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10 Years of the World Wide Web

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the waiting-for-godot dept.

NCSA Mosaic was first released ten years ago today (oh, I guess you could mark time from the 1.0 release, but who's counting), marking the first milestone in the evolution of the graphical World Wide Web. HTTP was originally developed between 1989-1991, but didn't take off until there was a useful browser which could display inline images. You can still download old versions of Mosaic from browsers.evolt.org. So, all you folks who think you have a real handle on technological progress: what will information-access-over-electronic-networks look like in 2013?

11 of 429 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Obviously plagarized by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    because subscribers can read the stories before anyone else.

  2. nongraphical too by MrChuck · · Score: 4, Informative
    When http was spec'd, there were a variety of non-graphical clients out there. Granted it looked like a replacement for gopher, but it had hyperlinks that worked! Ted Nelson's dream, of a sort.



    My NeXT was running web clients in 1991 or 1992. Not much to see, if you didn't put it up.


    Mosaic was a milestone, but it didn't mark the start line.

  3. 12 Years of the World Wide Web by gbitten · · Score: 5, Informative

    The first browser was called WorldWideWeb, more info where. His first release was in Christmas 1990. So, the World Wide Web is 12 years old.

  4. CERN WWW by scriptkiddie · · Score: 4, Informative

    There was a text-based browser before Mosaic, written at CERN and called www. That's the earliest web browser. I even remember using on a shell account in 1992 or so, though an early version of Lynx was available as well.

    In the interests of Internet history, I'd like to see www. It should be able to run fine on a Linux system, as it's a simple line-based program. However, I haven't been able to find a copy, as browsers.evolt.org doesn't go back that far. Does anyone have the source?

  5. Re:In 10 years ... by matthewg42 · · Score: 2, Informative
    Not if you're German. "www" is pronounced "vay vay vay".

    A German friend of mine really couldn't believe that people actually say "double-u double-u double-u"... It's kind-of cute though.

    Where's the fun in making things easy?

  6. Emulate old browsers... by eingram · · Score: 2, Informative

    ...at dejavu.org. They've got seven to choose from. Pretty cool.

  7. Re:10 years... So similiar... by fredrik70 · · Score: 2, Informative

    >quickly perfected by Microsoft
    um, that would have been Apple really. Yeah, sure MS got a GUI with Windows 1.0, but it wasn't perfected quickly (and some would argue it's still not perfected). MS didn't get a decent GUI until win95, about 10 yewars after their first GUI

    --
    if (!signature) { throw std::runtime_error("No sig!"); }
  8. Re:I'll tell you what innovation we will see. by zBoD · · Score: 2, Informative

    Is this a joke?
    Obviously you never tried to do client-side XSLT, where IE clearly wins (which means doing what is said in the spec actually works).
    May I remind you that external entity references, a basic functionnality of XML, are not supported in Mozilla?

    --
    BoD
  9. NeXT was first by 97jaz · · Score: 2, Informative


    Yeah, I was waiting for someone to make this point. NCSA Mosaic was not the first web browser. Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first browser, called "WWW," for NeXTSTEP. ...which just goes to show, as if it hasn't already been demonstrated enough, how far ahead of its time NeXT was.

  10. Credit where it's due by lcrocker · · Score: 2, Informative

    Just to set the record straight, the first
    graphical browser was Viola, not Mosaic.

    --
    --Lee Daniel Crocker : http://www.etceterology.com My life is in the public domain.
  11. Re:10 years... So similiar... by rpresser · · Score: 2, Informative

    Forms were already present. Of course the controls you could put on a form were limited: no clickable images. No client-side image maps either - I remember the huzzah when they first appeared (in Netscape 1.1N IIRC).