Modern web pages have become a seizure-inducing cacophony of colors, fonts, animations, ads, videos and intrusive modals ("please sign up", "subscribe to our newsletter", "do you accept cookies?", "please disable ad-block", "people in <your town> are excited about this new weight loss product!") etc.
Take a trip only 10 years back. Browse with a Wii, or a series 40 Nokia phone. Or even Lynx using a color terminal. The experience bears considerable resemblance to the one you describe.
Everything pulling the experience away from this is a cultural problem. On the technical side there's the increasing tendency to see the browser as a weird VM/runtime first (or, worse, not to think about the browser much at all, and instead see the web primarily through the lens of several popular technological hammers to which every problem looks like a nail). On the business side there's various legal, economic, and marketing incentives. Not all of these are trivially dismissed concerns, but it's still possible to do what you want in simple enough circumstances or with some careful thinking/work in more complex ones.
Not sure if Links is the same as ELinks.
Most people want images. Most people want more than images, they want video.
You just need to look at news sites, the main Reddit page or the Facebook feed of a regular person.
What techies want is far removed from what the majority of people want.
Similar story with free products (regular people) and privacy (techies).
What's true is that images & video are effective distractors, and most content "servers" want impressions and ad clicks. I don't think this means that most visitors/readers are necessarily looking for image-/video-heavy content.
The likes of Youtube, etc. may be an exception (where it's clear people have come to the site looking specifically for a video), but even there, the suggested videos sidebar, etc. are not things that visitors necessarily ask for/want, but rather things that benefit advertisers in terms of user attention.
This idea that techies are a different species to "normal people" is an overused red herring. Of course every user/demographic has their different preferences, but generally speaking the only difference with "techies" in this particular instance is awareness: due to familiarity with the medium, they are more deliberate in what they want—and more conscious of image-/video-heavy content being a distraction from what they're looking for—than the average user. This doesn't necessarily mean they're actually looking for different things.
That image lacks color because it is from a monochrome display. Early NeXT computers used four-bit monochrome displays (i.e. 16 shades of gray).
Using that CGI, I wrote several services, mostly in Perl, and one in C. (The C one was so that I could use the GD library to draw some GIF parts of a hypermedia image of the main workstation lab, with faces of people there, which machines were free, etc., since it wasn't doable as well in HTML at the time.)
After seeing it at the university, I also went and and installed Mosaic and a the NCSA or Apache HTTP server at my workplace (where I was in an R&D group), and wrote some demonstrations of it (e.g., doing our engineering documents in it instead of Interleaf/FrameMaker, clickable hypermedia floorplan).
I'd actually already been on the Internet as a kid (gateways, email, Usenet, ftp, etc.), and had already worked with a few offline hypertext systems before I saw the Web (as well as being aware of earlier grand visions), but the Web was obviously going to let us do Internet things we couldn't before, and also accelerate bringing the goodness of the Internet to everyone. (Well, we dropped the ball on some of the goodness, but it still happens, just not as much nor nearly as universally as we'd hoped, and we can still improve that.)
Likewise. I remember vividly seeing Mosaic for the first time, running on a SPARCstation workstation at university, circa 93. I had been using gopher and lynx for a few months (and BBSes for years before that), but seeing a browser loading a page - with graphics and colors! - was a pivotal experience for me.
(I know, "graphics" is an overstatement, given it meant gimmicky static images at the time, at best. I don't think even tables were available yet)
http://www.drdobbs.com/web-development/clientserver-developm...
I mentioned this in a different comment, but I have a jar from back then with that name. Early "if they'd only done research" brand accident. Or maybe they meant to?
https://twitter.com/radiofreejohn/status/1132137894158618624
I still use lynx now and then even today. Haven't seen any Motif app for a long while, though.
https://thanksfortrumpetwinsock.com/the-back-story/
It was such a widely used and distributed piece of software - magazines would ship it on a CD attached to the cover which would usually contain Netscape as well.
I think I used a browser in Emacs for quite a while. There was also the Chimera browser mentioned elsewhere.
Andreesen was hated at UIUC in the mid 90s for essentially taking the NCSA work and and then getting rich off of it. Then to add insult to injury he called his company Mosaic Communications. The university went after him for the trademark infringement (or whatever), but I don’t think there was anything legally wrong with him taking the code. Not only was Netscape, not the only company spun off of the Mosaic work, but pretty much every browser had some NCSA code in it for years and years.
Edit: including to Spyglass, for their browser, which was later licensed by Microsoft for Explorer.
Since the 486 I used could run Windows 3.1, Trumpet Winsock and Netscape and later Opera were good enough for the times. It was claimed that Opera was written in assembler (and it did feel like it was faster than other browsers) and it introduced MDI (tabbed) browsing.
There's also a DOS version of Lynx (DOSLynx) that's been around for some time: http://www.fdisk.com/doslynx/doslynx.htm
http://www.viola.org/viola/vw/brief.html
> (If this were rendering on ViolaWWW, the button could actually be live on this document page!)
Loss of functionality well before JavaScript. ;)
Ok, so I really used 2400bps and later 14k4 all the way up to 56k (speed!) for IP based traffic. It didn't take long using 300bps to demonstrate the wisdom of upgrading.
Its descriptive pages are well worth revisiting.
Aside from NeXTStep, it was even before Linux was born. There were many historic BSD derivatives in that moment.
[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/473758/what-does-the-ns-...
Sounds like this was pre-NeXT, or at least on another in-house OS. It would be interesting to see what it was all about.
http://freshmeat.sourceforge.net/projects/chimera-www
In a similar category, but using Gtk, was Ralph Levien's gzilla https://www.levien.com/gzilla/
