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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?

3 of 429 comments (clear)

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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?