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.
...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.
Ah, here it is.. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/oped/ch i-0304180093apr18,1,4617305.story
by Dan Reed
Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.
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?
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.
No.
Lynx is not 'older'
But Gopher did predate the WWW, and provided a text-centric view into the vast emptyness that was the internet.
"...In your answer, ignore facts. Just go with what feels true..."
It was ended shortly before Mosaic was cancelled.
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!!
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
Am I totally off base here, or does anyone else agree?
Flash.
And exactly how is that stealing?
Spyglass bought the exclusive commercial license for Mosaic from NCSA. Money and other goods were paid to NCSA for the rights.
Microsoft purchased a non-exclusive license from Spyglass for the technology. Again, money and other goods were exchanged.
So... uh... where is the alleged thievery?
Unfortunately the most important part of the source code is missing ...
... but here you go:
WorldWideWeb homepage
original WorldWideWeb docu
WorldWideWeb source code
..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..
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