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The Internet Mozilla

Ten Years of Web Browsing 270

Posted by michael from the browse-baby-browse dept.
AnamanFan writes "Today in 1993, a group of students at the University of Illinois released a little program called Mosaic. News.com.com.com has a special four-part series on the anniversary. I for one will celebrate by spending extra time with Mozilla and Camino." Slashdot marked the anniversary a little while ago.
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Ten Years of Web Browsing More

Ten Years of Web Browsing

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  • Web browsing? So what! (Score:5, Funny)

    by corsec67 ( 627446 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @12:32PM (#5782426) Homepage Journal
    Who cares when web browsing started.

    The more important question is when did the first porn site start?

  • if only they had known... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Ratphace ( 667701 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @12:34PM (#5782436)

    what a bloated piece of crap webpages would have become, they might have abandoned the idea... :)

    • Re:if only they had known... (Score:5, Funny)

      by strateego ( 598207 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @12:38PM (#5782478)
      Where people with no knowledge on a subject can come, post, and pretent they know more than everybody else. (SLASHDOT.ORG)
    • "what a bloated piece of crap webpages would have become, they might have abandoned the idea... :) "

      Ever notice how bloated Slashdot is? FP tags, Ogg tags, Beowulf tags, MSSUX tags... Slashdot could do with a good spring cleanin!

    • In fact.. (Score:3, Informative)

      by Axe ( 11122 )
      ..the reason that HTML was such a piece of crap is that early folks (like them [stanford.edu] here at US in 1991 where pretty damn sure that everything will be TeX. It was designed for physics experiment collaborations to use. Everything else was not anticipated..

  • Reminisce (Score:5, Funny)

    by yotto ( 590067 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @12:34PM (#5782439) Homepage
    Ahhh, I remember it like it was, well, 10 years ago. World Wide Web? Right, It'll never catch on. We've already got gopher and ftp, what else do you need?

    Oh, how little I knew.

    • Re:Reminisce (Score:5, Interesting)

      by rsheridan6 ( 600425 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @12:42PM (#5782520)
      I recall getting on yahoo, surfing all the interesting links in one night, getting bored and going back to usenet news.

      Yeah, this web thing is a nice idea, but it'll never go anywhere without any content.

    • I remember a buddy of mine at the time likened the web to the CB radio fad of the 70's.

      Everybody now!

      We've got a big ole convoy, cross the USA... Convoy...

    • You seem to be missing THE #1 attraction on the Ineternet in those days.. IRC.. who needs instant messaging if everyone you care to know is already in your channel?!?

      Of course, ten years ago my IRC lag started increasing drastically.. I wonder why...

      ---
      Schizophrenia beats being alone.

    • I had my first job out of college at the time. I was tasked with setting up online access to social science data holdings information for a large university (a specialized card catalog essentially). I was instructed to start by figuring out how to set up a gopher site, and "check out this http thing while you're at it" (i.e. my well informed uber-geek boss had not heard the term World Wide Web). I soon told them to forget about gopher, which took some convincing, but then we went ahead. So I always fee

  • I've been doing this for 10 years!!!? (Score:5, Funny)

    by confused philosopher ( 666299 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @12:35PM (#5782449) Homepage Journal

    Excuse me, I have to go outside and stretch my legs. A bathroom break would be a nice change of pace too.
  • Well, sort of. I installed Netscape 2 [netscape.com] for the fun of it and to relive my first intenet memories and swiftly uninstalled it as it was well... hopeless. I swiftly discovered my url.dll had been deleted and I had some real good 'fun' finding it again. Thanks Netscape :/

  • Huh? (Score:2, Offtopic)

    by delta407 ( 518868 )
    Slashdot marked the anniversary a little while ago.
    So why post it again?!?

    Is Slashdot trying to get an obscene number of duplicates today?

  • Deliberate Dupe (Score:5, Funny)

    by MoZ-RedShirt ( 192423 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @12:36PM (#5782463)
    Slashdot marked the anniversary a little while ago.

    Great. They know they are posting dupes and they even brag about it ;-)

    RedShirt
    • Not only that but look at the topic icon(s) at the top of the page.

      Somehow they've managed to stack both the Mozilla and The Internet icons.

      Is this the new standard for "We know it's a dupe" or is it just me?

  • Uhh... (Score:5, Informative)

    by iamdrscience ( 541136 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @12:37PM (#5782473) Homepage
    ...but mosaic wasn't the first web browser, just the first that most people used. Tim Berners-Lee wrote a graphical browser for NeXT -- his preferred platform at the time and the GUI platform he was most familiar with. For the Unixes there were only lame command-line/text-mode browsers at the time, but even those count as browsers that predate Mosaic.

    • Re:Uhh... (Score:2, Informative)

      by torpor ( 458 )
      No, for the Unixes there was NCSA Mosaic. Well, if you had Sun hardware, that is.

      I remember the day I first got a web browser working properly on my old Sparc box (moon.earthlink.net, incidentally EarthLinks' first DNS server...) I thought to myself: This is going to be huge if it ever gets to PC's.

      A few weeks later, someone got NCSA Mosaic working under Windows (forget who it was), and the rest is history...
      • Yeah but this was also way back when you had to buy a separate TCP/IP stack for your Dos/Windoze machine. Anyone outside of a university who had any internet access in 1993 (with maybe a scant couple exceptions) was doing it by dialing into a shell account.
      • Well I rember rusing NSCA Mosaic in 1994 for Linux. It was great I could view the Web With Pictures. And using dip was much easier to setup and run then using WinSock. But at the time what I relly liked on the web was FTP and Telnet. It was great I could Telnet to a BBS and use FTP to download the files all at the same time, Heck I could download multible files and telnet to multible BBSs at the same time all on 1 14.4k modem. Man that was just so cool! And with Linux kernel 1.2(i think) I hade multi-tas

    • Re:Uhh... (Score:5, Informative)

      by drgroove ( 631550 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @12:47PM (#5782576)
      Tim's web browser was called "WorldWideWeb" ...
      W3.org [w3.org]

    • Re:Uhh... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by #!/bin/allen ( 136622 )
      The systems programmers with Unix workstations didn't have Windows and Word, so we used xmosaic as a page layout system. At that time, we were also able to delete most Word and all Excel file sent via email. If we did need to read a Word file, we used the Unix Word viewer, "strings".

      Before we were directly connected to the DDN, one of the guys wrote a telnet tunneler to get through the gatehost. That was a great day. We didn't care what we looked at. It was soooo cool.

  • We should celebrate (Score:5, Funny)

    by Chairboy ( 88841 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @12:37PM (#5782474) Homepage
    We should celebrate this taking the original source code from Mosaic and updating it to include these new useful features:

    Pop up ads
    ActiveX controls that can have full access to your computer
    An e-mail client with HTML support so you can view spam as it was intended

    and so on. Go progress!

  • Lucky (Score:2, Insightful)

    by mrphish697 ( 219802 )
    Computer Science seems to be the only profession in which we still have access to the people that helped start it. I've always enjoyed that. Take Whitfield Diffie [sun.com], for example.
    • Computer Science seems to be the only profession in which we still have access to the people that helped start it. I've always enjoyed that. Take Whitfield Diffie [sun.com], for example.

      When you see Charles Babbage or Alan Turing, tell them I said Hi. :-)

      I get your point though, we have more modern founders than any other profession that is so widely recognized. But there will always be someone long dead who paved the way for Computer Science. It all depends on who you consider truly "started" it. On

  • timeline (Score:5, Informative)

    by ih8apple ( 607271 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @12:38PM (#5782480)
    Here's [w3.org] a history provided by w3. (Note: mozilla alpha released in February 1993. Already 50 HTTP servers in existence.)

    Here's a really cool seminar given at CERN in Feb 1993 on the potential of the web browser.

  • Advent of html/http worse thing for online apps (Score:4, Insightful)

    by binaryDigit ( 557647 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @12:39PM (#5782490)
    IMHO, in 10 years we've progressed in the negative direction in regards to online applications thanks to Mosiac/http/html. 10 years later we're stuck with ecommerce pages that get hopelessly confused if you press the back button. Annoying website timeouts. Complex logic on the backend to handle stateless connections. Ugly front end development models. Half/assed Java Applets/Javascript attempts to actually create decent applications.

    Now as a presentation model, the web is great. But as an application infrastructure, we've gone nowhere if not backwards.
    • But as an application infrastructure, we've gone nowhere if not backwards.

      No, we haven't, because there really wasn't any infrastructure for on-line applications before the web. Sure there were a handful of standard protocols like ftp and telnet, plus the ability to have remote X sessions, but there wasn't really anything beyond that. At least today it's possible to have an on-line application that has some prayer of working. The web is piss poor compared to what you could do with a really well designed on-line applications protocol, but it's a fair sight better than having to roll your own system any time you want to accomplish anything.

      • Re:Advent of html/http worse thing for online apps (Score:4, Interesting)

        by jlusk4 ( 2831 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @04:08PM (#5784336)
        I'm not sure where you're going with this.

        Client-server was most definitely a going concern before Mosaic, as was Sun's RPC and XDR protocols (if I may use such a grandiose word for such simple concepts).

        Even today, decent client-server apps are pretty much forced to have their own "custom" state machines/diagrams because otherwise, we'd all be running the same app (and it would be, uh... a web browser!).

        (What I mean, specifically, is that a hospital utilization management system would have a very different workflow from a textile mill spare-parts system, for instance, and that workflow/peer dialog state machine would be embodied in the application itself.)

        A co-worker tells me that maybe you're referring to the ease w/which apps could be developed post-Mosaic vs. pre-Mosaic, since tools like Visual Dev Studio ++ Wizzy Wizard# were just a gleam in somebody's eye at the time, and anyway, were absolutely not oriented to distributed processing.

        If we haven't taken a giant step backwards in developing distributed apps, we've certainly experienced some arrested development.

        John.
    • I wouldn't say it's the fault of Mozaic/http/html. It's the lowest common denominator. In fact i'd say we've advanced due to the fact that browsers can handle more on the client side than they ever have. Stateless connections are not something that should be used for web apps, but it works (in a half asses way). That doesn't mean you should blame a pliers because it does a crap job of hammering in a nail.

  • Mosaic in the context of the time (Score:5, Interesting)

    by JoeBuck ( 7947 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @12:39PM (#5782493) Homepage

    I had actually used the CERN line-mode www interface before Mosaic came out, just to check out the ravings of this pompous Brit I heard about (by the name of Tim Berners-Lee) who was raving that this thing called the World Wide Web was intended to contain the sum of all human knowlege. But Mosaic was a huge leap forward.

    However, when Mosaic first came out, a lot of folks in my department were using it as a better interface to Gopher, since in 1993 there was far more interesting stuff available via Gopher than via HTTP. Of course that didn't last long.

    • What's funny is we have a sub-section of the WWW at Everything2 [everything2.com] that seems to be heading in the direction of containing the sum of all human knowledge.

      Or at least a summary of it.

      Biggest problem is that people would rather write about themselves than node anything factual.

      Did anyone think that the WWW would become so entertainment oriented?

      My first website was a breath of fire 2 info-tastic spectacular (in fugly blue and black colours) so it was kinda both :)

  • I remember reading about it in Infoweek... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by MyNameIsFred ( 543994 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @12:40PM (#5782500)
    I can remember reading an article about Mosiac in Infoweek around then. The article gushed over it. Saying how the combination of text and pictures would revolutionize the Internet.

    I still remember thinking what's the big deal. Revolution, Shemzolution. This thing will never take off.

    • You're in good company (Score:5, Funny)

      by GuyMannDude ( 574364 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @12:46PM (#5782566) Journal

      I still remember thinking what's the big deal. Revolution, Shemzolution. This thing will never take off.

      Don't feel bad. Bill Gates said the same thing and according to Peter Jennings (and any other talking head that gets a chance to interview him), Gates is one of the smartest men in the world. I mean, he's got all that money, right? Surely he deserves it all for his visionary thinking. If a super-genius could make a mistake, then you shouldn't be so hard on yourself for making the same mistake.

      I remember hearing one interviewer on a radio talk show ask Gates: "Mr Gates, everyone is wondering: how did you write the Internet?" and good ol' Billy didn't bother to correct the man but gave some vague answer about how the Internet would make information available to everyone (provided they purchase a valid copy of Windows, of course).

      GMD

      • Re:You're in good company (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Speare ( 84249 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @01:42PM (#5783067) Homepage Journal

        Gates has always said that (paraphrased) Microsoft makes mistakes all the time, and that just one particularly bad misstep could doom Microsoft's prospects. The key to survival is to outlive the mistakes, to make fewer mistakes than the competition, and to keep tons of money in the bank instead paying them out in dividends, but these things can't always be done. This is why his company has tried to lowbal investor expectations every quarter, and exceed those expectations every quarter.

  • The celebration [uiuc.edu] NCSA is having doesn't even have one person speaking that had anything to do with Mosaic. Nearly everyone that had anything to do with it's long gone, and the department that created it (and NCSA telnet) was axed years ago.

    • I think one of the more remarkable things about the WWW was that it came out of CERN and NCSA.

      Those institutions were publicly funded to do work on physics and generic supercomputing.

      Note that WWW and Mosaic were only peripherally related to the core missions of CERN and NCSA.

      In a privately funded enterprise, these projects might well have been killed off because they would have been deemed too peripheral, not manifestly contributing to next quarter's EPS.

      So these great inventions, WWW and the browser,

  • It's hard to remember doing any kind of research before the internet... of course, that's probably because in 1993 I was in 7th grade, when going to the school library and opening a book was considered a huge deal. I had to stay after school as punishment for writing a computer drawing program -- the teachers thought I broke the machine!
  • and I really miss Internet Policy, which have had banned commercial stuff from the Internet.
  • I'm trying to remember the order of the web pages I saw come up back in 1993...

    1) Sun
    2) HP
    3) MS? IBM?
    4-1000) Porn

    Great invention, the web...

    --trb
  • 10 years ago i was playing in my backgarden eating mud. And the interweb was happening without me! :(

  • Browser competition (Score:5, Interesting)

    by iamacat ( 583406 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @12:58PM (#5782698)
    Well, Apple users still have it, IE vs Safari vs Camino. And as a result, browsers are fast, have popup blockers, download managers and tabbed browsing and about anything users ask for. Anyone who thinks they might sell stuff to Mac users designs their website properly. Just think about how much more lean and stable windows browsers would be if MS didn't kill off serious competition. Typing this in Safari.

  • The speed of information (Score:5, Interesting)

    by GOD_ALMIGHTY ( 17678 ) <curt.johnson@gma[ ]com ['il.' in gap]> on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @01:02PM (#5782736) Homepage
    This makes me amazed at the speed with which information now travels. I remember trying to get on the net in high school back in 94. Nobody I knew, knew anything about it and there were no easy to install IP stacks for Win 3.1. I remember trying to decipher the articles in Boardwatch magazine and hunting the local BBS's for info.

    It took me forever to finally get on (a Prodigy account) and then that was text. I used that to get info for my first Linux install and finally after switching to Netcom and getting X working, I was surfing the web with Netscape. What a pain.

    I had no idea how to do this stuff and finding the info was extremely painful. It was like a bunch of secrets that took forever to find. The only person I talked to at the time that knew about Mosaic or anything was some random clerk in an OfficeDepot.

    Today, we know the instant anything is released, we get the inner workings of expert groups. I know I take all this stuff for granted today, but it is still completely amazing how things have changed.
    • Today, we know the instant anything is released, we get the inner workings of expert groups.

      You mean like ICANN?

    • For a while we were installing Trumpet on every machine in the office, except for the silly MacTCP installs. Actually, Trumpet seemed to work better than MS's own Winsock 1.0 implementation. The trace window was wonderful for protocol programming.

    • Re:The speed of information (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Cyno ( 85911 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @05:56PM (#5785302) Journal
      Me too.

      I was just thinking the other day where would we be without the net. Right now I have access to answers to almost any questions on google, which is always available when I'm at work or home or over at a friend's house. Everyone I know has an email address or IM or some account somewhere on the net.

      Soon I will use the net for all communications, including audio, video and text. It has become as essential to everyone's every day lives as the telephone or TV. Which is very similar to AOLTW's and most corporation's mission statement, replacing internet with the company name of your choice.

      But no matter how much has been changed because of the net we can never forget that those changes happened because of open communication, open protocols, free intellectual property, free access, and the hard work of many many extremely skilled engineers. I don't think the internet could be rebuilt today in the US under our current administration or their preference for security over freedom.

      The internet is based entirely on freedom and could not exist without everyone agreeing to maintain that freedom. The freedom to send a packet around the world for $0.00. The freedom to say what you want without fear of prosecution, etc. Those freedoms might not exist forever. And then what will become of the internet as we know it or as it could be used tomorrow?

      American Capitalist Perspective: The net was only useful for commercialism. But then all those dotcoms crashed. So does that mean the net is worthless?

      MPAA/RIAA Rep: No, the net is a tool for terrorists and pirates to steal your IP and must be monitorred, enforced and secured. It is a dangerous place.

      Tech: The net can be used for voting and education and automation and software development and music and video and games and... if we just got rid of money we have the technology to make it all work for us, instead of the other way around.. Hello.. anybody listening?

  • The web is great and all, but... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Iscariot_ ( 166362 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @01:02PM (#5782737)
    The web is great, but I think lately there's been a real focus on making the web do things it shouldn't. And by that, I mean web-based applications.

    There are certain things the web can do well application wise. Like an online calendar, or email application (yahoo/hotmail). However, things like office applications should not use web-based technologies. It's always slow and clunky. I mean, sure you can do drag-and-drop with dhtml, but it's inconsistant and slow. I'd much rather deal with a java applet, or ActiveX, so as to have a true GUI instead of a GUI-emulator.

    Am I totally off base here, or does anyone else agree?

    • There are certain things the web can do well application wise. Like an online calendar, or email application (yahoo/hotmail). However, things like office applications should not use web-based technologies. It's always slow and clunky. I mean, sure you can do drag-and-drop with dhtml, but it's inconsistant and slow. I'd much rather deal with a java applet, or ActiveX, so as to have a true GUI instead of a GUI-emulator.

      Am I totally off base here, or does anyone else agree?

      Flash.

  • With the 10th anniversary of Mosaic I decided to writeup some of my recollections from the days when I was a participant in the browser wars:

    http://software.ericsink.com/Browser_Wars.html [ericsink.com]

  • I had worked in a corporate office up until '92 where networking only consisted of NetBIOS over NetBEUI. Then, I went to work at NYU Computer Science in '93. Man, what a great place to be at that time. We had Sparcs as our office computers! I used xrn and loved killfiles :) I remember compiling Mosaic, and being blown away with what I saw.

    My first project was to put the technical reports collection online for the department. Most of them were in DVI format and needed to be converted to .ps. Others were so
  • ... and raise you news.com.com.com.com.

  • If Mosaic was released 10 years ago... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by greysky ( 136732 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @01:06PM (#5782769)
    Then why is it that most of the web development job postings I've seen for the last couple of years say "minimum 10 years of HTML/DHTML programing experience required"?

    • Because (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Gonoff ( 88518 )
      Such adverts are designed by people whose profession is wearing a suit.

      No - they are not HR droids, managers or agency clones. All of those may contain people who wear suits while they work. I am talking about people who wear suits as the major part of their jobs.

      Consider a conversation...

      What do you do?
      a. I'm an accountant. What about you?
      b. I'm a programmer. And you?
      c. I wear a suit.

      These are the people that are currently requiring 5 years experience with XP for Tier 2 support jobs....

      Com

  • in related news.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by verch ( 12834 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @01:11PM (#5782797)
    ..most of us had our last productive day on April 21st 1993. :)

  • Collage - Mosaic had a companion (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jdoeii ( 468503 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @01:13PM (#5782809)
    I remember that ftp site with Mosaic back in 1993. There was another application there - Collage. The idea was pretty neat. It was a tool to *sensualize* scientific data. Not just visualize, but turn in into audio too. I wonder what happened to it. I am not sure if it later became Spyglass Transform. It could be that its development was discontinued. Does anyone know Collage fate?

  • Silly Campus Tech dept. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dreadpiratemark ( 450962 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @01:17PM (#5782837)
    I was a Sophmore at American University in DC when Mosaic was announced. I remember going to the main computer center on campus and inquiring about this 'web browser' program and if they'd let me load it on a machine there, since the 386sx in my dorm wasn't going to cut it (or, failing that, if they'd load it themselves). Having been shuffled from person to person, I finally ended up with the lab manager who stated "Why would you want to do that? You can get everything you would want off of UseNet. We can't have students loading every flash-in-the-pan technology on these machines."

    Fine, he was rather right - there wasn't going to be much to do with Mosaic and I *did* get most things from usenet. But I would just love to go back and ask him today if he still considers web browsers a 'flash-in-the-pan'.

    -Mark

  • I was reading Wired, and they had a big spread on Mosaic, including screenshots of the browser in action. When I saw it, I immediately installed Mosaic and hunted down every Web site I could. I wish I could remember what issue of Wired featured a multi-page layout of Mosaic screenshots and text. Does anyone else know? I'd guess it was from the 2.xx series, maybe 3.xx.

  • I'd love to see if that would compile under OS X, it supposedly supporting all the NeXT stuff.

    It would be neat to see what it would do with today's web pages. Anyone have source?
  • ...is the fact that soon after the alpha release of Mosiac, CERN's directors stated that WWW technology to be freely usable by anyone. Being free is what bulid up Web technology more than any browser or server.

  • Most antique system used for browsing the web? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by GridPoint ( 588140 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @01:29PM (#5782963)
    A while ago slashdot posted a story [slashdot.org] about an Internet-enabled operating system with a web browser [dunkels.com] for the Commodore 64. It was claimed that the 21 years old C64 was the oldest system ever to run a (real) web browser, and a few days later this was changed to the 23 years old Atari 800 (see the web browser's [dunkels.com] homepage for the full story). This means that the web is almost 10 years younger than the oldest system to surf it!
  • So Mosaic is 10 years old today. I wonder whether in 10 years anyone will be looking back at today and saying, yeah, I remember such and such came out and I thought it was bullshit, but look at where we are now!

    If so, what is it?

  • Not the first and Not the Best either (Score:3, Informative)

    by pjones ( 10800 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @01:42PM (#5783062) Homepage
    As I wrote in LocalTechWire [localtechwire.com]. Mosaic was not the first and not the best browser.

    Web Turns 10 - But Was Mosaic Really First and Best Browser? No, No.
    By Paul Jones, Special To LTW
    Editor's note: April 22, 1993, is widely regarded as the day on which a number of people, including Marc Andreessen, who went on to help found Netscape, produced Mosaic - the ground-breaking Web browser. But was it really the first? To mark the 10th anniversary, Local Tech Wire asked one of the pioneers in Internet development - Paul Jones - to talk about the rise of the browser and how the technology transformed the Internet. Jones, who is director of ibiblio.org, a project that includes the Site Formerly Known as MetaLab and SunSITE, The Public's Library, has some very interesting observations.

    CHAPEL HILL - I don't mean to spoil the party, but the geek in me is forcing me to tell the cold unsociable truth - Mosaic, the browser that taught us the World Wide Web, is neither the first web browser nor is it the best. To make matters even more, well uncomfortable, I believe that Mosaic was a serious step in the wrong direction.

    The web seems wild and wide open now, but yes it was once designed to be more so. Believe it or not - the Web was designed for connectivity for all users, not just for publishers or information providers and it allowed the person browsing to create pages and links quickly and easily. The first web browser was about sociability and the interchange of ideas, not just delivery of linked pages.

    The real "Tucker" of Web browsers was the browser developed at CERN -where the web itself was developed - for the NeXT computer. The CERN
    Browser allowed not only web page browsing, but also WYSIWYG page creation and the ability to create links by simply highlighting text on a browsed page and linking that text to a page under construction by an easy click.

    The Hypermedia Browser also called Nexus and for a while called
    WorldWideWeb was written by none other than Tim Berners-Lee in 1990 and released in Christmas of that year. The focus of Tim's Browser was collaboration and mutual linking as reflected by the ease with which pages could be produced and links made between pages.

    I created my own first web page with only a few seconds instruction from Tim and a look at his demo age (a copy of which can be found at www.ibiblio.org/pjones/old.page.html ).

    For Tim's own description of the first Browser as well as screen shots of the browser in action see www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb.html

    More participation

    Notice that the Web in Tim's vision, as seen in his browser, was to be about active participation and creation of shared linked pages.

    Mosaic did have its moment of promoting collaboration. In Mosaic 1.2, the Group Annotations feature allowed readers of pages to add notes to those pages. This innovation was a precursor to the message boards, discussion groups and blogs of today. The nice thing about Group Annotations was the ease in which you could make notes for other group members. Even better Annotations in Mosaic supported both text and audio comments.

    Although Annotations would eventually collapse due to their
    over-popularity (and unscalable protocol design), the feature did manage to keep part of the dream of a sociable Web alive. But with the release of Mosaic 2.0 in September 1993, the folks at NCSA's System development Group decided to kill Group Annotations "initially" which turned out to be forever. (See
    target="_blank">archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/So ftware /Mosaic/Docs/group-annotations.html for NCSA's description of Annotations and their brief tale of their depreciation.)

    'A nice piece of work ...'

    The Mosaic that finally appeared in September 1993 was a nice piece of work. Mostly

  • ... I learned this new fangled HTML thingy in 1994 whilst at college and I, and my roomate, posted one of the most successful online games of the time, Connect Four.

    Thousands of games were played each day with people coming in from nasa.gov, ibm.com, and many other very interesting places. Even better the computer AI that I had written (a very basic 1.5 step look ahead AI) was capable of winning 50% or so of the games.

    Then I remember the day that AOL got a web browser. Shortly thereafter my Connect Four

  • evolution of a shell script (Score:5, Funny)

    by farnsworth ( 558449 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @01:45PM (#5783092)
    less ~/scripts/browser-is-hanging.sh

    #!/bin/bash

    # killall -9 mosaic-bin
    # killall -9 netscape-bin
    # killall -9 mozilla-bin
    # killall -9 phoenix-bin
    killall -9 thunderbird-bin
  • I remember when a fellow grad student showed me Mosaic and pronounced it the next big thing. I knew better, of course, in that Gopher had far more real information available and would never be replaced by this www stuff.
  • April 22, 1994: The first successful requested web page is served.
    April 23, 1994: Irwin Spelnik attempts to read a Hello World page and receives the first 404 page not found.
    May 10, 1994: Charlie Northrup gives up on his dream to become a buddhist monk after a 4x4 spashes mud on him while he played a tamborine on a street corner, he decides to get even and files for web service patents.
    June 7, 1995: Wanda Furdman, attempting to entice her boyfriend, Jimmy Pimpleton, into proposing, places a nude picture

  • My memories of early Mosaic and the Web (Score:5, Interesting)

    by IvyMike ( 178408 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @02:40PM (#5783543)

    I was a student at UIUC at the time when Mosaic was developed, and I remember using it in the Sun and HP EWS labs. (Mosaic was installed and maintaned by students, in the lab-wide /scratch directory, for a while). I started using it right before the invention of the "IMG" tag. When it came along, that was a big deal. The NCSA "What's New on the web" page was updated with a few new web pages each day. And that was almost a comprehensive list!

    In any case, the bigger deal for me was when the EWS lab manager (Ed Kubaitis, I think) installed httpd and students were allowed to created their own web pages and serve them worldwide via www.ews.uiuc.edu/~username/ urls. I realized that EVERYONE could be a content provider, not just a select few (as was the gopher model), and this was going to be unstoppable. I even HTML-ized the existing PovRay faq, put it on my student account, sent mail out to the PovRay mailing list, and had hits within a few minutes. That was a rush, too.

    To encourage people to provide content (and get linked) I created the "UIUC People" page, which started as a list to every student homepage I knew about at UIUC. It had four entries. That quickly changed, as you can imagine.

    I don't know who decided to add the "~username" syntax to httpd, allowing mere users to add content to the global web (was it a part of CERN, or did McCool add that to NCSA?) but I'm convinced that was a key factor in getting the early web going. It's certainly what got me interested.

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