In 1992ish I worked at RNEC Manadon (UK, Devon). I was asked by my boss to investigate this new www thing.
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.
The experience was very different on a NeXT computer.
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 worked at an EDI company in the mid 90s. X.25 was the wild west. We had a router set up on it that would happily stand up a ppp session to anyone that knew the node name. No password, right on the core network lol.
I got on the 'Net in 1993. The Web was very "meh". A lot of tutorials on how to write HTML, very little useful content yet. IRC and Usenet were where the action was.
Fun fact: Erwise[0] was the first _graphical_ browser developed by a group of students in Helsinki University of Technology with Sir Berners Lee. Sadly there was no funding in Finland available at the time and they had to abandon the project and most of the group ended up working at Tekla, contributing to a bunch of cool AEC CAD technology (Tekla is now a Trimble subsidiary).
Not really. In Graz we had our better Hyper-G graphical browser before CERN, with a completely integrated system to ensure link consistency. Every browser was also the editor. In 1989. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2105.08057
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.
It's a javascript-based imitation, much like all of those js-based imitations of various Windows versions.
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):
TimBL's original NeXT is still on display at CERN, I've seen it.
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).
It's a real shame both Job's movies skip right over his NeXT and Pixar days..
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..
That makes me think about the whatng cartel apocalypse.
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.
I love what the CERN team did here visually with the NeXT UI. Rebuilding a historical browser inside a modern one is a fun rabbit hole, but man, it is the same technical wall to hit every time: iframes.
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.
network users at that time already had software for ftp and other common tools. Gopher sort of linked logically to an ftp idea. Mosaic was often introduced in the same sentence as "uses a format called HTML" .. Mosaic seemed interesting but also it was obvious that pages in that format would have to become popular, to make more of them. There wasn't a big reason to switch your daily software to Mosaic since stable apps were better for their existing uses. It was a very rare thing to have access to a NeXT machine (maybe not on YNews).
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.
When watching this I'm shocked how bad the UX Was these days. The scrollbar left, the triple steped menu...
What was improved sometimes is only visible when we see how it was back in the past.
> When watching this I'm shocked how bad the UX Was these days. The scrollbar left, the triple steped menu...
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.
WorldWideWeb didn't originally support inline images, and while using a graphical toolkit rendered pages more like Lynx, albeit with the ability to vary fonts. Lynx wasn't the first WWW browser, but came along shortly after, a year or so after WorldWideWeb, and is the oldest browser still maintained. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_web_browser#Ear...
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.
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 :)
It wasn't a rocket science amazing idea in 1989. It was a pretty obvious thing anyone in the space could see would be interesting to try -- hypertext already existed. The internet was just taking off. The idea that you could host pages that hyperlinked to each other on the internet was totally obvious and if you'd explained it to anyone active in the internet at the time (obviously not that many of those people), they'd have nodded. I should add that almost nobody had a computer with a graphics display in 1989 (I did, at work) so that further constrains the set of folk to whom the idea would make sense. The fact that everyone now has many 64-bit computers with extremely high resolution displays is probably the more surprising thing to 1989-dude.
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:
> The Lively Kernel would be another way to fix html but retain the web.
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.
gerdesj|9 days ago
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.
hackingonempty|9 days ago
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 :-(
jcims|9 days ago
qingcharles|9 days ago
fsloth|9 days ago
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwise
rurban|9 days ago
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.
cxr|9 days ago
No, as indicated in the submission the original WorldWideWeb.app (developed on a NeXTCube) is a graphical Web browser.
lysace|9 days ago
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):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19249373
nine_k|9 days ago
The performance would likely be comparable %)
ErroneousBosh|8 days ago
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).
krackers|9 days ago
Rapzid|9 days ago
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..
nebula8804|9 days ago
tylerdane|9 days ago
Kim_Bruning|9 days ago
Something was lost along the way.
(Nowadays you need a separate wiki engine on a site to be able to do that)
ChrisArchitect|9 days ago
Some previous discussions:
2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34218591
2021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26680839
2020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25013103
2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19249373
sylware|9 days ago
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.
hackingonempty|9 days ago
The last time I tried about the only site that worked was useit.com, former home of Nielsen Norman UX experts ;-)
dang|8 days ago
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)
keepamovin|9 days ago
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.
jbottoms|8 days ago
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.
mistrial9|9 days ago
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.
amelius|9 days ago
At least that would formalize the specification.
jibal|9 days ago
I guess that let them off the hook for incorrect spelling. :-)
ulrischa|9 days ago
gapan|9 days ago
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.
Jaxan|9 days ago
I have the minimap configured on the left in vs code and use it as scrollbar. It’s quite nice actually.
alansaber|9 days ago
WillAdams|9 days ago
I miss that.
java-man|9 days ago
:-)
jmclnx|9 days ago
But it makes sense it is a GUI browser since it was developed on a NeXT
wahern|9 days ago
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.
hinkley|9 days ago
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)
shevy-java|9 days ago
unknown|9 days ago
[deleted]
unknown|9 days ago
[deleted]
j3th9n|9 days ago
karanveer|9 days ago
embedding-shape|9 days ago
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 :)
dboreham|8 days ago
fecal_henge|9 days ago
unknown|9 days ago
[deleted]
morphle|9 days ago
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/
cxr|9 days ago
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.