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The Finns Who Invented the Graphical Browser

Posted by kdawson on from the something-in-the-water dept.

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."

8 of 148 comments (clear)

  1. ?tsop tsrif by M8e · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    ?tsop tsrif

    1. Re:?tsop tsrif by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

      Sup dawg, I herd you didn't liek forming babby, but I accidentally in your base.

    2. Re:?tsop tsrif by Jonah+Bomber · · Score: 0, Offtopic

      What is it with the Finns inventing ubiquitous computer software?

  2. I Invented by UncleWilly · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    First Post

  3. Ideas worth a cent a docen. by Tei · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    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!

  4. Ninne Labs was first! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Ninnle Labs was involved with Tim Berners-Lee at CERN back in the day. The idea of a browser that could do Gopher and later WWW was floated around 1987 or so. This was obviously well before Ninnle Linux and the idea was to make it work on various flavours of UNIX as well as Mac and Amiga. Even the hyperlinked Windows Help came from this idea, although Gates appropriated it. Everything has evolved from that original idea since then.

  5. Re:Correction. by commodore64_love · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Good post.

    What do you call other Hypertext/clickable graphics interfaces like Q-Link (1985) and ANSI (circa 1987)? Is the only key difference between them and a web browser that they were limited to Phoneline connections & not internet connections?

    Aside -

    What to see what BBSing in the late 80s/early 90s was like? Then click here for a demo - the only difference is that our speeds were about one-tenth as fast (1k or 2k modem) - http://www.flashterm.com/

    --
    "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
  6. Was written in Finnish by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Berners-Lee couldn't continue their work either, as all the code was written in Finnish.

    I didn't know you could write code in a human language instead of, say, a programming language.