The Finns Who Invented the Graphical Browser

waderoush writes "If you thought Mosaic was the first graphical Web browser, think again. In their first major interview, three of the four Finnish software engineers behind Erwise — a point-and-click graphical Web browser for the X Window system — describe the creation of their program in 1991-1992, a full year before Marc Andreessen's Mosaic (which, of course, evolved into Netscape). Kim Nyberg, Kari Sydänmaanlakka, and Teemu Rantanen, with their fellow Helsinki University of Technology student Kati Borgers (nee Suominen), gave Erwise features such as text searching and the ability to load multiple Web pages that wouldn't be seen in other browsers until much later. The three engineers, who today work for the architectural software firm Tekla, say they never commercialized the project because there was no financing — Finland was in a deep recession at the time and lacked a strong venture capital or angel investing market. Otherwise, the Web revolution might have begun a year earlier."

whatever...

[The Mayor]

To tell you the truth, I had never heard of Erwise until today. A have a few questions about Erwise:
- Did it support graphics other that XBM?
- Did it render HTML, or some other markup language?

I did some consulting for a company called HyperMedia Corporation in 1991-92. As part of that work, I watched closely the development of HTML, NCSA Mosaic, and the lot. HMC's markup language was proprietary and binary. The first thing that struck me about HTML was the ease of editing--you didn't need a dedicated editor. Then, I remember seeing early builds of NCSA's browser (to become Mosaic) when they first added, IIRC, gif support. I remember being absolutely floored with the ability to create attractive content in only a few minutes. My first thought after seeing it was, "I need to find a new job!" Sure enough, within a few months HMC was out of business.

The end result is that there were many factors that led to the success of NCSA Mosaic and Netscape. First, Mosaic ran on platforms other than the X Window System, so it was more accessible. Second, it was among the first to support usable graphics (i.e. not XBM), at least on an accessible platform (Emacs' browser & WorldWideWeb.app had early image support, too, but both were on platforms that had very narrow distribution possibilities). Third, it used standard HTML.

Erwise might have had all of these, with the one caveat that it supported only Unix/X Window System. Hard to say from this article. However, I think it's a little simplistic to say that funding was the only thing holding these guys back from Netscape-like success.

Depends on what you mean by "Graphical"

[ThrowAwaySociety]

WorldWideWeb 1.0 had a windowed, point-and-click UI, so it would be "graphical" compared to, say, Lynx.

The real title of "first graphical browser" goes to whichever application first displayed inline graphics on a page. I'm not sure exactly which one this was...NCSA Mosaic often gets credit for this, but the feature was also added to later versions of ViolaWWW and WorldWideWeb.

Inline graphics were a major factor in the success of the Web over existing internet hypertext systems like Gopher.

Re:Ideas worth a cent a docen.

[poot_rootbeer]

A problem-solver comes up with a solution to a specific problem. The genesis of Cello, for example, was one guy saying to himself "I need a windows-based program that can access legal sites in html" and then solving the problem.

Which is not to say Tom Bruce, author of Cello, wasn't ALSO a visionary; the Legal Information Institute [cornell.edu] he founded in the early days of the web (thus creating the need for his web browser for lawyers' Win3.1 PCs in the first place) is perhaps the foremost reference site on the Constitution of the United States and related issues, and it didn't come to be that way by chance.

Andreesen's vision happened to involve making a pile of money; Bruce's did not.

Re:Mosaic -- Netscape?

[Stormwatch]

I'm pretty sure NCSA's Mosaic "evolved" into "Internet Explorer".

Not really, at least not directly. Check this: [wikipedia.org]

Spyglass licensed the technology and trademarks from NCSA for producing their own web browser but never used any of the NCSA Mosaic source code. Microsoft licensed Spyglass Mosaic in 1995 for US$2 million, modified it, and renamed it Internet Explorer. After a later auditing dispute, Microsoft paid Spyglass $8 million. The 1995 user guide The HTML Sourcebook: The Complete Guide to HTML, specifically states in a section called Coming Attractions, that Explorer "will be based on the Mosaic program" (p. 331). Versions of Internet Explorer before version 7 stated "Based on NCSA Mosaic" in the About box. Internet Explorer 7 was audited by Microsoft to ensure that it contained no Mosaic code, and thus no longer credits Spyglass or Mosaic.