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.

Comments

Web browsing? So what!

[corsec67]

Who cares when web browsing started.

The more important question is when did the first porn site start?

Re:Web browsing? So what!

[poot_rootbeer]

The more important question is when did the first porn site start?

Come back tomorrow, when we'll be celebrating the 10-year anniversary of THAT.

if only they had known...

[Ratphace]

what a bloated piece of crap webpages would have become, they might have abandoned the idea... :)

Re:if only they had known...

[strateego]

Where people with no knowledge on a subject can come, post, and pretent they know more than everybody else. (SLASHDOT.ORG)

Reminisce

[yotto]

Ahhh, I remember it like it was, well, 10 years ago. World Wide Web? Right, It'll never catch on. We've already got gopher and ftp, what else do you need?

Oh, how little I knew.

Re:Reminisce

[rsheridan6]

I recall getting on yahoo, surfing all the interesting links in one night, getting bored and going back to usenet news.

Yeah, this web thing is a nice idea, but it'll never go anywhere without any content.

Re:Reminisce

[countzer0interrupt]

Now it just has a different feel to it.

I know exactly what you mean. I only "surfed" for the first time in 1996, but the Web definitely felt less commercial, and more homely. Back then most of the web sites had a home-made quality to them, and viewing the HTML source showed an awful lot was written by hand (as opposed to web-authoring software, Flash or CGI).

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. :-)

I've been doing this for 10 years!!!?

[confused philosopher]

Excuse me, I have to go outside and stretch my legs. A bathroom break would be a nice change of pace too.

Deliberate Dupe

[MoZ-RedShirt]

Slashdot marked the anniversary a little while ago.

Great. They know they are posting dupes and they even brag about it ;-)

RedShirt

We should celebrate

[Chairboy]

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!

timeline

[ih8apple]

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.

You're in good company

[GuyMannDude]

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

If Mosaic was released 10 years ago...

[greysky]

Then why is it that most of the web development job postings I've seen for the last couple of years say "minimum 10 years of HTML/DHTML programing experience required"?

Gopher's cousin protocol: Beaver

[Pyrosophy]

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...