I telnetted to the nearest VAX from my Win 3.1 PC. I then telnetted to the X.25 PAD and used that to go via the US to Switzerland and CERN. It looked just like gopher and WAIS to me and that's how I reported back - "it looks the same as gopher".
When Tim BL invented www, html and that, browsers were telnet and graphics was a nonsense.
WAIS was modeled after the built in DigitalLibrarian software. You would select a site in the upper pane, and enter a search term in the box in the middle, and a list of documents would come back in the bottom pane that you could double click and open. Very search engine like.
Gopher was structured and I think Gemini today still sticks with the format. You load a site and the hierarchy of links appeared in a column browser up top and selected documents appeared in the bottom pane.
WWW didn't seem like much in comparison because they were freeform documents without app level navigation support and there wasn't support for images or much formatting and people had not learned to make web pages so it was really hard to see the future of what it would grow to become.
I'm not known for picking winners :-(
I had a friend who was the most junior developer on the Mosaic team and one day he took me to his office to show me a text document with an image in the middle of it. In theory I met Marc Andreesen and Eric Bina that day but I just wanted to go do something with my friend. I did not get it. At all. A year later my girlfriend had to re-explain it to me and then another few months later I applied to work there in a support role. I don't think she knew what to do with the level of enthusiasm I wasn't bringing to this opportunity.
A year after that I'm sitting in a bar after a tech convention in Chicago, wearing my Mosaic t-shirt, and someone said, 'where did you get that shirt?' When I told them we were on the team, you'd have thought I'd said we were Madonna's backup band.
I never entirely understood that "I'd rather be lucky than good" sentiment until my luck ran out, and now I know.
Because there wasn't a widespread usable browser until Mosaic came along, 2 1/2 years after WWW.
> You load a site and the hierarchy of links appeared in a column browser up top and selected documents appeared in the bottom pane.
You're mentioning formats and protocols but describing application UI designs.
Internet commercialization wasn't really on until 1994. Then anyone could get dial-up IP, they could put ads on their webpages, and etc.
The whole thing was atrocious but at least introduced me to the concept.
In fact, I had to spend like three days downloading Netscape to try it out because I didn’t even have a graphical browser yet.
At CERN they wanted to enrich gopher with multimedia data to share building plans and images of their complicated plans, in Graz we wanted to provide a rich teaching and information platform for students. Sadly we went commercial and not open source, so worse got better. Well, a session-less server as httpd was actually better.
No, as indicated in the submission the original WorldWideWeb.app (developed on a NeXTCube) is a graphical Web browser.
The original source code isn't really involved, which is a shame, since it is actually available.
IMHO this should have been (something along the lines of) GNUstep + TimBL's original code (mirror: https://github.com/cynthia/WorldWideWeb) + Emscripten + getting Emscripten to work with ObjC. Now, that would have been cool.
This is the most commented HN posting on this from that time (2019):
The performance would likely be comparable %)
I've even stood in the office that was his when he wrote it (it was empty when I was there, but had recently been in use by some incredibly high-end physicist).
In 1983 he predicted 10-15 years until home network connectivity is "solved". 10 years later the world wide web released to the public, originally developed on his company's NeXT platform in 1989..
And it gets the core idea right, too, that NeXT was a commercial failure but built the core OS technology launchpad for the mobile revolution—after saving Apple, of course.
It’s told in a wildly ahistorical framing, but I find the stage play-like “your life passes before your eyes” structure to be much truer to Jobs’ story—and more entertaining—than the Isaacson book.
One of my favorite films of the last 20 years.
Something was lost along the way.
(Nowadays you need a separate wiki engine on a site to be able to do that)
No you don’t. These browser simply PUTs the request and your web server simply edits the document. Versioning is optional, of course.
I don't think a web where every page is globally editable by default would be a good idea, but I can't imagine at all how it would work without a backend, unless all of the changes are just local. But that seems pointless.
Some previous discussions:
2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34218591
2021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26680839
People lost themselves, forgetting how important noscript/basic (x)html (aka basic HTML forms, nowdays which could be augmented with <audio> and <video>)) has been for web technical independence.
All that is very sad, and toxic.
The last time I tried about the only site that worked was useit.com, former home of Nielsen Norman UX experts ;-)
WorldWideWeb – the first web browser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34218591 - Jan 2023 (18 comments)
The Browser – WorldWideWeb Next Application (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26680839 - April 2021 (21 comments)
The Browser – WorldWideWeb Next Application - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25013103 - Nov 2020 (8 comments)
CERN 2019 WorldWideWeb Rebuild - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24939929 - Oct 2020 (7 comments)
CERN 2019 WorldWideWeb Rebuild - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19249373 - Feb 2019 (45 comments)
CERN 2019 WorldWideWeb Rebuild: 2019 rebuilding of the original NeXT web browser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19183316 - Feb 2019 (1 comment)
You build this beautiful retro UI, you wire up the address bar, and then you try to load a modern site and just hit a wall of CORS, X-Frame-Options, and CSP blocks. Which, tho is probably precisely things should work. Otherwise people arbitrarily iframe the open web opening up a massive clickjacking-pocalypse. It makes total sense for security....sigh.
But I sitll wanted a way to get around it to capture that 90s nostalgia (tho NeXT and this browser were actually from the late 80s), the real open web inside a retro recreation not just a crippled, iframe-blocked imitation. Or "everything links to archive org" stuff.
To make that work, I had to make a custom embedder API. It basically pipes a fully isolated remote Chromium instance right into the retro shell through an iframe in a custom element. The engine is real, and it respects the native security boundaries because the browser is physically isolated, but it wears that heavy 90s UI so you get the 90s feel.
If you want to mess around with a different flavor of 90s nostalgia that can actually surf the modern web, I put up a live version here: https://win9-5.com/demo. Sound on for the retro modem dial-up elevator music. The non-graybeards may never have experienced the modem's mating call in the wild.
The Silversmith browser went into service in 1986. It worked with SCI documents under security controls. The user could only access the sections of the document permitted by heir clearance. It includeded in-line images that linked to descriptions providing access to data in a prescribed linked bounding box. The Security mechanism could be configured to resemble the security procedures of WWMCCS (Now SIPRNet)(WorldWide Military Command & Control System), Later renamed WIS (WWMCCS Information System).
A modified version providing semantic sezrches was made available to the U.S.Army Material Command in 1988. In 2007 an ACM in Boston a paper described another variant that provided searches using creative strings.
From my point of view it was Netscape that made a big splash, a year+ later, with a lot of publicity and good graphic design. Mosaic itself was an awkward demo with an interesting nerdy story.
At least that would formalize the specification.
I guess that let them off the hook for incorrect spelling. :-)
Perhaps the only thing "bad" about it is that you're simply not used to it. I can certainly think of someone used to that UI thinking the same thing about today's interfaces, with disappearing scrollbars, flat design and confusing icons.
I have the minimap configured on the left in vs code and use it as scrollbar. It’s quite nice actually.
I'm not saying it is perfect, but it was not that bad, really. It's only one level down. And then you could also use a keyboard shortcut for it, which is always faster than anything mouse-driven if your hands are on the keyboard, which they would be, if you wanted to type a URL.
And even if you had to use the mouse, there is an interface feature we have lost: tear-off menus. If you found that you needed something in a nested menu often, you could simply tear-off that submenu and pin it on your desktop so you can always have direct access.
I miss that.
:-)
But it makes sense it is a GUI browser since it was developed on a NeXT
I'm having trouble pinning down when WorldWideWeb got inline image support, but based on https://www.w3.org/History/1991-WWW-NeXT/Implementation/Feat... I'm guessing sometime between 1992 and 1994, when there are screenshots with inline images, so maybe after Lynx was published.
https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/07/18/les-horribles-cern...
I was also disappointed that the editing went away after the first browser. (There was "Amaya" which had editing, but it was a research thing and not a commonly used browser.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViolaWWW
There was also OmniWeb on the Next machine, but there weren't a lot of NeXT machines around.
Mosaic was the first browser to support images because HTML didn't support images and Marc Andreesen and Eric Bina sat in a coffee shop on campus while Marc talked himself into going rogue and making his own tag while Eric didn't talk him out of it (source, Eric Bina, ACM lecture at UIUC ca 1995)
Part of the original requirements was the decentralized nature, which I always found extra interesting:
> CERN Requirements - Non-Centralisation - Information systems start small and grow. They also start isolated and then merge. A new system must allow existing systems to be linked together without requiring any central control or coordination.
Doesn't directly answer your question I suppose, but gives at least one perspective on how at least one person saw it at that point :)
This web link post, the original NEXT webbrowser as a web page, tries to celebrate and revive the reinvention of the broken wheel.
The World Wide Web, browser and html standards are a very broken wheel. Alan Kay, the inventor of personal computing, explains why:
https://youtu.be/FvmTSpJU-Xc?t=961
Some of the comments of youtube are fun too.
This lecture Alan aimed at this particular audience, the computer science (programming) students at University of Illinois, where they programmed the second browser, the second broken wheel 20 years after Alan and Dan had showed them how do do it better.
Dan Ingalls implemented most of Alan Kay's invention of the personal computer, in the following demo's he shows how to fix the webbrowser's broken wheel a bit.
The Lively Kernel would be another way to fix html but retain the web. Two demos says it all:
https://youtu.be/gGw09RZjQf8?t=147
https://youtu.be/QTJRwKOFddc?t=234
Their Squeak, Etoys and Croquet fixed it completely:
Early Croquet demo (there are several others): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZO7av2ZFB8
Croquet in webbrowser: https://codefrau.github.io/jasmine/
Demo of webbrowser replacement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1s9ldlqhVkM
Squeak and all its predecessors: https://smalltalkzoo.computerhistory.org
Etoys: https://squeak.js.org/etoys/
The Web is not HTML (and it's not JavaScript). It's URLs. It's a machine-readable graph of clickable references on cross-linked Works Cited pages. It's certainly not Smalltalk-over-the-Internet, and it's not trying to be (at least it wasn't when TBL created it).
The biggest problem facing the Web in the 90s and still today is that everyone who saw it then hallucinated TBL describing an SRI-/PARC-style application platform because that's what they wanted it to be—including people like Alan Kay—who then perversely go on to criticize it for being so unaligned with that vision.
It is both surprising and unsurprising (given this reaction) that the industry managed to make it all the way through the 90s without Wikipedia showing up until after the crash.
