Computed·Blg

Via eurekalert

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Researchers have succeeded in combining the power of quantum computing with the security of quantum cryptography and have shown that perfectly secure cloud computing can be achieved using the principles of quantum mechanics. They have performed an experimental demonstration of quantum computation in which the input, the data processing, and the output remain unknown to the quantum computer. The international team of scientists will publish the results of the experiment, carried out at the Vienna Center for Quantum Science and Technology (VCQ) at the University of Vienna and the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI), in the forthcoming issue of Science.

Quantum computers are expected to play an important role in future information processing since they can outperform classical computers at many tasks. Considering the challenges inherent in building quantum devices, it is conceivable that future quantum computing capabilities will exist only in a few specialized facilities around the world – much like today's supercomputers. Users would then interact with those specialized facilities in order to outsource their quantum computations. The scenario follows the current trend of cloud computing: central remote servers are used to store and process data – everything is done in the "cloud." The obvious challenge is to make globalized computing safe and ensure that users' data stays private.

The latest research, to appear in Science, reveals that quantum computers can provide an answer to that challenge. "Quantum physics solves one of the key challenges in distributed computing. It can preserve data privacy when users interact with remote computing centers," says Stefanie Barz, lead author of the study. This newly established fundamental advantage of quantum computers enables the delegation of a quantum computation from a user who does not hold any quantum computational power to a quantum server, while guaranteeing that the user's data remain perfectly private. The quantum server performs calculations, but has no means to find out what it is doing – a functionality not known to be achievable in the classical world.

The scientists in the Vienna research group have demonstrated the concept of "blind quantum computing" in an experiment: they performed the first known quantum computation during which the user's data stayed perfectly encrypted. The experimental demonstration uses photons, or "light particles" to encode the data. Photonic systems are well-suited to the task because quantum computation operations can be performed on them, and they can be transmitted over long distances.

The process works in the following manner. The user prepares qubits – the fundamental units of quantum computers – in a state known only to himself and sends these qubits to the quantum computer. The quantum computer entangles the qubits according to a standard scheme. The actual computation is measurement-based: the processing of quantum information is implemented by simple measurements on qubits. The user tailors measurement instructions to the particular state of each qubit and sends them to the quantum server. Finally, the results of the computation are sent back to the user who can interpret and utilize the results of the computation. Even if the quantum computer or an eavesdropper tries to read the qubits, they gain no useful information, without knowing the initial state; they are "blind."

The research at the Vienna Center for Quantum Science and Technology (VCQ) at the University of Vienna and at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences was undertaken in collaboration with the scientists who originally invented the protocol, based at the University of Edinburgh, the Institute for Quantum Computing (University of Waterloo), the Centre for Quantum Technologies (National University of Singapore), and University College Dublin.

Publication: "Demonstration of Blind Quantum Computing" Stefanie Barz, Elham Kashefi, Anne Broadbent, Joseph Fitzsimons, Anton Zeilinger, Philip Walther. DOI: 10.1126/science.1214707

Via TechnologyReview

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Microsoft has developed a new kind of Wi-Fi network that performs at its top speed even in the face of interference. It takes advantage of a new Wi-Fi standard that uses more of the electromagnetic spectrum, but also hops between the narrow bands of unused spectrum within television broadcast frequencies.

In 2008, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission approved limited use of "white spaces"—portions of spectrum adjacent to existing television transmissions. The ruling, in effect, expanded the available spectrum. Microsoft developed the new network partly as a way to push Congress to allow much broader use of white spaces, despite some concerns over interference with some other types of wireless devices, such as wireless microphones.

The fastest Wi-Fi networks, which can transmit data at up to a gigabit per second, use as much spectrum as possible, up to 160 megahertz, to maximize bandwidth. Krishna Chintalapudi and his team at Microsoft Research have pioneered an approach, called WiFi-NC, which makes efficient use of these white spaces at these speeds.

Rather than using a conventional Wi-Fi radio, it uses an array of tiny, low-data rate transmitters and receivers. Each of these broadcast and receive via a different, narrow range of spectrum. Bundled together, they work just like a regular Wi-Fi radio, but can switch between white-space frequencies far more efficiently.

That means the system is compatible with existing equipment. "The entire reception and transmission logic could be reused from existing Wi-Fi implementations," says Chintalapudi.

The team calls these transmitters and receivers "receiver-lets" and "transmitter-lets." Together, they make up what's known as a "compound radio."

The resulting wireless network doesn't increase data rates in specific ranges of spectrum above what's currently achieved with latest-generation technology. It does, however, make more efficient use of the entire range of spectrum, and especially the white spaces freed up by the FCC.

The new radio integrates with a previous Microsoft project that provides a wireless device with access to a database of available white-space spectrum in any part of the United States. That system, called SenseLess, tells a device where it can legally broadcast and receive. WiFi-NC then chooses the bands of spectrum that have the least interference, and broadcasts over them.

By sending its signal over many smaller radios that operate in slivers of the available spectrum, WiFi-NC suffers less interference and experiences faster speeds even when a user is at the intersection of overlapping networks. This is important because the white spaces that may be authorized for commercial use by the FCC are at the lower ends of the electromagnetic spectrum, where signals can travel much further than existing Wi-Fi transmissions.

Whether or not Microsoft's WiFi-NC technology gets commercialized depends on Congress, says Kevin Werbach, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton Business School, and an expert on the FCC's effort to make more spectrum available for wireless data transmission.

"The problem is that many of the Congressional proposals to give the FCC [the authority to auction off currently unused bandwidth] also restrict it from making available white spaces for devices around that spectrum," says Werbach.

Microsoft hopes WiFi-NC will persuade Congress to approve wider use of white spaces.

"It is our opinion that WiFi-NC's approach of using multiple narrow channels as opposed to the current model of using wider channels in an all-or-nothing style is the more prudent approach for the future of Wi-Fi and white spaces," says Chintalapudi. The team's ultimate goal, he adds, is to propose WiFi-NC as a new wireless standard for the hardware and software industries.

Via PCWorld

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Hackers reportedly plan to fight back against Internet censorship by putting their own communications satellites into orbit and developing a grid of ground stations to track and communicate with them.

The news comes as the tech world is up in arms about proposed legislation that many feel would threaten online freedom.

According to BBC News, the satellite plan was recently outlined at the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin. It's being called the "Hackerspace Global Grid."

If you don't like the idea of hackers being able to communicate better, hacker activist Nick Farr said knowledge is the only motive of the project, which also includes the development of new electronics that can survive in space, and launch vehicles that can get them there.

Farr and his cohorts are working on the project along with Constellation, a German aerospace research initiative that involves interlinked student projects.

You might think it would be hard for just anybody to put a satellite into space, but hobbyists and amateurs have been able in recent years to use balloons to get them up there. However, without the deep pockets of national agencies or large companies they have a hard time tracking the devices.

To better locate their satellites, the German hacker group came up with the idea of a sort of reverse GPS that uses a distributed network of low-cost ground stations that can be bought or built by individuals.

Supposedly, these stations would be able to pinpoint satellites at any given time while improving the transmission of data from the satellites to Earth.

The plan isn't without limitations.

For one thing, low orbit satellites don't stay in a single place. And any country could go to the trouble of disabling them. At the same time, outer space isn’t actually governed by the countries over which it floats.

The scheme discussed by hackers follows the introduction of the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the United States, which many believe to be a threat to online freedom.

As PC World's Tony Bradley put it, the bill is a combination of an overzealous drive to fight Internet piracy, with elected representatives who don't know the difference between DNS, IM, and MP3. In short, SOPA is a "draconian legislation that far exceeds its intended scope, and threatens the Constitutional rights of law abiding citizens," he wrote.

And apparently those who typically don't follow the law -- hackers -- think there's something they can do about it.

Via TomsGuide

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Microsoft announced that it will be launching silent updates for IE9 in January.

Despite the controversy of user control, Microsoft especially has a reason to make this move to react to browser "update fatigue" that has resulted in virtually "stale" IE users who won't upgrade their browsers unless they upgrade their operating system as well.

The most recent upgrade of Google's Chrome browser shows just how well the silent update feature works. Within five days of introduction, Chrome 15 market share fell from 24.06 percent to just 6.38 percent, while the share of Chrome 16 climbed from 0.35 percent to 19.81 percent, according to StatCounter. Within five days, Google moved about 75 percent of its user base - more than 150 million users - from one browser to another. Within three days, Chrome 16 market share surpassed the market share of IE9 (currently at about 10.52 percent for this month), in four days it surpassed Firefox 8 (currently at about 15.60 percent) and will be passing IE8 today, StatCounter data indicates.

What makes this data so important is the fact that Google is dominating HTML5 capability across all operating system platforms and not just Windows 7, where IE9 has a slight advantage, according to Microsoft (StatCounter does not break out data for browser share on individual operating systems). IE9 was introduced on March 14 of 2011, has captured only 10.52 percent market share and has followed a similar slow upgrade pattern as its predecessors. For example, IE, which was introduced in March 2009, reached its market share peak in the month IE9 was introduced - at 30.24 percent. Since then, the browser has declined to only 22.17 percent and 57.52 percent of the IE user base still uses IE8 today.

With the silent updates becoming available for IE8 and IE9, Microsoft is likely to avoid another IE6 disaster with IE8. Even more important for Microsoft is that those users who update to IE9 may be less likely to switch to Chrome.

Via ZDNet

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owncloud.com

Everyone likes personal cloud services, like Apple’s iCloud, Google Music, and Dropbox. But, many of aren’t crazy about the fact that our files, music, and whatever are sitting on someone else’s servers without our control. That’s where ownCloud comes in.

OwnCloud is an open-source cloud program. You use it to set up your own cloud server for file-sharing, music-streaming, and calendar, contact, and bookmark sharing project. As a server program it’s not that easy to set up. OpenSUSE, with its Mirall installation program and desktop client makes it easier to set up your own personal ownCloud, but it’s still not a simple operation. That’s going to change.

According to ownCloud’s business crew, “OwnCloud offers the ease-of-use and cost effectiveness of Dropbox and box.net with a more secure, better managed offering that, because it’s open source, offers greater flexibility and no vendor lock in. This makes it perfect for business use. OwnCloud users can run file sync and share services on their own hardware and storage or use popular public hosting and storage offerings.” I’ve tried it myself and while setting it up is still mildly painful, once up ownCloud works well.

OwnCloud enables universal access to files through a Web browser or WebDAV. It also provides a platform to easily view and sync contacts, calendars and bookmarks across all devices and enables basic editing right on the Web. Programmers will be able to add features to it via its open application programming interface (API).

OwnCloud is going to become an easy to run and use personal, private cloud thanks to a new commercial company that’s going to take ownCloud from interesting open-source project to end-user friendly program. This new company will be headed by former SUSE/Novell executive Markus Rex. Rex, who I’ve known for years and is both a business and technology wizard, will serve as both CEO and CTO. Frank Karlitschek, founder of the ownCloud project, will be staying.

To make this happen, this popular–350,000 users-program’s commercial side is being funded by Boston-based General Catalyst, a high-tech. venture capital firm. In the past, General Catalyst has helped fund such companies as online travel company Kayak and online video platform leader Brightcove.

General Catalyst came on board, said John Simon, Managing Director at General Catalyst in a statement, because, “With the explosion of unstructured data in the enterprise and increasingly mobile (and insecure) ways to access it, many companies have been forced to lock down their data–sometimes forcing employees to find less than secure means of access, or, if security is too restrictive, risk having all that unavailable When we saw the ease-of-use, security and flexibility of ownCloud, we were sold.”

“In a cloud-oriented world, ownCloud is the only tool based on a ubiquitous open-source platform,” said Rex, in a statement. “This differentiator enables businesses complete, transparent, compliant control over their data and data storage costs, while also allowing employees simple and easy data access from anywhere.”

As a Linux geek, I already liked ownCloud. At the company releases mass-market ownCloud products and service in 2012, I think many of you are going to like it as well. I’m really looking forward to seeing where this program goes from here.

Via GeekOSystem

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A new installation at the Amsterdam Foam gallery by Erik Kessels takes a literal look at the digital deluge of photos online by printing out 24 hours worth of uploads to Flickr. The result is rooms filled with over 1,000,000 printed photos, piled up against the walls.

There’s a sense of waste and a maddening disorganization to it all, both of which are apparently intentional. According to Creative Review, Kessels said of his own project:

“We’re exposed to an overload of images nowadays,” says Kessels. “This glut is in large part the result of image-sharing sites like Flickr, networking sites like Facebook, and picture-based search engines. Their content mingles public and private, with the very personal being openly and un-selfconsciously displayed. By printing all the images uploaded in a 24-hour period, I visualise the feeling of drowning in representations of other peoples’ experiences.”

Humbling, and certainly thought provoking, Kessel’s work challenges the notion that everything can and should be shared, which has become fundamental to the modern web. Then again, perhaps it’s only wasteful and overwhelming when you print all the pictures and divorce them from their original context.

Via Recursivity.blog()

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At the beginning of last week, I launched GreedAndFearIndex - a SaaS platform that automatically reads thousands of financial news articles daily to deduce what companies are in the news and whether financial sentiment is positive or negative.

It’s an app built largely on Scala, with MongoDB and Akka playing prominent roles to be able to deal with the massive amounts of data on a relatively small and cheap amount of hardware.

The app itself took about 4-5 weeks to build, although the underlying technology in terms of web crawling, data cleansing/normalization, text mining, sentiment analysis, name recognition, language grammar comprehension such as subject-action-object resolution and the underlying “God”-algorithm that underpins it all took considerably longer to get right.

Doing it all was not only lots of late nights of coding, but also reading more academic papers than I ever did at university, not only on machine learning but also on neuroscience and research on the human neocortex.

What I am getting at is that financial news and sentiment analysis might be a good showcase and the beginning, but it is only part of a bigger picture and problem to solve.

Unlocking True Machine Intelligence & Predictive Power
The human brain is an amazing pattern matching & prediction machine - in terms of being able to pull together, associate, correlate and understand causation between disparate, seemingly unrelated strands of information it is unsurpassed in nature and also makes much of what has passed for “Artificial Intelligence” look like a joke.

However, the human brain is also severely limited: it is slow, it’s immediate memory is small, we can famously only keep track of 7 (+-) things at any one time unless we put considerable effort into it. We are awash in amounts of data, information and noise that our brain is evolutionary not yet adapted to deal with.

So the bigger picture of what I’m working on is not a SaaS sentiment analysis tool, it is the first step of a bigger picture (which admittedly, I may not solve, or not solve in my lifetime):

What if we could make machines match our own ability to find patterns based on seemingly unrelated data, but far quicker and with far more than 5-9 pieces of information at a time?

What if we could accurately predict the movements of financial markets, the best price point for a product, the likelihood of natural disasters, the spreading patterns of infectious diseases or even unlock the secrets of solving disease and aging themselves?

The Enablers
I see a number of enablers that are making this future a real possibility within my lifetime:

• Advances in neuroscience: our understanding of the human brain is getting better year by year, the fact that we can now look inside the brain on a very small scale and that we are starting to build a basic understanding of the neocortex will be the key to the future of machine learning. Computer Science and Neuroscience must intermingle to a higher degree to further both fields.
• Cloud Computing, parallelism & increased computing power: Computing power is cheaper than ever with the cloud, the software to take advantage of multi-core computers is finally starting to arrive and Moore’s law is still advancing at ever (the latest generation of MacBook Pro’s have roughly 2.5 times the performance of my barely 2 year old MBP).
• “Big Data”:  we have the data needed to both train and apply the next generation of machine learning algorithms on abundantly available to us. It is no longer locked away in the silos of corporations or the pages of paper archives, it’s available and accessible to anyone online.
• Crowdsourcing: There are two things that are very time intensive when working with machine learning - training the algorithms, and once in production, providing them with feedback (“on the job training”) to continually improve and correct. The internet and crowdsourcing lowers the barriers immensely. Digg, Reddit, Tweetmeme, DZone are all early examples of simplistic crowdsourcing with little learning, but where participants have a personal interest in participating in the crowdsourcing. Combine that with machine learning and you have a very powerful tool at your disposal.

Babysteps & The Perfect Storms
All things considered, I think we are getting closer to the perfect storm of taking machine intelligence out of the dark ages where they have lingered far too long and quite literally into a brave new world where one day we may struggle to distinguish machine from man and artificial intelligence from biological intelligence.

It will be a road fraught with setbacks, trial and error where the errors will seem insurmountable, but we’ll eventually get there one babystep at a time.
I’m betting on it and the first natural step is predictive analytics & adaptive systems able to automatically detect and solve problems within well-defined domains.

Via LUKEW

By Luke Wroblewski

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As mobile devices have continued to evolve and spread, so has the process of designing and developing Web sites and services that work across a diverse range of devices. From responsive Web design to future friendly thinking, here's how I've seen things evolve over the past year and a half.

If you haven't been keeping up with all the detailed conversations about multi-device Web design, I hope this overview and set of resources can quickly bring you up to speed. I'm only covering the last 18 months because it has been a very exciting time with lots of new ideas and voices. Prior to these developments, most multi-device Web design problems were solved with device detection and many still are. But the introduction of Responsive Web Design really stirred things up.

Responsive Web Design

Responsive Web Design is a combination of fluid grids and images with media queries to change layout based on the size of a device viewport. It uses feature detection (mostly on the client) to determine available screen capabilities and adapt accordingly. RWD is most useful for layout but some have extended it to interactive elements as well (although this often requires Javascript).

Responsive Web Design allows you to use a single URL structure for a site, thereby removing the need for separate mobile, tablet, desktop, etc. sites.

For a short overview read Ethan Marcotte's original article. For the full story read Ethan Marcotte's book. For a deeper dive into the philosophy behind RWD, read over Jeremy Keith's supporting arguments. To see a lot of responsive layout examples, browse around the mediaqueri.es site.

Challenges

Responsive Web Design isn't a silver bullet for mobile Web experiences. Not only does client-side adaptation require a careful approach, but it can also be difficult to optimize source order, media, third-party widgets, URL structure, and application design within a RWD solution.

Jason Grigsby has written up many of the reasons RWD doesn't instantly provide a mobile solution especially for images. I've documented (with concrete) examples why we opted for separate mobile and desktop templates in my last startup -a technique that's also employed by many Web companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. In short, separation tends to give greater ability to optimize specifically for mobile.

Mobile First Responsive Design

Mobile First Responsive Design takes Responsive Web Design and flips the process around to address some of the media query challenges outlined above. Instead of starting with a desktop site, you start with the mobile site and then progressively enhance to devices with larger screens.

The Yiibu team was one of the first to apply this approach and wrote about how they did it. Jason Grigsby has put together an overview and analysis of where Mobile First Responsive Design is being applied. Brad Frost has a more high-level write-up of the approach. For a more in-depth technical discussion, check out the thread about mobile-first media queries on the HMTL5 boilerplate project.

Techniques

Many folks are working through the challenges of designing Web sites for multiple devices. This includes detailed overviews of how to set up Mobile First Responsive Design markup, style sheet, and Javascript solutions.

Ethan Marcotte has shared what it takes for teams of developers and designers to collaborate on a responsive workflow based on lessons learned on the Boston Globe redesign. Scott Jehl outlined what Javascript is doing (PDF) behind the scenes of the Globe redesign (hint: a lot!).

Stephanie Rieger assembled a detailed overview (PDF) of a real-world mobile first responsive design solution for hundreds of devices. Stephan Hay put together a pragmatic overview of designing with media queries.

Media adaptation remains a big challenge for cross-device design. In particular, images, videos, data tables, fonts, and many other "widgets" need special care. Jason Grigsby has written up the situation with images and compiled many approaches for making images responsive. A number of solutions have also emerged for handling things like videos and data tables.

Server Side Components

Combining Mobile First Responsive Design with server side component (not full page) optimization is a way to extend client-side only solutions. With this technique, a single set of page templates define an entire Web site for all devices but key components within that site have device-class specific implementations that are rendered server side. Done right, this technique can deliver the best of both worlds without the challenges that can hamper each.

I've put together an overview of how a Responsive Design + Server Side Components structure can work with concrete examples. Bryan Rieger has outlined an extensive set of thoughts on server-side adaption techniques and Lyza Gardner has a complete overview of how all these techniques can work together. After analyzing many client-side solutions to dynamic images, Jason Grigsby outlined why using a server-side solution is probably the most future friendly.

Future Thinking

If all the considerations above seem like a lot to take in to create a Web site, they are. We are in a period of transition and still figuring things out. So expect to be learning and iterating a lot. That's both exciting and daunting.

It also prepares you for what's ahead. We've just begun to see the onset of cheap networked devices of every shape and size. The zombie apocalypse of devices is coming. And while we can't know exactly what the future will bring, we can strive to design and develop in a future-friendly way so we are better prepared for what's next.

Resources

I referenced lots of great multi-device Web design resources above. Here they are in one list. Read them in order and rock the future Web!

• Effective Design for Multiple Screen Sizesby Bryan Rieger
• Responsive Web Design (article) by Ethan Marcotte
• Responsive Web Design (book) by Ethan Marcotte
• There Is No Mobile Web by Jeremy Keith
• mediaqueri.es by various artisits
• CSS Media Query for Mobile is Fool’s Gold by Jason Grigsby
• Why Separate Mobile & Desktop Web Pages? by Luke Wroblewski
• About this site... by Yiibu
• Where are the Mobile First Responsive Web Designs? by Jason Grigsby
• Mobile-First Responsive Web Design by Brad Frost
• Mobile-first Media Queries by various artists
• The Responsive Designer’s Workflow by Ethan Marcotte
• Responsible & Responsive (PDF) by Scott Jehl
• Pragmatic Responsive Design (further details) by Stephanie Rieger
• A Closer Look at Media Queries by Stephen Hay
• Responsive IMGs — Part 1 by Jason Grigsby
• Responsive IMGs — Part 2 by Jason Grigsby
• Device detection as the future friendly img option by Jason Grigsby
• Responsive Video Embeds with FitVids by Dave Rupert
• Responsive Data Tables by Chris Coyier
• RESS: Responsive Design + Server Side Components by Luke Wroblewski
• Adaptation (PDF) by Bryan Rieger
• How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Set my Mobile Web Sites Free by Lyza Danger Gardner
• The Coming Zombie Apocalypse by Scott Jenson
• Future Friendly by various artists

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.

Tim Berners-Lee's original WorldWideWeb browser running on a NeXT computer in 1993

Cern

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."

An early CERN Web browser, circa 1990

info.cern.ch

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."

The Erwise browser

OS News

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."

ViolaWWW Hypermedia Browser

viola.org

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."

Samba!

Loz's Nicole Project

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."

The Mosaic browser was available for X Windows, the Mac, and Microsoft Windows

http://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/news/03/images/mosaic.6beta.jpg

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."

Cello!

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)