molly.com
Wednesday 21 July 2004
new book giveaway!
Hi everyone,
It’s book giveaway time again. The first three people who write a short essay (at least 500 but no more than 750 words) about the first popular text-based desktop web browser, who wrote it, which platforms supported it, and some commentary on actual usage will win their choice of one of my new books: 250 HTML and Web Design Secrets or Teach Yourself Movable Type (co-authored with Porter Glendinning).
The trick here is to be comprehensive in your description. You have to write it with substance- no answers that are simply lists will be accepted for the prize. The more detail you provide, the better your chances, and extra points to anyone who describes a current use of this browser accurately. Place your submissions in the comment section of this post. No email entries please.
Let the games begin!
Filed under: blogging, professional, web design and development
Posted by: Molly | 10:58 | Comments (16)
Define “popular”. It could be argued the first such browser was the first one to be included with cellphones, since in terms of numbers of users it would probably be more ‘popular’ than anything from the Web’s early days ever dreamed of being.
(I’m not planning to enter. I just thought it should be clear for those who do… unless of course the ambiguity is intentional, in which case, um, look over there!)
Sheesh, some people
I’ve clarified a wee bit. But that’s where I’ll leave it.
To my knowledge, the first really “popular” text browser which was available on the x-windowing system was Mosaic. The following short essay discusses this browser’s beginnings and usage.
—
Mosaic was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois in 1993 by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina–respectively, the co-founder of Netscape and a respected NCSA Unix programmer. Mosaic’s user-centric interface helped simplify the internet at a critical time, when it was expanding beyond the domain of scientific and academic application. Macintosh and Windows ports followed the browser’s initial release that same year and it was widely-adopted as “the” internet browser at the time. With its straight-forward interface consisting of buttons that performed logical document manipulations (including back, forward, home, reload, clone, new window, and many other modern functions), Mosaic proved a substantial technological improvement over other academic browsers and even the web’s first browser: WorldWideWeb, developed by the pioneering Tim Berners-Lee.
Using Mosaic was not unlike using modern browsers. The Mosaic “globe/s” icon would animate while a page was loading, documents contained clickable hyperlinks to other Usenet/gopher web pages, frequently visited URLs could be stored in a “hotlist” which was a precursor to the modern bookmark, and history-based “back” and “forward” functionality provided a method of quickly accessing previous web pages. Mosaic also offered features that helped users associate their own metadata with documents through the use of textual and audio annotations that resided locally on the users’ workstations.
Mosaic continued revisions until its final stable version 2.6 was released. Even with its abandonment, Mosaic still lives on in the modern internet, as its code was used by Spyglass Inc. to make their own internet browser. Spyglass was eventually bought out by Microsoft, who then renamed the browser “Internet Explorer.”
Source: http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/NCSAMosaicHome.html
that was a good essay, justin. no point in me entering =)
Is Justin correct?
Mosaic is what I remember, I can’t compete with the above commentary. I can remember trying to get it to run on my Mac 512KE at 2400 baud, I don’t think it did, but I had something running about that time, “Quicklink” perhaps? It was long ago.
I should hope so.
I could use that book.
I visit this site often, but never write anything, so I thought I would put in my 2 cents.
Here is what I found:
WorldWideWeb was the world’s first web browser. It was introduced on February 26, 1991, by Tim Berners-Lee, and ran on the NeXT platform. as seen here.
I don’t have time to write an essay, and I am not sure if this is even correct!
That’s correct, WorldWideWeb was the first ever text browser.
I read “text-based” as “runs in a console” and immediately thought of Lynx. While off the topic I found it quite funny to find out that it’s called Lynx because a lynx is an animal that eats gophers.
The first web browser I ever used was Lynx. Lynx was purely text based, which wasn’t particularly attractive, but was blazingly fast. There was no sitting around waiting for a page to load, at least not at 9600 baud. At the time, I was already familiar with the University of Minnesota’s gopher system, and was pleasantly surprised to see that the city of Tucson had already jumped on the internet bandwagon and posted a variety of census data and other city information. As far as I know, Lynx was entirely Unix-based. I used it on my cool Next computer at the University.
The problem with Lynx was that you pretty much had to know where you were going before you ever started. Because it was purely text-based, there was no favorites list, or at least none that I knew of. Back then, you were desperate for links, because your best search engine was an Archie. Lynx was cool in that it could also run gopher sites, which were much more popular at the time than web sites. This was back around 1989 or so. I wish I had an inking of how big the Internet was going to go at the time, because I could have staked claim to a number of great domains. To me the system was so academically based, though, that I didn’t see it having a broader appeal. I didn’t start my own web site until 1993. Still early by today’s standards, but I could have had a better head start.
Lynx was developed out of the University of Kansas. There were several contributors to the development but the main developers were Michael Grobe, Charles Rezac and Lou Montulli.
One of the innovations of Lynx was its use of hypertext tags and URLs. Hypertext was already around. Another developer, Tim Berners-Lee created URLs, HTTP and HTML .My first memory hypertext was Apple Macintosh’s HyperCard program, which I made heavy use of at the time. I remember, at that time, CD roms were considered the information wave of the fute. CD-based encyclopedias and books were a big deal. Still, since Lynx was entirely text based, it didn’t have the look and feel that would attract users. I used it, but I wasn’t impressed with it.
It wasn’t until I saw a Windows computer running Mosaic in about 1992 that I realized the Internet might be going places. Mosaic was capable of multi-media, and that made a world of difference. That’s when I started to think about running my own web pages. Until then I had primarily used the Internet for the newsgroups.
I went right out and downloaded Mosaic for the Mac, although I still preferred my AOL at the time. The one nice thing about Mosaic that I wish browsers still had was the ability to surf without images (just like Lynx did, only the formatting seemed better). I would love to access some of today’s web sites with the images turned off.
Truth be known, the human finger was the world’s first text-based browser. Oddly, the human finger(“finger” for short), while it’s inception and inventor are argued, was in common use for many other purposes prior even to the creation of text. In fact, “the finger” was so inovative, that while other browsers have come and gone, it’s still in widespread daily use.
“The finger” had the unique ability to indicate lines of text, and follow those lines as the eye did – thus keeping track of not only word orientation, but spatial orientation as well.
Other features included:
Temporary bookmark (close your book on the finger while answering the phone)
A forward and back feature (although this feature was not well thought-out as moisture was often required and “the finger” had no reliable way of producing it on command)
And should the text be deemed either unworthy of reading or objectionable, “the finger”, in conjunction with other networked “fingers” had the ability to drag and drop the entire manuscript to the trash.
If you want to know how influential “the finger” was in the world of browsers, consider this: current browser builders felt strongly enough about it to pay homage to “the finger” every time you mouse over a hyperlink.
Define Web? internet or WWW? That has a huge implication on what kind of program was first. I remember Gopher being able to read and show simple text, and that was before Berners Lee gave us the www. and therefore also lynx! However I’m don’t remember who wrote the program, but we used it on Sun3’s, but it could pretty much run on any unix machine.
I have never posted to a blog before but I must say Keith Burgin’s comment was so witty that I think he deserves some kind of prize. Sir, you should consider submitting to the New Yorker!
Kieth – I think you may be on to something.
Pretty interesting results. It would appear that my reader demographic is changing a lot, which is actually really cool. If I’d posted this a year ago, most everyone would have known I meant Lynx.
However, that doesn’t mean I was particularly accurate in my query. I probably should have clarified it to the point that said “line based” instead of “text based” – reason being that Mosaic, while a GUI browser, was not line based but at the time of its emergence, the Web itself was still text. So in that sense, Mosaic is a correct answer so Justin wins a book! One minor goof – Spyglass was not bought by Microsoft, rather, Microsoft licensed the technology. Thanks to Matt May for honing in on that detail.
John’s description of Lynx was really what I was looking for, so John gets a book! Well done, John.
Claus: I’m not sure what you mean by “define web.” The Web is most decidedly a part of the Internet, but not the other way around. Again, this might be due in part to a shift in my readership, but I honestly thought that distinction would be self-evident. When I write of the Web, I mean the Web, not other Internet protocols such as Gopher or FTP or Telnet. But it’s an important distinction, and one many contemporary users who weren’t around before the Web became the default interface for so many Internet protocols don’t make.
And, of course Keith’s version is not only hysterically funny, but it also is accurate in an absurdist way. So Keith, you win a book too, because you took the time to be funny but also put your finger (ahem) on the “text” aspect of this discussion.
I’ll follow up individually with the winners, JUSTIN, please email me so I have your email address–but in the meantime, thanks to all for a compelling discussion, and congratulations to the winners