Slashdot Mirror
Ten Years of Web Browsing
AnamanFan writes "Today in 1993, a group of students at the University of Illinois released a little program called Mosaic. News.com.com.com has a special four-part series on the anniversary. I for one will celebrate by spending extra time with Mozilla and Camino." Slashdot marked the anniversary a little while ago.
Who would have guessed that so much would change in a decade?
Who cares when web browsing started.
The more important question is when did the first porn site start?
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
I saw an editoral written up in the Chicago Trib last week about Mosiac celebrating 10 years and submitted it to /.
Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.
what a bloated piece of crap webpages would have become, they might have abandoned the idea...
Oh, how little I knew.
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
Excuse me, I have to go outside and stretch my legs. A bathroom break would be a nice change of pace too.
Why slashdot? Why not?
Ten years of quality pr0n! Go internet! May you bring us a 1000 years more!
Well, sort of. I installed Netscape 2 for the fun of it and to relive my first intenet memories and swiftly uninstalled it as it was well... hopeless. I swiftly discovered my url.dll had been deleted and I had some real good 'fun' finding it again. Thanks Netscape :/
Is Slashdot trying to get an obscene number of duplicates today?
Slashdot marked the anniversary a little while ago.
;-)
Great. They know they are posting dupes and they even brag about it
RedShirt
Microsft spel chekar vor sail, worgs grate !!!
This would be the best way to celebrate the centenary of this legendary USENET reader!
Congratulations to all the folks at Novell!
Cheers,
Paco
...but mosaic wasn't the first web browser, just the first that most people used. Tim Berners-Lee wrote a graphical browser for NeXT -- his preferred platform at the time and the GUI platform he was most familiar with. For the Unixes there were only lame command-line/text-mode browsers at the time, but even those count as browsers that predate Mosaic.
We should celebrate this taking the original source code from Mosaic and updating it to include these new useful features:
Pop up ads
ActiveX controls that can have full access to your computer
An e-mail client with HTML support so you can view spam as it was intended
and so on. Go progress!
Computer Science seems to be the only profession in which we still have access to the people that helped start it. I've always enjoyed that. Take Whitfield Diffie, for example.
You can't ride two horses with one ass
Here's a history provided by w3. (Note: mozilla alpha released in February 1993. Already 50 HTTP servers in existence.)
Here's a really cool seminar given at CERN in Feb 1993 on the potential of the web browser.
Why do I h8 apple?
IMHO, in 10 years we've progressed in the negative direction in regards to online applications thanks to Mosiac/http/html. 10 years later we're stuck with ecommerce pages that get hopelessly confused if you press the back button. Annoying website timeouts. Complex logic on the backend to handle stateless connections. Ugly front end development models. Half/assed Java Applets/Javascript attempts to actually create decent applications.
Now as a presentation model, the web is great. But as an application infrastructure, we've gone nowhere if not backwards.
I had actually used the CERN line-mode www interface before Mosaic came out, just to check out the ravings of this pompous Brit I heard about (by the name of Tim Berners-Lee) who was raving that this thing called the World Wide Web was intended to contain the sum of all human knowlege. But Mosaic was a huge leap forward.
However, when Mosaic first came out, a lot of folks in my department were using it as a better interface to Gopher, since in 1993 there was far more interesting stuff available via Gopher than via HTTP. Of course that didn't last long.
I still remember thinking what's the big deal. Revolution, Shemzolution. This thing will never take off.
Shouldn't that be 10 years of *GUI* web browsing? Isn't lynx, and the whole web stuff a little bit older?
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
The celebration NCSA is having doesn't even have one person speaking that had anything to do with Mosaic. Nearly everyone that had anything to do with it's long gone, and the department that created it (and NCSA telnet) was axed years ago.
Dear Neophytus,
On behalf of the Netscape Development Team, I just want to say, you're welcome!
Happy Hunting!
The Netscape Development Team.
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
I remember the moment when I loaded a web page in an alpha release of Mosaic like people remember where they were when they heard about the JFK assassination or 9/11. I announced to the room full of internet users that "This is going to change the world". One of my coworkers said "Big deal. So they threw together an app that can download html files and some helper apps to display bitmaps and play sounds. We could have done that." I replied, "Maybe so, but mark my words: this is going to change the world." Looks like I was right about something for once.
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
It's hard to remember doing any kind of research before the internet... of course, that's probably because in 1993 I was in 7th grade, when going to the school library and opening a book was considered a huge deal. I had to stay after school as punishment for writing a computer drawing program -- the teachers thought I broke the machine!
stuff |
I recall getting on yahoo, surfing all the interesting links in one night, getting bored and going back to usenet news.
So... what you're saying is you reached the end of the internet?
I still remember thinking what's the big deal. Revolution, Shemzolution. This thing will never take off.
Don't feel bad. Bill Gates said the same thing and according to Peter Jennings (and any other talking head that gets a chance to interview him), Gates is one of the smartest men in the world. I mean, he's got all that money, right? Surely he deserves it all for his visionary thinking. If a super-genius could make a mistake, then you shouldn't be so hard on yourself for making the same mistake.
I remember hearing one interviewer on a radio talk show ask Gates: "Mr Gates, everyone is wondering: how did you write the Internet?" and good ol' Billy didn't bother to correct the man but gave some vague answer about how the Internet would make information available to everyone (provided they purchase a valid copy of Windows, of course).
GMD
watch this
Cynical posts like this don't provide any constructive criticism, so it's better if they're hidden from public view.
and I really miss Internet Policy, which have had banned commercial stuff from the Internet.
I can remember thinking, "oh great, now everyone will be able to just get online and hit my favorite servers without needing to know squat. Within days it became necessary to go to my favorite servers in the middle of the night instead of at any time of the day. All I could see was congestion. Soon thereafter I saw my first web page with advertisements and I decided right then and there I would NEVER allow myself to bother viewing web sites with ads in them. hah.
I'm trying to remember the order of the web pages I saw come up back in 1993...
1) Sun
2) HP
3) MS? IBM?
4-1000) Porn
Great invention, the web...
--trb
here. And yes, starting with Sputnik really does make sense, that little tin ball spurned more scientific research (and translation Russian services) that some people realize.
the World Wide Web Worm (www.wwwww.(com?org?))
And you hear an old crotchety voice...
I remember back when windows 3.1 DOS v1.31...
Yep that was back in the days when I could still get layed...
Now all you young whippersnappers...
It was 16 colors of pure madness!!!
10 years ago i was playing in my backgarden eating mud. And the interweb was happening without me! :(
I mean...what else would you use the web for?
Are you serious? It's a joke--News.com comes up in a web browser as news.com.com. The joke is that they are adding more com's. Slashdot has one TLD--like normal sites.
(Yes, I know it's because CNET's URL is com.com)
Well, Apple users still have it, IE vs Safari vs Camino. And as a result, browsers are fast, have popup blockers, download managers and tabbed browsing and about anything users ask for. Anyone who thinks they might sell stuff to Mac users designs their website properly. Just think about how much more lean and stable windows browsers would be if MS didn't kill off serious competition. Typing this in Safari.
what a bloated piece of crap Mosaic would sadly become, they might have abandoned the project as well. Microsoft stole Mosaic.
This wasn't the first web browser. It wasn't the first use of html or http. Those are the significant milestones, not Mosaic.
.....
So why did the Slashdot editors pick this story, while (presumably) rejecting dozens of worthwhile ones? Oh - I get it - it's a repeat
You seem to be missing THE #1 attraction on the Ineternet in those days.. IRC.. who needs instant messaging if everyone you care to know is already in your channel?!?
Of course, ten years ago my IRC lag started increasing drastically.. I wonder why...
---
Schizophrenia beats being alone.
This makes me amazed at the speed with which information now travels. I remember trying to get on the net in high school back in 94. Nobody I knew, knew anything about it and there were no easy to install IP stacks for Win 3.1. I remember trying to decipher the articles in Boardwatch magazine and hunting the local BBS's for info.
It took me forever to finally get on (a Prodigy account) and then that was text. I used that to get info for my first Linux install and finally after switching to Netcom and getting X working, I was surfing the web with Netscape. What a pain.
I had no idea how to do this stuff and finding the info was extremely painful. It was like a bunch of secrets that took forever to find. The only person I talked to at the time that knew about Mosaic or anything was some random clerk in an OfficeDepot.
Today, we know the instant anything is released, we get the inner workings of expert groups. I know I take all this stuff for granted today, but it is still completely amazing how things have changed.
Arrogance is Confidence which lacks integrity. -- me
The web is great, but I think lately there's been a real focus on making the web do things it shouldn't. And by that, I mean web-based applications.
There are certain things the web can do well application wise. Like an online calendar, or email application (yahoo/hotmail). However, things like office applications should not use web-based technologies. It's always slow and clunky. I mean, sure you can do drag-and-drop with dhtml, but it's inconsistant and slow. I'd much rather deal with a java applet, or ActiveX, so as to have a true GUI instead of a GUI-emulator.
Am I totally off base here, or does anyone else agree?
Go here for teh [sic] funny.
this is what you wanted? this must be some sort of pun(ishment)?
.controll??
once upon a time, there were to partIEs, now that they are won, the partIE's overbullown?
that's gov.va.msn.?net?(as in fishes) (VAST)
all icann say is: lookout bullow.
http://software.ericsink.com/Browser_Wars.html
Eric Sink
Software Craftsman
I had worked in a corporate office up until '92 where networking only consisted of NetBIOS over NetBEUI. Then, I went to work at NYU Computer Science in '93. Man, what a great place to be at that time. We had Sparcs as our office computers! I used xrn and loved killfiles :) I remember compiling Mosaic, and being blown away with what I saw.
.ps. Others were so old, that I had to scan them in and store them as God knows what. I also took an Apple Quicktake 100 around campus and made a clickable map of the campus that brought up the photos of the campus area, including the fountain in Washington Square Park.
My first project was to put the technical reports collection online for the department. Most of them were in DVI format and needed to be converted to
Fun times, fun times.
Intelligent Life on Earth
... and raise you news.com.com.com.com.
a world in progress...
When you see Charles Babbage or Alan Turing, tell them I said Hi. :-)
I get your point though, we have more modern founders than any other profession that is so widely recognized. But there will always be someone long dead who paved the way for Computer Science. It all depends on who you consider truly "started" it. On the shoulders of giants you know. Also, Computer Science is a pretty broad term now, there are definite "specializations" and crossover professions within pure CS.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
my comment in my computer note book
There are no answers only hyperlinks It would be pat to say '..and nothing has changed' but it has I would now write
There are many answers, and even more popups
And I will celebrate this anniversary by making yet another flaming post, chastising Microsoft's direct involvement in squashing the independant browser movement. I'll compose my flaming post in preferably l33t speak to bemuse the online audience and deliver an oh'so strong punch up Bill Gate's nose. I'll type my flaming post in a mozilla browser... while still burning in rage, I'll find my Windows XP OS box with the Windows (R) logo on it and crush it into the ground with my bare feet.
I wouldn't go as extreme as doing all this had I not had to reinstall my entire OS when my IE upgrade went wrong just a couple days prior to this special anniversary!!
(note: your understanding of sarcasm is appreciated).
..most of us had our last productive day on April 21st 1993. :)
I remember that ftp site with Mosaic back in 1993. There was another application there - Collage. The idea was pretty neat. It was a tool to *sensualize* scientific data. Not just visualize, but turn in into audio too. I wonder what happened to it. I am not sure if it later became Spyglass Transform. It could be that its development was discontinued. Does anyone know Collage fate?
Slashdot also contains repetition.
Say "slashdot.org" and it sounds like "slash dot dot org".
What's next, the first time the word "Internet" was used in a sentence, following a comma?
It's May 3rd, btw.
I was a Sophmore at American University in DC when Mosaic was announced. I remember going to the main computer center on campus and inquiring about this 'web browser' program and if they'd let me load it on a machine there, since the 386sx in my dorm wasn't going to cut it (or, failing that, if they'd load it themselves). Having been shuffled from person to person, I finally ended up with the lab manager who stated "Why would you want to do that? You can get everything you would want off of UseNet. We can't have students loading every flash-in-the-pan technology on these machines."
Fine, he was rather right - there wasn't going to be much to do with Mosaic and I *did* get most things from usenet. But I would just love to go back and ask him today if he still considers web browsers a 'flash-in-the-pan'.
-Mark
The web page banner shows up; progress meter sticks at 99% ; BUT no story appears. http://www.iht.com/articles/93954.htm Some web pages take a certain amount of time to come up. Some never come up. And I am not talking about web sites that were slashdotted. KDE people are not telling me anything. If this is the future of the net, then I am in trouble. MOD ME DOWN please. Kiss my karma goodbye.
I was reading Wired, and they had a big spread on Mosaic, including screenshots of the browser in action. When I saw it, I immediately installed Mosaic and hunted down every Web site I could. I wish I could remember what issue of Wired featured a multi-page layout of Mosaic screenshots and text. Does anyone else know? I'd guess it was from the 2.xx series, maybe 3.xx.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
Wow. I posted a link to an article on my personal weblog. That article does not mention my company name or any of the names of my company's products.
Shameless self promotion? You've gotta be kidding.
Eric Sink
Software Craftsman
Internet protocols that never made it:
Like the GOPHER protocol, used in text-based information outlines, the BEAVER protocol was the first porn-only protocol available on the world-wide-web. BEAVER://hotladies.com certainly had great promise and wide usership in its early days, but the advent of MOSAIC and all things HTTP soon spelled the end of one of the more outrageous experiments in Internet history. Now it joins the long list of Archie, Veronica, and WAIS as the burned out Stuckey's stand on the information super-highway
Notable features were the massive amount of stripped bits in beaver packets, thrust-technology (the precursor of push-technology), ActiveXXX support, and of course evil bit technology which was 10 years (!) ahead of its time.
beaver://slashdot.com -- we never knew ya...
I'd love to see if that would compile under OS X, it supposedly supporting all the NeXT stuff.
It would be neat to see what it would do with today's web pages. Anyone have source?
...is the fact that soon after the alpha release of Mosiac, CERN's directors stated that WWW technology to be freely usable by anyone. Being free is what bulid up Web technology more than any browser or server.
A while ago slashdot posted a story about an Internet-enabled operating system with a web browser for the Commodore 64. It was claimed that the 21 years old C64 was the oldest system ever to run a (real) web browser, and a few days later this was changed to the 23 years old Atari 800 (see the web browser's homepage for the full story). This means that the web is almost 10 years younger than the oldest system to surf it!
How is a question and an incorrect assumption moderated as "insightful" ?
Mosaic could browse the web before Lynx could. The existing program Lynx was WWW-enabled after Mosaic was released. Just because it's text-only doesn't mean that it's older!!
So Mosaic is 10 years old today. I wonder whether in 10 years anyone will be looking back at today and saying, yeah, I remember such and such came out and I thought it was bullshit, but look at where we are now!
If so, what is it?
"If I could live to be several hundred
I could take a walk and really wander, really wonder."
Does anybody even "browse" the web? I visit the exact same websites everyday, the browsing euphoria wore off with in the first few months that I had my first Internet connection back in '94 (AOL!). There are way too many websites on the Internet to browse through. If I need to find something I know how to find it (Google).
Web Turns 10 - But Was Mosaic Really First and Best Browser? No, No.
By Paul Jones, Special To LTW
Editor's note: April 22, 1993, is widely regarded as the day on which a number of people, including Marc Andreessen, who went on to help found Netscape, produced Mosaic - the ground-breaking Web browser. But was it really the first? To mark the 10th anniversary, Local Tech Wire asked one of the pioneers in Internet development - Paul Jones - to talk about the rise of the browser and how the technology transformed the Internet. Jones, who is director of ibiblio.org, a project that includes the Site Formerly Known as MetaLab and SunSITE, The Public's Library, has some very interesting observations.
CHAPEL HILL - I don't mean to spoil the party, but the geek in me is forcing me to tell the cold unsociable truth - Mosaic, the browser that taught us the World Wide Web, is neither the first web browser nor is it the best. To make matters even more, well uncomfortable, I believe that Mosaic was a serious step in the wrong direction.
The web seems wild and wide open now, but yes it was once designed to be more so. Believe it or not - the Web was designed for connectivity for all users, not just for publishers or information providers and it allowed the person browsing to create pages and links quickly and easily. The first web browser was about sociability and the interchange of ideas, not just delivery of linked pages.
The real "Tucker" of Web browsers was the browser developed at CERN -where the web itself was developed - for the NeXT computer. The CERN
Browser allowed not only web page browsing, but also WYSIWYG page creation and the ability to create links by simply highlighting text on a browsed page and linking that text to a page under construction by an easy click.
The Hypermedia Browser also called Nexus and for a while called
WorldWideWeb was written by none other than Tim Berners-Lee in 1990 and released in Christmas of that year. The focus of Tim's Browser was collaboration and mutual linking as reflected by the ease with which pages could be produced and links made between pages.
I created my own first web page with only a few seconds instruction from Tim and a look at his demo age (a copy of which can be found at www.ibiblio.org/pjones/old.page.html ).
For Tim's own description of the first Browser as well as screen shots of the browser in action see www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb.html
More participation
Notice that the Web in Tim's vision, as seen in his browser, was to be about active participation and creation of shared linked pages.
Mosaic did have its moment of promoting collaboration. In Mosaic 1.2, the Group Annotations feature allowed readers of pages to add notes to those pages. This innovation was a precursor to the message boards, discussion groups and blogs of today. The nice thing about Group Annotations was the ease in which you could make notes for other group members. Even better Annotations in Mosaic supported both text and audio comments.
Although Annotations would eventually collapse due to their /Mosaic/Docs/group-annotations.html for NCSA's description of Annotations and their brief tale of their depreciation.)
over-popularity (and unscalable protocol design), the feature did manage to keep part of the dream of a sociable Web alive. But with the release of Mosaic 2.0 in September 1993, the folks at NCSA's System development Group decided to kill Group Annotations "initially" which turned out to be forever. (See
target="_blank">archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/So ftware
'A nice piece of work ...'
The Mosaic that finally appeared in September 1993 was a nice piece of work. Mostly
Certified Black Helicopter Pilot *** Unwitting Dupe of One World Gov'ment
... I learned this new fangled HTML thingy in 1994 whilst at college and I, and my roomate, posted one of the most successful online games of the time, Connect Four.
Thousands of games were played each day with people coming in from nasa.gov, ibm.com, and many other very interesting places. Even better the computer AI that I had written (a very basic 1.5 step look ahead AI) was capable of winning 50% or so of the games.
Then I remember the day that AOL got a web browser. Shortly thereafter my Connect Four AI was winning 60% of the time.
Of course, then the lawyers from Hasbro called and told me to shut it off since our board looked pretty close to the real thing and we were using the name. We offered them the source code but once they found out that were weren't making any money off of it they weren't interested.
Oddly enough the url for the game was printed in a magazine for kids, complete with sticker of the URL, as well as a book of the "Best of the Web", kind of a Yellow Pages of URLs.... Seems really strange that people would print paper books indexing URLs. But of course I have a copy, for archival purposes.
42 - So long and thanks for all the fish.
less ~/scripts/browser-is-hanging.sh
#!/bin/bash
# killall -9 mosaic-bin
# killall -9 netscape-bin
# killall -9 mozilla-bin
# killall -9 phoenix-bin
killall -9 thunderbird-bin
There aint no pancake so thin it doesn't have two sides.
It seems to coincide with the "end" of Netscape (perhaps the name, the company, the browser entity ?) as mentioned in some employee's blogs
wolruf@gmail.com
You mean like Boutros-boutros-boutros Ghali?
Such adverts are designed by people whose profession is wearing a suit.
;)
No - they are not HR droids, managers or agency clones. All of those may contain people who wear suits while they work. I am talking about people who wear suits as the major part of their jobs.
Consider a conversation...
What do you do?
a. I'm an accountant. What about you?
b. I'm a programmer. And you?
c. I wear a suit.
These are the people that are currently requiring 5 years experience with XP for Tier 2 support jobs....
Come the revolution......
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
lynx -dump www.slashdot.com|grep "Ten Years" -A 10|sed s#web#porn#gi
--
Suddenly the troll ate all the moderators and this posting lived a happy long life.
I remember when a fellow grad student showed me Mosaic and pronounced it the next big thing. I knew better, of course, in that Gopher had far more real information available and would never be replaced by this www stuff.
April 22, 1994: The first successful requested web page is served. .com era to come. .com bust, but she will never be happy again, on her private island in the South Pacific.
April 23, 1994: Irwin Spelnik attempts to read a Hello World page and receives the first 404 page not found.
May 10, 1994: Charlie Northrup gives up on his dream to become a buddhist monk after a 4x4 spashes mud on him while he played a tamborine on a street corner, he decides to get even and files for web service patents.
June 7, 1995: Wanda Furdman, attempting to entice her boyfriend, Jimmy Pimpleton, into proposing, places a nude picture of herself on a webserver and emails him the URL. Rather than keep this to himself, he joins the spam craze and sends to URL to everyone he can find an email address for. His plan flops as he hasn't figured a way to collect money for this, however he is widely credited with establishing the business model of the
December 24, 1997: Melvin Gormly acts out an episode of Star Trek with figurines and his own voice, capturing it and converting it to an AVI file. He places it on his school web server and is promptly served the first Cease and Desist letter over web content and copyrighted material.
April 1, 1998: CowboyNeal finally abandons his trusted TRS-80, buys a PC and joins the information age. The internet will never be the same.
July 14, 1998: Wilbur Grimp, The CEO of Universal Business Associates, a fortune 100 company, suggests an discreet interlude with a detective posing as a 13 year old boy in an internet chat room. The pair are married on San Francisco 6 months later.
November 7, 1998: Hershel Plotz ignores requests to pay for an item he has won on eBay and receives the first negative feedback. Two days later Hershel is bitten by a dog, hit by a car, falls into an open manhole and drowns. The first troll on Slashdot finds him guilty of being in league with Microsoft and deserving of his fate.
November 11, 1998: The first troll on slashdot accuses a bitten, battered and drowned former Sun Java Developer and good friend of Scott McNeally, of being in league with Microsoft. Months later a stack of papers will be found in a brown paper bag in a Kent, WA bus depot locker connecting Hershel Plotz and William Gates III in a bogus jcode ring. The troll is vindicated, but the victory goes un-noticed in the torrent of me-too-trolls who followed.
February 21, 1999: Freida Morganblat writes the first Internet Search Engine in VB.net Tragically, the first VB.net compiler and Microsofts CLR won't be created unil years later and she instead turns to a career as a stockbroker, makes millions and squirrels most of it away before the
October 31, 1999: CNN's main page is hacked, the days top news is replaced with preposerous headlines and idiotic stories. No one notices for hours, then stock closes up 3 points.
January 1, 1900: The first automobile plant opens in Vetchburg, ND. It closes three days later because of a horrific glitch in computer software.
January 3, 2000: First webcast of manufactured Hollywood brain-softening music. Rupert Windelpoons digitizes it and captures it to an array of hard disks. Initially pleased with capturing music, Rupert realizes its all tripe and reformats the drives, narrowly avoiding a not-social call from Hilary Rosen and Jack Valenti.
August 17, 2000: Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda shyly and quivering with nervous energy, attempts to email Lara Croft, asking for a date. After days of silence he decides it was never to be, he turns with tearful eyes to a girl named Kathleen for consolation and the rest, as they say, is history.
March 24, 2001: A mothballed server is powered up and the sendmail daemon forwards a queued message from the french president to president@whitehouse.gov, what was meant as a personal jest between Francois Mitterand and Bill Clinton will eventually result in strained feelings between the US and France.
September 12, 2001: Virgil Nordling abandons his plan for a bloo
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
For a while we were installing Trumpet on every machine in the office, except for the silly MacTCP installs. Actually, Trumpet seemed to work better than MS's own Winsock 1.0 implementation. The trace window was wonderful for protocol programming.
Wow -- I remember the day my mother, a Professor, was pointed to Mosaic in 1993. I was looking at it with her, and predicted that the Web was doomed to failure because there was NOTHING there and no way to catalog anything. I told her it would die out to gopher b/c that was a so much better service at the time.
Boy has history proven me wrong!
**When craziness is bliss, 'tis folly to be sane**
There were many alternatives to http when it started, does anyone remember hytelnet?
It was basically a frontend to telnet that would let you surf to multiple telnet sites using onscreen menus. Gopher improved on this slightly, but it really wasn't a quantum leap. Search was separate from surfing, WAIS was quite popular for documents and Archie made ftp viable.
The Mosaic GUI really made things intuitive, I remember the first time I started it up on a Sparc -- I couldn't believe that I was getting a graphical view of things.
Eric Sarjeant
eric[@]sarjeant.com
Before Mosaic there was Tim Berner-Lee's WWW browser, available for NeXT workstations.
A few years ago I had the following exchange with Paul Kunz of Stanford University, in an effort to determine who could claim to have been the first in North America to have used the web. Bottom line: probably him, but I was probably second. Paul did a rather extensive search through the rather small but tightly-knit NeXT community, and found no earlier claims.
> Well, I can claim to having HAD a browser earlier than you, though
> I'm not sure about USING it. Here's the story: I got my NeXT slab in
> March 1991. This was NeXT's entry-level 8/108 25MHz slab. Like many
> other people, I soon found the 108MB HD to be very tight, given
> NeXTSTEP's requirements. Later that spring, my father (Emilio
> Pagiola of CERN, whom you know) visited me at Stanford, and he
> brought me a 200MB HD. Since my father was also a NeXT user, he had
> loaded the disk with a variety of available software for NeXTSTEP,
> and since he was an early user of the web, this software included
> Tim's browser. So I had a browser sometime in late spring 1991 -- I
> can check my old datebooks for the exact dates, if you like.
PK: Well seems you had a web brower on your machine at a time when the
PK: Web wasn't made public outside of CERN yet.
> Our offices were wired in the fall of 91, IIRC. At some point soon
> thereafter, I did try out the www browser. There was very little if
> anything to browse, of course. Basically CERN's seminar schedule
> and the like. And so, since I needed the disk space, I deleted the
> browser.
PK: I demonstrated the web browser at SLAC before the end of
PK: September. Not sure of the exact date, but it was immediately on
PK: my return from CERN.
> I only started using the web permanently when the first omniweb
> browsers started coming out in 1993 or so.
PK: The president of the Omni company worked for me one summer on
PK: HippoDraw just before his senior year at U Washington.
> So, I seem to have HAD a browser before you, but may or may not have
> USED one before you.
PK: Seems I used the browser before you, but you had one on your
PK: machine. I didn't pay any attention to the Web, even after public
PK: announcement until I saw a demo on that trip.
Back in '89 I wrote a hypertext browser using Windows Write (the little wordprocessor in Windows 1.0 and 2.0) files. This was for a help system for a Windows app that was to come out before Windows Help was available.
Anyway, the idea was that anyone could fire up Windows Write, type their text (with fonts and colors), add some graphics, and add some little tags (which I based loosely on a combination of SGML and Rich Text Format tags), and Voila! You'd have a colorful hypertext help file! (local files only, unfortunately)
We put it out with our networking app when Win 3.0 was introduced.
Then sometime in late '90 or '91, someone said to me... "you oughta look at this thing called WWW. They use URIs to connect files on different machines. But it's text only... maybe you could marry your app up to it..." But by then I was on to newer more mundane things. Sigh.
I was a student at UIUC at the time when Mosaic was developed, and I remember using it in the Sun and HP EWS labs. (Mosaic was installed and maintaned by students, in the lab-wide /scratch directory, for a while). I started using it right before the invention of the "IMG" tag. When it came along, that was a big deal. The NCSA "What's New on the web" page was updated with a few new web pages each day. And that was almost a comprehensive list!
In any case, the bigger deal for me was when the EWS lab manager (Ed Kubaitis, I think) installed httpd and students were allowed to created their own web pages and serve them worldwide via www.ews.uiuc.edu/~username/ urls. I realized that EVERYONE could be a content provider, not just a select few (as was the gopher model), and this was going to be unstoppable. I even HTML-ized the existing PovRay faq, put it on my student account, sent mail out to the PovRay mailing list, and had hits within a few minutes. That was a rush, too.
To encourage people to provide content (and get linked) I created the "UIUC People" page, which started as a list to every student homepage I knew about at UIUC. It had four entries. That quickly changed, as you can imagine.
I don't know who decided to add the "~username" syntax to httpd, allowing mere users to add content to the global web (was it a part of CERN, or did McCool add that to NCSA?) but I'm convinced that was a key factor in getting the early web going. It's certainly what got me interested.
60% of the Slashdot crowd are probably still using Mosaic in an evolved form. Try this menu: "Help->About Internet Explorer"
Microsoft Internet Explorer
Version 6.0.26
Based on NCSA Mosaic. NCSA Mosaic(TM); was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Say what you like about the Microsoft embrace-and-extend experience, this product of Mosaic is still one of the best browsers available - although it's performance is largely due Window's superior hardware support.
I can't tell you how funny it is to look at those screen shots from 1993 while using Window Maker.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
What? Linux is dead?
Then Why oh Why have I been wasting my time in my parents basement these past 30 years!
Mmmm.. Im gonna start a temp job.. maybe something in Webhosting..
the existing formatting commands of t/nroff
instead of coming up with another spec; really,
what's the diff between: '
' and '.P',
'\' and '.B'? There was and still is a
significant amount of documentation and papers
written in t/nroff. Manpages would have displayed
directly into a browser without any conversion
tools. And yes, I believe t/nroff syntax could
have easily been extended to handle graphics,
sound, etc.
Oh well, water under the bridge...
Watching Godzilla and driving my El Camino.
Gates also infamously said "640k ought to be enough for anybody"
Mosaic itself came after other browsers such as Erwise, Viola and Midas popped up at various institutions around the world. Viola, written by an undergraduate student named Pei Wei (at the University of California at Berkeley) inspired the group over at NCSA to try their hand at designing web browsers.
Mosaic was also far from being a "humble browser". Berners-Lee admits that he felt like that NCSA was trying to take credit , especially when he met with the creators of Mosaic in Illinois for the first time (page 70 of Weaving the Web):
And on Page 71:
One is reminded of Indira Gandhi, the former prime minister of India (who was unfortunately assasinated in a violent manner):
I remember myself being shocked when I heard rumors that Time magazine considered putting Marc Andressen as one of the 100 most influential people in the 20th century, or "Person of the Year".
By the way, does anybody know what happened to Pei Wei? After working with O'Reilly Books, he seems to have disappeared from the face of the earth.
Ok, for those of you who read the article, look in the upper left-hand corner. It says "News.com". Not "News.com.com". That is its address (and btw, the redirect from news.com works just fine). Any other news site on Slashdot is posted by its name (Yahoo, eWeek, etc) not it's address. You don't say "I work at 123 Main St.", it's "I work at ACME corporation". Really people, get over this marketing bullshit and continue with your lives.
Alright, offtopic. Slashdot.org moderators, do your worst.
Kurdt
I'm not anti-social. Just pro-technology.
My first experience with the web was with a very early version of Mosaic on an SGI Indigo workstation in 1993. While it was a bit of a novelty at first, it became quite handy when the (USA) national weather service began to make their data and graphics available via the web (rather than just FTP).
A few months later, we began using Mosaic on our Apple Mac Quadras when NCSA released versions for MacOS and Windows. Because most of my group used Macs or SGIs, we found the whole "web safe color" issue to be funny... our machines were already able to display 24 bit color! (Unlike most Suns and many PCs of the day).
Netscape 1.x was a very nice upgrade, but things began to go downhill with 2.x. and hit rock bottom at 3.0. (If you think Netscape 4.x is bad, try using Netscape Gold 3.0 for awhile!) Livescript/Javascript was cranky. Plugins were a mess. Java was way too slow. I stuck with Netscape 1.1N and 2.02 on my machines for a long time.
These days I'm a happy camper with Mozilla nightlies on my SGI and Safari on my Mac.
Someone help me. How many years of goatse is that?
eTrade SUCKS
was this not first posted a few weeks ago??
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
First webs server and browser in USA was developed at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center - 2 years before Mosaic and with most of its features in. One of the guys who did it As far as I know he got noting out of it..
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
..the reason that HTML was such a piece of crap is that early folks (like them here at US in 1991 where pretty damn sure that everything will be TeX. It was designed for physics experiment collaborations to use. Everything else was not anticipated..
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
I realised that due to Australia being one of the first countries to experience any given anniversary, it was gone by the time /. mentioned it.
/. is behind on the times... by about 12 hours ;)
;)
Clearly
I think that anniversaries should be posted about 12 hours earlier for those living closer to the date line. It gives the rest of you a chance to put up some decorations too
Could this be part of the "prior art" bit that's needed to deal with that patent-holding wanker in New Jersey?
--I have an old powerbook 280c that I call my "storm computer". I run it off a 12 volt truck battery and an adapter. Whenever there is a really nasty thunderstorm I shut everything else off and surf with that one, using netscape 2 (or icab). Used it last week, with images off it's really not that bad a surfer.
Most webpages kinda sorta look like web pages still in netscape 2. Biggest problem is image links that don't have the alt text tag to them.
Ya, I started surfing a lot in 95 as well, on a 486 running win3.1. Netcom as the ISP. 16 megs of ram to run the OS and apps. Wha' happen? heh
Is here.