Via ars technica
By Matthew Lasar
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When Tim Berners-Lee arrived at CERN,
Geneva's celebrated European Particle Physics Laboratory in 1980, the
enterprise had hired him to upgrade the control systems for several of
the lab's particle accelerators. But almost immediately, the inventor of
the modern webpage noticed a problem: thousands of people were floating
in and out of the famous research institute, many of them temporary
hires.
"The big challenge for contract programmers was to try to
understand the systems, both human and computer, that ran this fantastic
playground," Berners-Lee later wrote. "Much of the crucial information
existed only in people's heads."
So in his spare time, he wrote up some software to address this
shortfall: a little program he named Enquire. It allowed users to create
"nodes"—information-packed index card-style pages that linked to other
pages. Unfortunately, the PASCAL application ran on CERN's proprietary
operating system. "The few people who saw it thought it was a nice idea,
but no one used it. Eventually, the disk was lost, and with it, the
original Enquire."
Some years later Berners-Lee returned to CERN.
This time he relaunched his "World Wide Web" project in a way that
would more likely secure its success. On August 6, 1991, he published an
explanation of WWW on the alt.hypertext usegroup. He also released a code library, libWWW, which he wrote with his assistant
Jean-François Groff. The library allowed participants to create their own Web browsers.
"Their efforts—over half a dozen browsers within 18 months—saved
the poorly funded Web project and kicked off the Web development
community," notes a commemoration of this project by the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. The best known early browser was Mosaic, produced by Marc Andreesen and Eric Bina at the
National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).
Mosaic was soon spun into Netscape, but it was not the first browser. A map
assembled by the Museum offers a sense of the global scope of the early
project. What's striking about these early applications is that they
had already worked out many of the features we associate with later
browsers. Here is a tour of World Wide Web viewing applications, before
they became famous.
The CERN browsers
Tim Berners-Lee's original 1990 WorldWideWeb browser was both a
browser and an editor. That was the direction he hoped future browser
projects would go. CERN has put together a reproduction
of its formative content. As you can see in the screenshot below, by
1993 it offered many of the characteristics of modern browsers.
The software's biggest limitation was that it ran on the NeXTStep
operating system. But shortly after WorldWideWeb, CERN mathematics
intern Nicola Pellow wrote a line mode browser that could function
elsewhere, including on UNIX and MS-DOS networks. Thus "anyone could
access the web," explains Internet historian Bill Stewart, "at that point consisting primarily of the CERN phone book."
Erwise
Erwise came next. It was written by four Finnish college students in 1991 and released in 1992. Erwise is credited as the first browser that offered a graphical interface. It could also search for words on pages.
Berners-Lee wrote a review
of Erwise in 1992. He noted its ability to handle various fonts,
underline hyperlinks, let users double-click them to jump to other
pages, and to host multiple windows.
"Erwise looks very smart," he declared, albeit puzzling over a
"strange box which is around one word in the document, a little like a
selection box or a button. It is neither of these—perhaps a handle for
something to come."
So why didn't the application take off? In a later interview, one of
Erwise's creators noted that Finland was mired in a deep recession at
the time. The country was devoid of angel investors.
"We could not have created a business around Erwise in Finland then," he explained.
"The only way we could have made money would have been to continue our
developing it so that Netscape might have finally bought us. Still, the
big thing is, we could have reached the initial Mosaic level with
relatively small extra work. We should have just finalized Erwise and
published it on several platforms."
ViolaWWW
ViolaWWW was released in April
of 1992. Developer
Pei-Yuan Wei wrote it at the University of California at Berkeley via
his UNIX-based Viola programming/scripting language. No, Pei Wei didn't
play the viola, "it just happened to make a snappy abbreviation" of
Visually Interactive Object-oriented Language and Application, write
James Gillies and Robert Cailliau in their history of the World Wide
Web.
Wei appears to have gotten his inspiration from the early Mac
program HyperCard, which allowed users to build matrices of formatted
hyper-linked documents. "HyperCard was very compelling back then, you
know graphically, this hyperlink thing," he later recalled. But the
program was "not very global and it only worked on Mac. And I didn't
even have a Mac."
But he did have access to UNIX X-terminals at UC Berkeley's
Experimental Computing Facility. "I got a HyperCard manual and looked at
it and just basically took the concepts and implemented them in
X-windows." Except, most impressively, he created them via his Viola
language.
One of the most significant and innovative features of ViolaWWW was
that it allowed a developer to embed scripts and "applets" in the
browser page. This anticipated the huge wave of Java-based applet
features that appeared on websites in the later 1990s.
In his documentation, Wei also noted various "misfeatures" of ViolaWWW, most notably its inaccessibility to PCs.
- Not ported to PC platform.
- HTML Printing is not supported.
- HTTP is not interruptable, and not multi-threaded.
- Proxy is still not supported.
- Language interpreter is not multi-threaded.
"The author is working on these problems... etc," Wei acknowledged
at the time. Still, "a very neat browser useable by anyone: very
intuitive and straightforward," Berners-Lee concluded in his review
of ViolaWWW. "The extra features are probably more than 90% of 'real'
users will actually use, but just the things which an experienced user
will want."
Midas and Samba
In September of 1991, Stanford Linear Accelerator physicist Paul
Kunz visited CERN. He returned with the code necessary to set up the
first North American Web server at SLAC. "I've just been to CERN," Kunz
told SLAC's head librarian Louise Addis, "and I found this wonderful
thing that a guy named Tim Berners-Lee is developing. It's just the
ticket for what you guys need for your database."
Addis agreed. The site's head librarian put the research center's
key database over the Web. Fermilab physicists set up a server shortly
after.
Then over the summer of 1992 SLAC physicist Tony Johnson wrote Midas, a graphical browser for the Stanford physics community. The big draw
for Midas users was that it could display postscript documents, favored
by physicists because of their ability to accurately reproduce
paper-scribbled scientific formulas.
"With these key advances, Web use surged in the high energy physics community," concluded a 2001 Department of Energy assessment of SLAC's progress.
Meanwhile, CERN associates Pellow and Robert Cailliau released the
first Web browser for the Macintosh computer. Gillies and Cailliau
narrate Samba's development.
For Pellow, progress in getting Samba up and running was slow,
because after every few links it would crash and nobody could work out
why. "The Mac browser was still in a buggy form,' lamented Tim
[Berners-Lee] in a September '92 newsletter. 'A W3 T-shirt to the first
one to bring it up and running!" he announced. The T shirt duly went to
Fermilab's John Streets, who tracked down the bug, allowing Nicola
Pellow to get on with producing a usable version of Samba.
Samba "was an attempt to port the design of the original WWW
browser, which I wrote on the NeXT machine, onto the Mac platform,"
Berners-Lee adds,
"but was not ready before NCSA [National Center for Supercomputing
Applications] brought out the Mac version of Mosaic, which eclipsed it."
Mosaic
Mosaic was "the spark that lit the Web's explosive growth in 1993,"
historians Gillies and Cailliau explain. But it could not have been
developed without forerunners and the NCSA's University of Illinois
offices, which were equipped with the best UNIX machines. NCSA also had
Dr. Ping Fu, a PhD computer graphics wizard who had worked on morphing
effects for Terminator 2. She had recently hired an assistant named Marc Andreesen.
"How about you write a graphical interface for a browser?" Fu
suggested to her new helper. "What's a browser?" Andreesen asked. But
several days later NCSA staff member Dave Thompson gave a demonstration
of Nicola Pellow's early line browser and Pei Wei's ViolaWWW. And just
before this demo, Tony Johnson posted the first public release of Midas.
The latter software set Andreesen back on his heels. "Superb!
Fantastic! Stunning! Impressive as hell!" he wrote to Johnson. Then
Andreesen got NCSA Unix expert Eric Bina to help him write their own
X-browser.
Mosaic offered many new web features, including support for video
clips, sound, forms, bookmarks, and history files. "The striking thing
about it was that unlike all the earlier X-browsers, it was all
contained in a single file," Gillies and Cailliau explain:
Installing it was as simple as pulling it across the network and
running it. Later on Mosaic would rise to fame because of the
<IMG> tag that allowed you to put images inline for the first
time, rather than having them pop up in a different window like Tim's
original NeXT browser did. That made it easier for people to make Web
pages look more like the familiar print media they were use to; not
everyone's idea of a brave new world, but it certainly got Mosaic
noticed.
"What I think Marc did really well," Tim Berners-Lee later wrote,
"is make it very easy to install, and he supported it by fixing bugs via
e-mail any time night or day. You'd send him a bug report and then two
hours later he'd mail you a fix."
Perhaps Mosaic's biggest breakthrough, in retrospect, was that it
was a cross-platform browser. "By the power vested in me by nobody in
particular, X-Mosaic is hereby released," Andreeson proudly declared on
the www-talk group on January 23, 1993. Aleks Totic unveiled his Mac
version a few months later. A PC version came from the hands of Chris
Wilson and Jon Mittelhauser.
The Mosaic browser was based on Viola and Midas, the Computer History museum's exhibit notes.
And it used the CERN code library. "But unlike others, it was reliable,
could be installed by amateurs, and soon added colorful graphics within
Web pages instead of as separate windows."
A guy from Japan
But Mosaic wasn't the only innovation to show up on the scene around that same time. University of Kansas student Lou Montulli
adapted a campus information hypertext browser for the Internet and
Web. It launched in March, 1993. "Lynx quickly became the preferred web
browser for character mode terminals without graphics, and remains in
use today," historian Stewart explains.
And at Cornell University's Law School, Tom Bruce was writing a Web
application for PCs, "since those were the computers that lawyers tended
to use," Gillies and Cailliau observe. Bruce unveiled his browser Cello on June 8, 1993, "which was soon being downloaded at a rate of 500 copies a day."
Six months later, Andreesen was in Mountain View, California, his
team poised to release Mosaic Netscape on October 13, 1994. He, Totic,
and Mittelhauser nervously put the application up on an FTP server. The
latter developer later recalled the moment. "And it was five minutes and
we're sitting there. Nothing has happened. And all of a sudden the
first download happened. It was a guy from Japan. We swore we'd send him
a T shirt!"
But what this complex story reminds is that is that no innovation is
created by one person. The Web browser was propelled into our lives by
visionaries around the world, people who often didn't quite understand
what they were doing, but were motivated by curiosity, practical
concerns, or even playfulness. Their separate sparks of genius kept the
process going. So did Tim Berners-Lee's insistence that the project stay
collaborative and, most importantly, open.
"The early days of the web were very hand-to-mouth," he writes. "So many things to do, such a delicate flame to keep alive."
Further reading
- Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web
- James Gillies and R. Cailliau, How the web was born
- Bill Stewart, Living Internet (www.livinginternet.com)