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The Finns Who Invented the Graphical Browser
waderoush writes "If you thought Mosaic was the first graphical Web browser, think again. In their first major interview, three of the four Finnish software engineers behind Erwise — a point-and-click graphical Web browser for the X Window system — describe the creation of their program in 1991-1992, a full year before Marc Andreessen's Mosaic (which, of course, evolved into Netscape). Kim Nyberg, Kari Sydänmaanlakka, and Teemu Rantanen, with their fellow Helsinki University of Technology student Kati Borgers (nee Suominen), gave Erwise features such as text searching and the ability to load multiple Web pages that wouldn't be seen in other browsers until much later. The three engineers, who today work for the architectural software firm Tekla, say they never commercialized the project because there was no financing — Finland was in a deep recession at the time and lacked a strong venture capital or angel investing market. Otherwise, the Web revolution might have begun a year earlier."
The first web browser of all was WorldWideWeb.app, and it was a NeXTSTEP program. It was graphical from the beginning.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
(citation needed)
Sent from your iPad.
Ideas = shit.
You can have a good idea. Who cares? everyone have good ideas. Worth nothing. If you can implement something, that is something, but still not enough. It takes much more to win.
-Woof woof woof!
If you thought Erwise was the first graphical Web browser, think again.
Why not just say Hypercard was the first graphical browser?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Explains why the guys didn't start any lawsuits yet.
?täsoopiyauo tsauyriifäää
I'm sorry, this is a story about Finns. Corrected that for you.
Common... a graphical "gopher" was just a natural step. Hardly news worthy.
Well, first of all, Douglas Engelbart, for one, demonstrated a live audio video system over a network, and it had a graphical interface--this was in the 1960s, that is, long before this silly, narrow application of ideas anyway.
End this silly credit hogging nation wanking, like if we're making new religions. Let's not make it into one. Move on. There was never anything to see anyway..
Since HTTP was thought up at CERN, did they not have a browser? Or was it just text based?
Think Deeply.
Eric Bina wrote just as much code as Andressen. And Andressen later had help from several other UI students.
Also, nobody thinks Mosaic was the first. If anything, the card these Finns trump is Tim Bruce, who wrote Cello.
This is worse than Bill Gates inventing the personal computer, when all he did was steal CP/M. Let's do a little better at getting history correct.
Despite the company and browser not existing at the time, I can confidently say that Opera had all these features before Erwise. There will be naysayers, of course.
Vincent J. Murphy
Spandex Justice
Wow and we all though it was Mosaic!
Why is it that, everytime someone credits an American with something, some European must immediately chime in with "Oh no, Ludwig Von Whogivesashit did it first!" Even my black nationalist friend (who insists that the black man invented almost everything), cuts us evil white Americans SOME slack.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
To tell you the truth, I had never heard of Erwise until today. A have a few questions about Erwise:
- Did it support graphics other that XBM?
- Did it render HTML, or some other markup language?
I did some consulting for a company called HyperMedia Corporation in 1991-92. As part of that work, I watched closely the development of HTML, NCSA Mosaic, and the lot. HMC's markup language was proprietary and binary. The first thing that struck me about HTML was the ease of editing--you didn't need a dedicated editor. Then, I remember seeing early builds of NCSA's browser (to become Mosaic) when they first added, IIRC, gif support. I remember being absolutely floored with the ability to create attractive content in only a few minutes. My first thought after seeing it was, "I need to find a new job!" Sure enough, within a few months HMC was out of business.
The end result is that there were many factors that led to the success of NCSA Mosaic and Netscape. First, Mosaic ran on platforms other than the X Window System, so it was more accessible. Second, it was among the first to support usable graphics (i.e. not XBM), at least on an accessible platform (Emacs' browser & WorldWideWeb.app had early image support, too, but both were on platforms that had very narrow distribution possibilities). Third, it used standard HTML.
Erwise might have had all of these, with the one caveat that it supported only Unix/X Window System. Hard to say from this article. However, I think it's a little simplistic to say that funding was the only thing holding these guys back from Netscape-like success.
--Be human.
I'm pretty sure NCSA's Mosaic "evolved" into "Internet Explorer". Netscape's rendering engine was developed separately, wasn't it?
Harumph!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)
8-)
Who are they suing?
ni!
WorldWideWeb 1.0 had a windowed, point-and-click UI, so it would be "graphical" compared to, say, Lynx.
The real title of "first graphical browser" goes to whichever application first displayed inline graphics on a page. I'm not sure exactly which one this was...NCSA Mosaic often gets credit for this, but the feature was also added to later versions of ViolaWWW and WorldWideWeb.
Inline graphics were a major factor in the success of the Web over existing internet hypertext systems like Gopher.
Does anyone else remember Roboterm? It was a graphical BBS terminal client (which would show downloaded graphics when talking to a roboterm board). Neat but proprietary:
[-- Trust the Monkey --]
What is it with the Finns inventing ubiquitous computer software?
Thank you for saying that. The Slashdot story is misleading, as often happens. The story says "... a full year before Marc Andreessen's Mosaic...". But there were huge discussions of Hypertext long before that. It was clear that Hypertext would be implemented anywhere it could be used. What those who wrote the first internet browsers did was implement an old idea for the internet.
Flashterm makes me laugh.
n/t
Never mind that way back when a farmer named Filo Farnsworth, the real inventor of television envisioned the use of a glass screen for viewing content.
Then like some bolt of inspiration from the sky the need to have some sort of graphical interface was "invented" out of sheer genius since no one EVER foresaw the need to view any content within this glass bubble and on the screen in any other way that the way ALL content is viewed today be it TV or PC or Cell etc.
I mean it wasn't obvious at all
"Whoever was the conduit, Berners-Leeâ(TM)s request attracted the attention of the Finnsâ(TM) instructor, Ari Lemmke, who suggested the group start to work on it or âoesomething Linux-related.â They chose the browser."
Article fails to mention that their instructor, Ari Lemmke named Linux
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ari_Lemmke
Unfortunately, the stock for Ninnle labs tanked after it was found that everyone who ever supported it was a douchebag, and liked to spam forums about their products. Shortly thereafter, the company folded, leaving only a bunch of fanboys to talk about the good ol days.
The venerable Unix info files and even man pages also do the same thing. Web browsers was a logical improvement of existing ideas. It was not evolutionary, not revolutionary.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
They didn't get credit because they never Finnished it.
-1 Slur
Table-ized A.I.
How dare you, saying NI to an old woman?
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Oh no! You're sadly mistaken!
Ninnle Labs is still very much a going concern. Haven't you tried the new Ninnle Office yet?
And the thing is, Andreesen's vision wasn't particularly novel or innovative; everything he thought up was already out there, read the other posts in this thread. The world without him would be almost exactly the same; Andreesen might as well not have existed at all. The only difference between him and your next door neighbour is that he took something and had good enough PR to tie his nametag to it. And his case isn't unique. The more I learn from history the more I see that most of the names you come by belong to persons who played a part, often forced by the circumstances, that might as well have been played by someone else. It smacks of hero worship and I don't care much for it.
Can any of this prior art be used to tear apart the existing thousands of software copyrights that have been issued to MS, Sun, IBM, ...? It may not have been commercialized or even copyrighted but if it existed before the Copyright trolls got to it then maybe some of this mess can be undone.
"Be kind, for everyone you meet is facing a great battle." - Philo of Alexandria -
Or if they tried to profit off it, might have never happened at all.
The openness of the early days is why we have it today.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I created one back in May of 1967. I used Crayola Crayons (tm) and several sheets of paper. My mom published them up on the fridge.
The moment they started working on it they were Finnish...ed.
I'll be here all week.
paintball
to be noted that the "true" history of graphical web browsers started (and will end) with IE...
"Internet Explorer: what page do you want to rape today?"
$god = null;
if($god) echo 'I believe!';
I'd put no more credibility in Microsoft's audit of IE than in SCO's audit of Linux.
> Otherwise, the Web revolution might have begun a year earlier.
OMG! You mean I could have been using myspace a year earlier and I'd have twice as many friends by now?! We could have had lolcats twelve months earlier and my application in the lolcat programming language would already be finished?! It's like a year of my life has been stolen. Who do I sue?
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Based on NCSA Mosaic. NCSA Mosaic(TM); was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Distributed under a licensing agreement with Spyglass, Inc. Contains security software licensed from RSA Data Security Inc. Portions of this software are based in part on the work of the Independent JPEG Group. Multimedia software components, including Indeo(R); video, Indeo(R) audio, and Web Design Effects are provided by Intel Corp. Unix version contains software licensed from Mainsoft Corporation. Copyright (c) 1998-1999 Mainsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Mainsoft is a trademark of Mainsoft Corporation. Warning: This computer program is protected by copyright law and international treaties. Unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this program, or any portion of it, may result in severe civil and criminal penalties, and will be prosecuted to the maximum extent possible under the law.
Seems Netscape is not the only one?
Homonyms are fun!
You're driving your car, but they're riding their bikes there.
Being sad is no excuse for not taking over the world.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart
He also invented the mouse, the GUI, and ARPANET.
Finnish a human language? Next thing you'll be saying we're humans...
[OffTopic]
These words are different parts of speech, right?
"This is a graph (noun)."
"This is a graphic (adjective) representation"
i'm not sure graphical is a word at all. It doesn't parse to anything meaningful unless you go to graphically. "We are representing this information graphically (adverb, in a graphic way).
There's no such thing as a graphical, so there couldn't be a graphical designer. Why would it be a graphical interface, and not a graphic interface?
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
Roger, is that you?
Some sort of a generator you have - to catch old articles for recycling? //arl (Ari Lemmke)
tai jos he olisivat yrittÃneet tienata sillÃ, se ei vÃlttÃmÃttà olisi tapahtunut lainkaan.
Alkuaikojen avoimuus on syy siihen mità meillà on tÃnÃÃn.
There, corrected it into real Finnish from the American-Finnish you used.. Although it seems slashdot doesn't support the letter for a with dots correctly (but still almost right) ;)