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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.
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
Who would have guessed that so much would change in a decade?
No kidding, I just saw a blink tag yesterday...
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
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?
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 !!!
...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!
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.
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 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
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.
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
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.
..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?
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
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...
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!!
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
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.
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.