Slashdot Mirror
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."
So, you're saying that it was the first browser, except for the first one. Got it.
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.
Hypercard has got to be one of the first ever implementations of the "hypertext" concept, though.
Not even close. HyperCard was originally released with System Software 6 in 1987. Douglas Engelbart demonstrated a working hypertext system almost twenty years earlier, in 1968.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
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!
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 ----