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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.
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.
Yeah, this web thing is a nice idea, but it'll never go anywhere without any content.
Don't drop the soap, Tommy!
No, we haven't, because there really wasn't any infrastructure for on-line applications before the web. Sure there were a handful of standard protocols like ftp and telnet, plus the ability to have remote X sessions, but there wasn't really anything beyond that. At least today it's possible to have an on-line application that has some prayer of working. The web is piss poor compared to what you could do with a really well designed on-line applications protocol, but it's a fair sight better than having to roll your own system any time you want to accomplish anything.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
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.
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
http://software.ericsink.com/Browser_Wars.html
Eric Sink
Software Craftsman
or when was the first person spammed?
Um, it's rather well known when SPAM started.
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?
The systems programmers with Unix workstations didn't have Windows and Word, so we used xmosaic as a page layout system. At that time, we were also able to delete most Word and all Excel file sent via email. If we did need to read a Word file, we used the Unix Word viewer, "strings".
Before we were directly connected to the DDN, one of the guys wrote a telnet tunneler to get through the gatehost. That was a great day. We didn't care what we looked at. It was soooo cool.
sed 's/commun/terror/g' mccarthy > bush; sed 's/terror/saddam/g' bush > bush_wacked
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
You had the big name commercial sites back then of course (e.g. Microsoft), but even sites like Yahoo! felt like they were made by a bunch of fanatical semi-professionals, as opposed to some big corporation with big buildings and big salaries.
People used phrases like "home page", "surf the net" and "send me e-mail", and they all take me back to a time when the Web was more innocent, before every company, shop, charity or celebrity had their own "web-presence". The Web felt less tainted by greed. Now the feeling I get from the Web is a lot more like that I get in a shopping mall, where I'm constantly having to question people's motives and the veracity of information I'm getting. In '96 you knew with 95% certainty that the Michael Jackson fansite you were checking out was put together by a dedicated fan with all the pedantry and attention-to-detail that goes with it, so you tended to trust what you were reading a bit more.
Ok, I'm not saying that the Web was good then, and it's nothing but evil now. I'm not saying that the fantastic, informative, enjoyable, insightful sites are not there - just that they're a bit harder to find. I'm not saying that the Web is no longer a tool for free-speech and free-thinking, because as long as the standards that define the Web remain public, open and [relatively] anonymous we will still have this amazing playground for the groupmind.
Right, I'd better go, my pizza's rapidly cooling.
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!
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.
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.
The biggest problem is that the closer and closer the web gets to the traditional client UI, the farther and farther it gets away from true platform independence. I could show you 500 implementation items using DHTML/Javascript that work in IE and not Netscape or Mozilla based browsers (not that a little extra work for the developers could hammer out a solution that would work on both.)
This is a bigger problem in Intranets where the chosen browser is IE, and we do not even bother to test against anything else because of a install base of IE on 99.9% of our desktops....Or take the extra time to make it work on both.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
I'm not sure where you're going with this.
Client-server was most definitely a going concern before Mosaic, as was Sun's RPC and XDR protocols (if I may use such a grandiose word for such simple concepts).
Even today, decent client-server apps are pretty much forced to have their own "custom" state machines/diagrams because otherwise, we'd all be running the same app (and it would be, uh... a web browser!).
(What I mean, specifically, is that a hospital utilization management system would have a very different workflow from a textile mill spare-parts system, for instance, and that workflow/peer dialog state machine would be embodied in the application itself.)
A co-worker tells me that maybe you're referring to the ease w/which apps could be developed post-Mosaic vs. pre-Mosaic, since tools like Visual Dev Studio ++ Wizzy Wizard# were just a gleam in somebody's eye at the time, and anyway, were absolutely not oriented to distributed processing.
If we haven't taken a giant step backwards in developing distributed apps, we've certainly experienced some arrested development.
John.
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..
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