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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."

4 of 148 comments (clear)

  1. Correction. by jcr · · Score: 5, Informative

    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."
  2. Opera Was First! by vjmurphy · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
  3. So... by Quiet_Desperation · · Score: 5, Funny

    Who are they suing?

  4. Re:Ideas worth a cent a docen. by poot_rootbeer · · Score: 5, Interesting

    A problem-solver comes up with a solution to a specific problem. The genesis of Cello, for example, was one guy saying to himself "I need a windows-based program that can access legal sites in html" and then solving the problem.

    Which is not to say Tom Bruce, author of Cello, wasn't ALSO a visionary; the Legal Information Institute he founded in the early days of the web (thus creating the need for his web browser for lawyers' Win3.1 PCs in the first place) is perhaps the foremost reference site on the Constitution of the United States and related issues, and it didn't come to be that way by chance.

    Andreesen's vision happened to involve making a pile of money; Bruce's did not.