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 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.
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. :)
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...
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.