Anyone remember Erwise? Viola? cello? Let's remember.
When Tim Berners-Lee arrived at CERN, Europe's famed particle physics laboratory, in 1980, he was hired to upgrade the control systems of several particle accelerators. But the inventor of the modern web page almost immediately saw the problem: the research institute was constantly coming and going with thousands of people, many of whom worked there temporarily.
“It was quite difficult for contract programmers to try to understand the systems, both human and computational, that ran this fantastic playground,” Berners-Lee later wrote. "Most of the critical information existed only in people's heads."
So in his spare time, he wrote some software to remedy this shortcoming: a little program he called Enquire. It allowed users to create "nodes"—pages that looked like index cards filled with information and had links to other pages. Unfortunately, this application, written in Pascal, ran on the proprietary CERN OS. “A small number of people who saw this program thought it was a good idea, but no one used it. As a result, the disk was lost, and with it the original Enquire.
A few years later, Berners-Lee returned to CERN. This time, he restarted his World Wide Web project in a way that would increase the likelihood of its success. On August 6, 1991, he published an explanation of the WWW in the usenet group alt.hypertext. He also released the code for the libWWW library he wrote with his assistant Jean-Francois Groff. The library allowed members to create their own web browsers.
"Their work - more than five different browsers in 18 months - saved a web project that was in financial trouble and launched a web developer community," noted the Computer History Museum's anniversary celebration in Mountain View, California. The most famous of the early browsers was Mosaic, written by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).
Mosaic soon turned into Netscape, but it wasn't the first browser. The map compiled by the museum gives an idea of the global scale of the early project. The amazing thing about these early applications is that they already contain many of the features of later browsers. And here's a tour of web browsing apps as they were before they became famous.
Browsers from CERN
Tim Berners-Lee's first browser called WorldWideWeb from 1990 was both a browser and an editor. He hoped future browser designs would go in that direction. CERN has collected a reproduction of its contents. The screenshot shows that by 1993 many of the characteristics of modern browsers were already present there.
The main limitation of the software was that it ran on the NeXTStep OS. But shortly after WorldWideWeb, CERN mathematics intern Nicola Pellow wrote a browser capable of running in other places, including UNIX and MS-DOS networks. In this way, "anyone could go online," explains Internet historian Bill Stewart, "which at the time consisted largely of the CERN phone book."
Early CERN web browser, c. 1990
Erwise
Then came Erwise. It was written by four Finnish college students in 1991, and released in 1992. Erwise is considered the first GUI browser. He also knew how to search for words on a page.
Berners-Lee reviewed Erwise in 1992. He noted its ability to work with different fonts, underline links, allow you to navigate to other pages by double-clicking on a link, and support multiple windows.
“Erwise looks pretty smart,” he announced, although there is some mystery in it, “a strange box around one word in a document, similar to a button or a form for selection. Although it is neither one nor the other - perhaps this is something for future versions.
Why didn't the app take off? In an interview given later, one of the creators of Erwise noted that at that time Finland was in a deep recession. There were no "angel" investors in the country.
“At that time, we would not have been able to create a business based on Erwise,” he explained. “The only way to make money was to continue development so that Netscape would eventually buy us. However, we could have reached the level of the first Mosaic with a little more work. We needed to finish Erwise and release it on multiple platforms."
Browser
violaWWW
released in April 1992. Developer Pei-Yuan Wei wrote it at UC Berkeley using the Viola scripting language running under UNIX. Wei did not play the cello, "it just came about because of the catchy acronym" Visually Interactive Object-oriented Language and Application, as James Gillis and Robert Kaiau wrote in their history of the WWW.
Wei appears to have been inspired by an early Mac program called , which allowed users to create matrices from hyperlinked formatted documents. “Then HyperCard was a very interesting project, graphically, and also these hyperlinks,” he later recalled. However, the program “was not global and only ran on Mac. And I didn't even have my own Mac."
But he did have access to UNIX X terminals at the Berkeley Experimental Computing Center. "I had a manual for HyperCard, I studied it and just used the concepts to implement them in X-windows." Only, rather impressively, he implemented them using the Viola language.
One of the most important and innovative features of ViolaWWW was that the developer could include scripts and "applets" in the page. This anticipated the huge wave of Java applets that hit websites in the late 90s.
В Wei also noted various flaws in the browser, the main one being the lack of a PC version.
- Not ported to the PC platform.
- HTML printing is not supported.
- HTTP is non-interruptible, non-multi-threaded.
- Proxy is not supported.
- The language interpreter is not multi-threaded.
"The author is working on these problems, etc.," Wei wrote at the time. Still, "a very neat browser, usable by anyone, very intuitive and straightforward," Berners-Lee concluded in his . "Additional features will not be used by 90% of real users, but these are the features that advanced users want."
ViolaWWW Hypermedia Browser
Midas and Samba
In September 1991, physicist Paul Kunz from the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC) visited CERN. He returned with the code needed to run the first North American web server on SLAC. “Just been to CERN,” Kunz told the head librarian, Louis Eddis, “and discovered this wonderful thing that a friend, Tim Berners-Lee, is developing. It's exactly what you need for your base."
Addis agreed. The head librarian has put a key research base on the web. Physicists from Fermilab did the same a little later.
Then in the summer of 1992 a physicist from SLAC wrote Midas, a graphical browser for Stanford physicists. Huge Midas was that it could display postscript documents, favored by physicists for being able to accurately reproduce scientific formulas.
“With these key benefits, the web has become heavily used in the physical community,” ended US Department of Energy SLAC Progress of 2001.
Meanwhile, at CERN, Pellow and Robert Kaiau released the first web browser for the Macintosh computer. Gillis and Kaiau describe the development of Samba in this way.
For Pellow, progress on starting the Samba project was slow, as every few links the browser crashed, and no one could figure out why. "The Mac browser was full of bugs," Tim Berners-Lee sadly stated in a '92 newsletter. “Giving a T-shirt with the inscription W3 to whoever can fix it!” he announced. The T-shirt went to John Streets at Fermilab, who tracked down the bug, allowing Nicola Pellow to continue developing a working version of Samba.
Samba "was an attempt to port the design of the first browser I wrote on the NeXT machine to the Mac platform," Berners-Lee, but it didn't get finished until the NCSA released a Mac version of Mosaic that eclipsed it."
Samba
Mosaic
Mosaic was "the spark that ignited the explosive growth of the web in 1993," historians Gillis and Kaiau explain. But it could not have been developed without its predecessors, and without the NCSA offices at the University of Illinois, equipped with the best UNIX machines. The NCSA also had Dr. Ping Fu, a computer graphics doctor and wizard who worked on the morph effects for Terminator 2. And he recently hired an assistant named Marc Andreessen.
"What about writing a GUI for a browser?" Fu suggested to his new assistant. "What is a browser?" Andreessen asked. But a few days later, an NCSA employee, Dave Thompson, made a presentation of Nicola Pellow's early browser and Pei Wei's ViolaWWW browser. And just before the presentations, Tony Johnson released the first version of Midas.
The last program struck Andreessen. “Awesome! Fantastic! Incredible! Damn impressive!" he wrote to Johnson. Andreessen then got an NCSA UNIX expert, Eric Bean, to help write his own browser for X.
Mosaic has built in many new features for the web, such as support for videos, sound, forms, bookmarks, and history. “And the amazing thing was that, unlike all the early browsers for X, everything was contained in a single file,” Gillis and Kaiau explain:
The installation process was simple - you just had to download it and run it. Mosaic later became famous for entering the tag , which for the first time allowed images to be embedded directly into the text, instead of having them appear in a separate window, as in Tim's first NeXT browser. This allowed people to make web pages more like the print media they were familiar with; this idea did not appeal to all innovators, but it certainly made Mosaic famous.
“Which I think Mark did very well,” Tim Berners-Lee later wrote, “is very simple installation, and email support with bug fixes, any time of the day or night. You could send him a bug report, and after a couple of hours he would send you a fix.”
Mosaic's biggest breakthrough, from today's point of view, was its cross-platform nature. “With the power that, in principle, no one has given me, I declare X-Mosaic released,” Andreessen proudly wrote in the www-talk group on January 23, 1993. Alex Totik released his Mac version a few months later. The PC version is the work of Chris Wilson and John Mittelhauser.
The Mosaic browser was based on Viola and Midas, according to a computer museum exhibit. And he used a library from CERN. "But unlike the others, it was reliable, even non-professionals could install it, and it soon added support for color graphics in pages rather than individual windows."
Mosaic Browser was available for X Windows, Mac and Microsoft Windows
Guy from Japan
But Mosaic was not the only innovative product to emerge at the time. University of Kansas student adapted the hypertext information browser of his campus for the internet and the web. It launched in March 1993. "Lynx quickly became the browser of choice for non-graphical character terminals, and is still in use today," explains historian Stewart.
And at Cornell Law School, Tom Bruce was writing a web application for PCs, “because those are the computers that lawyers typically use,” Gillis and Kaiau note. Bruce published his Cello browser on June 8, 1993, "and soon it was being downloaded 500 times a day."
Cello
Six months later, Andreessen was in Mountain View, California. His team planned to release Mosaic Netscape on October 13, 1994. He, Totik, and Mittelhauser excitedly uploaded the application to an FTP server. The last developer remembers this moment. “Five minutes passed and we were all sitting there. Nothing happened. And suddenly the first download happened. It was a guy from Japan. We swore we'd send him a T-shirt!"
This complex history reminds us that no innovation is created by a single person. The web browser entered our lives thanks to visionaries from all over the world, people who often did not quite understand what they were doing, but were motivated by curiosity, practical considerations, or even a desire to play. Their individual sparks of genius supported the whole process. As well as Tim Berners-Lee's insistence that the project must remain collaborative, and, most importantly, open.
“The early days of the web were very limited in resources,” He. “There was so much to do, such a weak flame to sustain.”
Source: habr.com
