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."
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.
Hypertext even goes back to the sixties, where I've seen machines from that era utilize a primitive form of hypertext, even going so far as using a lightpen in conjunction with hypertext on a screen for somewhat graphically highlighting text, before the personal computer was even thought of. So yes, hypertext goes waaay back.