This year marks 30 years since the invention of the WWW, and to celebrate, today we're going to review these digital pioneers.
History tells us that in March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee made a proposal to develop 'a vast hypertext database', and although the interest was not very high at first, his boss Mike Sendall gave him the green light to use a NeXT workstation, which became the first Web server.
https://old.neoteo.com/la-primera-foto-subida-a-la-web/In the following two years, Berners-Lee created some of the fundamental pillars that still support the Web today, and that includes the concept of a browser. All that linked information had to be accessed or explored somehow, and the need for a specialized tool soon became apparent. The formal presentation of the World Wide Web at the alt.hypertext newsgroup was essential for the development of additional browsers, but the first one was called WorldWideWeb.
WorldWideWeb
Berners-Lee's original browser was a sort of hybrid between a browser and a WYSIWYG editor. Its source code was released to the public domain in April 1993, and it is believed that a part of it is still preserved on that NeXT server, now a museum piece. A notable piece of software for its time, but WorldWideWeb had the limitation of running only on the NeXT operating system. One of the central ideas of the World Wide Web is 'universal readership', and the technical condition of WorldWideWeb went against that, so...
Line Mode Browser
... that led to the birth of Line Mode Browser. Berners-Lee and his team couldn't port WorldWideWeb to X due to their lack of experience, but they recruited Nicola Pellow, a mathematics student working as an intern at CERN, to create a 'passive browser'. The priority was compatibility with available systems, including teletype machines. Only text, no images, line by line (i.e., without cursor positioning). Line Mode Browser was basic to the core, but it served its purpose.
Erwise
Erwise was born thanks to the effort of four Finnish students: Kim Nyberg, Teemu Rantanen, Kati Suominen and Kari Sydänmaanlakka. Besides being the first with a dedicated graphical interface and the ability to search for words within a page, Berners-Lee himself highlighted some of its most positive aspects, such as underlined links, the 'Previous Page-Next Page-Back' buttons, and an overall design he called 'intelligent'. What happened to Erwise? Lack of funding killed it. Finland was mired in a recession in the early 90s, and its creators were forced to move on to other projects.
ViolaWWW
Just a month before Erwise's debut, Pei-Yuan Wei of the University of California (Berkeley) presented ViolaWWW. Not related to the instrument: Viola is actually a compression of 'Visually Interactive Object-oriented Language and Application'. Wei's main source of inspiration was none other than HyperCard, an old acquaintance here at NeoTeo. The problem with HyperCard was that it only worked on Macs, and Wei didn't even have one. He took the HyperCard manual, sat in front of one of the university's UNIX terminals, and transferred its main elements to X. The final result was ViolaWWW, and support for 'applets' became one of its most important features.
Midas and Samba
Midas is one of the 'children' of SLAC, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. American physicist Paul Kunz visited CERN in September 1991, and there he saw 'something wonderful' (Berners-Lee's WWW). Kunz presented the technology to library head Louise Addis, who put the site's main database on the Web, and the Fermilab physicists soon set up their own server. The browser used at Stanford was Midas, creation of physicist Tony Johnson. The great advantage of Midas was its compatibility with postscript documents.
Back at CERN, Robert Cailliau and Nicola Pellow (the same one from Line Mode Browser) created Samba or MacWWW, the first browser for the Macintosh Classic. At first, the browser refused to cooperate, with a bug that hung it shortly after the session started. History says Berners-Lee promised a t-shirt to whoever managed to fix the error, and the t-shirt ended up in the hands of John Streets, from Fermilab. Samba tried to emulate the design and functionality of WorldWideWeb, but shared a lot of code with Line Mode Browser, so it never managed to reproduce images.
Mosaic
Every development has its pivot moment, and in the case of browsers, it manifested with the debut of Mosaic. Created at NCSA in early 1993, Mosaic opened a new category thanks to its spectacular cross-platform support (X, Mac, Windows, Commodore Amiga), its ease of installation (it was a single file), and the speed with which its leaders (with Marc Andreessen at the helm) fixed bugs.
Mosaic gave us video, sound, embedded images in documents (courtesy of the IMG tag), bookmarks, and form support. By mid-1994, Mosaic was averaging 50,000 downloads per month. Andreessen quickly left NCSA to found Mosaic Communications Corporation, which later became Netscape Communications Corporation, and its Netscape Navigator took the market by storm in 1994. Mosaic's golden age lasted only five years. By 1998, almost no one was using it.
Cello
However, Mosaic was not the first browser compatible with Windows. That honor belongs to Cello, developed by Thomas R. Bruce of the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School. Cello was nothing more than a response to sustained demand for web access from lawyers. In other words, the world of law used Windows but didn't include a browser at that time. Support for GIF-XBM-PCX-BMP images, postscript display, sound, saving and printing files, bookmarks, previews of large documents (vital in the dial-up era) and good protocol support showed that Cello was a very complete browser... but Mosaic absorbed its users, and version 2.0 never saw the light of day.
Yes, Lynx was left out of the selection, and yes, the epic war between Netscape and Internet Explorer is unmissable, but we have to draw the line somewhere. The history of browsers is fascinating, and we could easily lose our way. In essence, we're looking at half a decade of technological explosions that established the foundations of the modern Web. We owe them a lot, and they're worth remembering.
Source: Ars Technica
