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Mosaic, the First HTML Browser That Could Display Images Alongside Text, Turns 25 (wired.com)
NCSA Mosaic 1.0, the first web browser to achieve popularity among the general public, was released on April 22, 1993. It was developed by a team of students at the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), and had the ability to display text and images inline, meaning you could put pictures and text on the same page together, in the same window. Wired reports: It was a radical step forward for the web, which was at that point, a rather dull experience. It took the boring "document" layout of your standard web page and transformed it into something much more visually exciting, like a magazine. And, wow, it was easy. If you wanted to go somewhere, you just clicked. Links were blue and underlined, easy to pick out. You could follow your own virtual trail of breadcrumbs backwards by clicking the big button up there in the corner. At the time of its release, NCSA Mosaic was free software, but it was available only on Unix. That made it common at universities and institutions, but not on Windows desktops in people's homes.
The NCSA team put out Windows and Mac versions in late 1993. They were also released under a noncommercial software license, meaning people at home could download it for free. The installer was very simple, making it easy for just about anyone to get up and running on the web. It was then that the excitement really began to spread. Mosaic made the web come to life with color and images, something that, for many people, finally provided the online experience they were missing. It made the web a pleasure to use.
The NCSA team put out Windows and Mac versions in late 1993. They were also released under a noncommercial software license, meaning people at home could download it for free. The installer was very simple, making it easy for just about anyone to get up and running on the web. It was then that the excitement really began to spread. Mosaic made the web come to life with color and images, something that, for many people, finally provided the online experience they were missing. It made the web a pleasure to use.
You mean something like WorldWideWeb
Ezekiel 23:20
Never has a Slashdot article title made me feel so old...
And here I am, on my newish tablet, having turned off the auto d/ling of images, stop scripts, ad block, and a dozen other things to get web pages as close to pure text as possible because the carnival neon-sign autovideo blaring nature of web 3.0 sucks more ass than a jr Democratic congressman at a fundraiser.
Not to mention my 1000x more powerful tablet vs 1993 slows to a crawl otherwise.
I'd like boring. Boring would be good and fast and high signal to noise ratio. No, now I got reddit redesign to put up with, with more whitespace than a freshly painted looney bin, 1/3 info display, slowed to a crawl, just so they can inject more upcoming ads than Putin does Russian expats.
One of the first web pages I can't seem to forget about it about how cherry pop tarts could catch fire in a toaster under the right conditions. Does anyone else 'member that? Good times.
When IE 3.0 introduced the <marquee></marquee> tag is when we reached peak Web 1.0
"Mosaic made the web come to life with color and images, something that, for many people, finally provided the online experience they were missing."
P0rn.
"It made the web a pleasure to use."
I'm sure it did!
Mosaic added very little to Erwise which was the first browser with a GUI. Made in Finland like all relevant things :)
Just last week I installed Sgi Irix on my Octane (was only using Linux before) - wow, was that a adventurous experience. Also early Netscape. Unfortunately the WWW does not look that great without CSS, and too old HTTPS/SSL support: https://youtu.be/AkXB8M-0rTM?t...
Used it ...
And I remember that fancy new IBM WebExplorer ... on OS/2
The early Internet (and BBSes etc.) was nice because it were faceless, and you would be judged by you merits rather than mugshots. Fast forward quarter a century, and it's all about posting polished images of your luxurious lifestyle.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
It was VERY revolutionary - start of a new era ...
Hmmmm.
I do like my fiskars splitter.
However I also like my husqvarna limber..
Perhaps you are half right?
Mosaic is in pkgsrc and I can build a modern binary with a single make command.
The Mosaic team ran off to California to get rich.
Firstly, that's a quote from Wired, so Slashdot didn't say it was free software.
Secondly, some people still use the term "free software" to mean something other than the meaning chosen by RMS/FSF.
Thirdly, yes, you could get the source for early versions of NCSA Mosaic under terms of a license agreement.
ftp://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Web/Mosaic/Licensing/src_rel.txt
Shortly after Mosaic was released, Andreessen made a copy of the source code, moved to San Francisco and repackaged it as Netscape Navigator. That was one of the most profitable copies of code anyone ever made.
Proving you should NEVER trust me to make tech predictions, upon seeing Mosaic, I will forever be remembered as saying "Who'd ever use that, Gopher is WAY more efficient"
Oops.
Min
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
What a weird feeling.
To think I went through Archie, Veronica, Gopher... even before PPP through SLIP. The days of completely open mail relays, anonymous FTP, and all the UNIX. That's all there was really... it was a big blank chalkboard. Techies were racing to write on it.
Yea it makes me feel old. But I'm glad I got to see it.
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
Don't forget tomorrow to celebrate libcurses, libmotif and the backspace key of the first guy browsing for porn on the interwebs.
OR THE FIRST FUCKER TO DISCOVER THE CAPS LOCK KEY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I remember trying out Mosiac back when I first was trying out the internet (I'd say around 1994-ish). It was interesting but at the time Netscape was just much, much better so I didn't use it much aside from just playing around.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Anyone else remember the chimera browser from about the same time that could also do embedded images? Not the Mozilla-based one that became camino, but the original 1.x versions (from UNLV, I think?). Looked at my old lab notebooks and I used that chimera in a series of demos with homegrown video-over-IP in April, 1995. Didn't embed the video in the browser display proper, but added code to let the browser fork a separate video-over-IP player that displayed the stream.
Am I the only one still in 2018 who whenever I install a new webbrowser, one of the first things I do is to turn the default background colour back to mosaic-grey? I cannot remember the precise colour code, but I suspect #C0C0C0 (192, 192, 192) is a good approximation. The reason I do this is so that any plaintext file looks just like I'm used to seeing it when I see it through a web-browser. Likewise, any HTML document without the colours defined would look like how HTML documents looked like before Netscape let you chnge the background[-colour].
One of the things I discover is that people always assume the default text is black and default background is white. Which means that if someone wants to change the text-colour, they may forget about the background colour, and their choice of text-colour may not work so well on grey as on white. Another annoying thing is that some people place transparent images with anti-aliasing and one-bit transparency working on the assumption that the text will blend into a white background. If the background is grey, it looks like the text has a white halo with a jagged edge. BTW I'm not sure if CSS lets you anti-alias text to an arbitrary colour, or if I'm only seeing this with 1-bit transparent images.
There was no "World Wide Web" prior to HTML. There was an Internet(and still other networks such as bitnet), but the idea of the web really was derived from gopher. Gopher allowed an administrator to set up a menu style layout to find information, and what made HTML(the language web pages are written in), is the ability to have links within a document that would then connect you directly to other documents. Lynx was the go-to command line web browser, non-graphical, and MOSAIC was the graphical web browser in those early days. Netscape quickly came out as something faster(initially available to the general Internet as version 0.8 that I remember using, with that big pulsing "N" to show activity) which became the dominant graphical web browser.
I will again note, there was no such thing as a "web page", because the idea of having links from within one document to another document somewhere else on the Internet wasn't there before HTML.
I remember the day (actually very very late at night) that I was finally able to compile Mosaic on the Amiga 500 and look at a "modern" web page ie a headline, some text and a jpeg image. At the time it was a pretty big accomplishment and very exciting.
Oh, and get off my lawn.
Au contraire, what made the web a pleasure to use was multiple displays and tabbed browsing, open to motionless page views.
To this day, I write custom CSS that removes the majority of the images for most web sites (I turn this off when I think an image might actually matter to the article at hand). I wrote another one this morning, for a website that displayed too much non-essential cruft. (Stat check: I now have 300 user styles, and 95% of these do nothing but subtract visual cruft.)
If the image supports the text (certain key illustrations in explanations of deep learning come to mind) then you're amplifying your brain power. If the image supplements the text, if amounts to a second though process, which at best might not conflict too much with your textual understanding, and could help to anchor future recall. All the rest actively sabotage effective cognition. This being about 80% of all images on the internet.
Most people don't even realize that reading a single image-laden document (with its native visual commotion) is already a form of ineffective multitasking.
On the other hand, surrounding a issue from multiple sides is not a form of multitasking. For this task, one needs multiple displays and tabbed browsing. Anything less is a cognitive straightjacket.
Rarely, you find someone like Feynman who you can read straight through all day long and not feel like it's cramping your style (as a more humble example: Tim Wu). But even there, I'm liable to open twenty side-tabs per long read, just chasing down nuances of the technical jargon encountered (or refreshing my memory of the same).
For my money, Memex Multiplex is still the One True Killer App. No amount of candy-ass eyeball flypaper is ever going to change my mind on this point.
Think hard, play hard. Candy ass should have never escaped bucket number two to begin with.
[*] Google Images is a godsend of a second bucket: amazing how many hotties look spectacular in exactly one lucky photograph (the coyote vamps). In this sphere, too, I prefer to surround my subject matter. A woman who never takes a bad photo almost always has an inner light, and it's this inner light that ultimately makes pleasure a pleasure, supposing your mind is sufficiently uncluttered to detect the difference.
Lynx is still available. ;)
I used Mosaic for a few days in 1994 or early 1995, just before Netscape .9 came out. At the time I was active on the CalStateLA/K-12 usenet feed (free to 'students'), which was moderated by a total idiot who eventually went to the L.A. Freenet and ruined that too. Said idiot spent most of his budget trying to develop a child-friendly browser based on cello. Apparently it never worked and he was much ridiculed for his goal as well as his attempts. As he moderated a newsgroup out of existence everybody moved to a different unused newsgroup for self-help subjects as well as general bitching.
Good times...