CERN Launches Line Mode Browser Emulator 92
itwbennett writes "As part of the project to preserve the world's first website and all of the accompanying technology, CERN last week launched a line mode browser emulator. To make the browser experience authentic, the developers recreated how terminals would draw one character at a time by covering the page in black and then revealing each character by erasing a character-sized rectangle from that cover, one-by-one, line-by-line. They also recreated the sound of typing on older keyboards, specifically an IBM RS/6000 keyboard, by using HTML5 audio elements."
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Next on the list: Emulate oldest terminal browser, drink single malt, fire paladium at each other w/accelerator for fun cause there is no more science left!? #waste
There's plenty of science left. Please do the following (in this order):
1) Cure my goddamn jock itch.
2) Give the guy in the next cube some kind of space age denture glue so he stops making all those disgusting sounds with his dentures.
3) Make me a pill that will give me the ability to tell that cute girl in accounts that I'm really sorry about what happened after the company barbecue last month.
Get back to work, boys!
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3) You ARE a pill.
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lynx is actually older. It pre-dates http, in fact, since it was written for a different hypertext protocol and http support was added later.
Source: I'm a cougar.
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You might want to recheck your information. Lynx was released as a beta version for the internal U of Kansas system (and gopher) in July of 92. The internet aware 2.0 version was released in 93. Considering the "first web page" went up in Dec of 90 and the first version of HTTP was documented in 91 lynx does not pre-date http, despite not supporting it initially.
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You know what the E in CERN stands for, right? Hint: It's not America.
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Also the people that worked on this probably volunteered. Just look at the interviews page on their site.
Looks familiar... (Score:4, Interesting)
Almost exactly what browsing with lynx looks like on my CIT-101e VT100 dumb terminal that i still have, and still works.
It's been a workhorse since 1989 or so, and has yet to fail.
Granted, i don't keep it ON all the time.
Now, is CERN going to make an archie/veronica tty client for the web as well?
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Now, is CERN going to make an archie/veronica tty client for the web as well?
I'm never sure, but I think that's irony.
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They have a link for gopher but it doesn't go anywhere. ( Yet?)
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http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/ [floodgap.com]
lynx ruled! (Score:2)
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I lived in a house with six pair to every bedroom back in the nineties, and a Linux server in a garage with a 28.8k CSLIP to scruznet. We installed serial terminals in two of the bedrooms to permit housemates without computers to use the network, over three wires, right next to the phone. At 9600 bps, it worked fine. This was before the widespread web, though.
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Almost exactly what browsing with lynx looks like on my CIT-101e VT100 dumb terminal that i still have, and still works.
It's been a workhorse since 1989 or so, and has yet to fail.
Granted, i don't keep it ON all the time.
Don't keep it OFF too long, the cable might dry out and the thing might go up in smoke when turned on...
I might look into it. (Score:4, Insightful)
It'll be better than using the beta.
Yes, that was a cheap shot, I admit it.
Re:I might look into it. (Score:4, Insightful)
When there wasn't an unlimited amount of screen or an unlimited amount of graphics capability, interface designers had to be very diligent in how they used what they had. With only eighty columns and twenty-five rows, or if you were lucky, one-hundred-thirty-two columns and forty-four rows, there wasn't a lot of room for waste or poor design.
Modern web designers have embraced the ooh-shiny parts of modern HTML specifications but haven't held on to the basic purpose, to efficiently convey information. Beta is an example, embracing eye-candy at the expense of that which the site's purpose is for, to convey information that's mostly text-based.
I also used to use Lynx/links/elinks as testing for what I wrote. I haven't written HTML in a big way in some time, but I imagine that most pages will fail the text-mode test.
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Would you care to rephrase that? (Score:3, Informative)
FTFS: "...terminals would draw one character at a time by covering the page in black and then revealing each character by erasing a character-sized rectangle from that cover, one-by-one, line-by-line."
I don't know of any terminals that ever worked that way.
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FTFS: "...terminals would draw one character at a time by covering the page in black and then revealing each character by erasing a character-sized rectangle from that cover, one-by-one, line-by-line."
I don't know of any terminals that ever worked that way.
They didn't.
..."
I think what that poorly worded sentence meant to say was "... the developers simulated how terminals would draw one character at a time
FTFY
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To be clear, I think what the summary should have said "the developers recreated the appearance of a terminal using an emulator which covered the page in black and then revealed each character by erasing a character-sized rectangle from that cover, one-by-one, line-by-line". The actions described are those of the terminal emulator. Saying "terminals would draw..." makes the historic video terminals, and not the emulator, the subject of the entire subordinate clause, which is obviously wrong.
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No one claimed they did. You only quoted part of the sentence to make it say something different.
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They didn't, but Tek's 4014 and 4051 looked kind of like they were doing that.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpD1QXvtlcg&list=PL3DACE89AA461F5BC [youtube.com]
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They didn't, but Tek's 4014 and 4051 looked kind of like they were doing that.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpD1QXvtlcg&list=PL3DACE89AA461F5BC [youtube.com]
Very cool...
Has any one made a text simulator that reproduces the way a storage tube display would draw characters, stroke-by-stroke, onto the screen?
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They didn't, but Tek's 4014 and 4051 looked kind of like they were doing that.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpD1QXvtlcg&list=PL3DACE89AA461F5BC [youtube.com]
Very cool...
Has any one made a text simulator that reproduces the way a storage tube display would draw characters, stroke-by-stroke, onto the screen?
Yeah, but the 4010 and 4014 are the real thing!
I was wondering if there was a simulator for PC.
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I had forgotten that thing. I used a 4014 in 1979-1980. Apparently, our design automation department had acquired it as an experiment, but it was almost useless, since we had very little software (on the IBM mainframes) which could make use of it. I think I did manage to get curves and waveforms from SPICE simulations onto it. I still carry the Tektronix ASCII reference card that came with it.
Keyboard sounds (Score:5, Funny)
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I'm not proud of this, mind you...
Re: Keyboard sounds (Score:1)
Speaking of Windows sounds: Ever hear a person say "h", "t", "t", "p", "colon", "backslash", "backslash", ... ? It merits a face palm and a heavy sigh.
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Speaking of Windows sounds: Ever hear a person say "h", "t", "t", "p", "colon", "backslash", "backslash", ... ? It merits a face palm and a heavy sigh.
Better. I helped a woman who mumbled something very much like "user is M12345, password is k-g-a-r-n-e-t"
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Yesterday, in fact.
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Speaking of Windows sounds: Ever hear a person say "h", "t", "t", "p", "colon", "backslash", "backslash", ... ?
Incorrect. Several commercials for large, well known US companies often did that in the late nineties. They knew scant few people were aware of how to visit, so they had to encourage them to go by making it easy. This allowed them to enhance the point of a 30 second commercial, and had the appeal that eventually people would look up a product out of curiosity while never getting the urge to call an 800 number and get trapped by a live salesperson.
Since the potential medium was not as mainstream to trigger a
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Speaking of Windows sounds: Ever hear a person say "h", "t", "t", "p", "colon", "backslash", "backslash", ... ?
Incorrect. Several commercials for large, well known US companies often did that in the late nineties.
These ads you speak of, they said "backslash" when they meant "slash"? That's what GP was getting at by "Windows sounds" -- because people who'd only used Windows rarely used forward-slash, and thus might not realize the difference, or how the "back" got in the name of "backslash". (cf. DOS, where forward-slash was commonly used for switches, or Macs/UNIX/etc. where forward-slash was used as a path separator.) Personally, I suspect it was less about Windows as such, and more about the class of users who have exactly zero interest in computers and only learned enough about Windows to meet minimum competence to keep their office job.
Then too, I think old versions of IE would "help" users who actually typed backslashes in their URLs by silently correcting them instead of displaying an error message, which no doubt contributed to their failure to learn...
Yes, I remember DOS/Windows users thinking everything was a backslash back in the day... back then, Macs used the colon as a file separator, and the forward and backslash were used as textual elements.
But back in the beginning it really mattered what you typed as your prefix, because people were entering http:/// [http] gopher:// [gopher] ftp:// [ftp] telnet:// [telnet] mailto [slashdot.org]:, and many other things into their web browser, which could handle all of them. Originally I thought Mosaic was great because it provided a single place to handle
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PS: Anyone remember TWA flight 800? And then many years later we had 9/11. Is there something horrifically special about the American phone system?
I'll tell you about I-900, but it'll cost you....
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Speaking of Windows sounds: Ever hear a person say "h", "t", "t", "p", "colon", "backslash", "backslash", ... ? It merits a face palm and a heavy sigh.
People say things like this because they like to parrot words that they think make them sound smart. If they just learned "backslash" they'll be sure to pepper their speech with it even when the character is just a slash, just like calling the box with the power switch the "hard drive".
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FTFY ...What? Am I the only one who remembers which was designated which back when typewriters and terminals ruled the world? Just because Microsoft chose to confuse people yet again doesn't mean we should perpetuate the mistake! :-)
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Whoosh
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It's only a whoosh when you've never had a senior help desk monkey tell you that. :-)
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Because it's only a guest user.
I'd use it for every website ... (Score:2)
... if they can emulate the tactile feedback of those old terminal keyboards. :)
Boring (Score:1)
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What you're describing would truly be boring. I guess you need AjaxTerm [ubuntu.com]; knock yourself out.
KSR33 (Score:1)
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Lynx? Lynx is a screen mode browser with better UI, what you want is "www" which is the actual line mode browser.
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While they're at it... (Score:1)
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The simulated sound canvas just isn't complete without the horizontal scanning squeal of the CRT, which is about 15 kHz. Some of us used to be able to hear that 20 years ago.
I was 7 when I first started using computers and writing my own programs, and I could hear that squealing back then. It seemed my hearing actually got better since I could hear it even louder as I grew, well the CRTs got larger too. All through the 90's I spent more and more time coding and the CRTs squealed to me. I just learned to ignore it, didn't pay much attention to it. Then one day I watched a movie: The Matrix. Leaving the movie theater I thought I could still hear that faint CRT squealing? N
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Waste of time (Score:2)
All they will accomplish is remind people how utterly crappy the web was until Mosaic introduced the IMG tag.
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The browser that CERN created first on their NeXt machine, called WorldWideWeb, had image support.
The line mode browser was created for less capable machines.
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I think you are mistaken. Here's a 1992 draft of HTML without IMG support:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-talk/1992MayJun/0020.html [w3.org]
Here's another in November 1992 still without IMG tags:
http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/Tags.html [w3.org]
By early 1993 NCSA was working on Mosaic and it now included IMG support.
I can save them a LOT of work here... (Score:2)
# lynx http://www.slashdot.org
Missing the authentic experience (Score:2)
During the next two hours, the system will be going up and down several
times, often with lin~po_~{po ~poz~ppo\~{ o n~po_~{o[po ~y oodsou>#w4ko
Why print the javascript... (Score:2)
I think all that javascript is a bit annoying. And probably just providing a gateway to lynx and tin would be surprising enough to people?
q: "I'm not a quitter"
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Serving the Javascript means a lot less load on the server and works in every modern webbrowser.
This whole story is about webbrowsers.
Anyway, if you check the interview section, the people that created it probably volunteered to do it.
So why would you care ?
Can /. do this? (Score:3)
Am I missing something? (Score:2)
This emulator doesn't seem to be able to load an actual page on the web, just a limited bunch of stuff that's programmed into it, right? I mean if I type www.google.com and press enter, it doesn't load Google.
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Interesting. Google is completely unusable in this emulator, but IBM's website renders like it was made for it.
Lynx still works (Score:2)
Cool demonstration. The last time I had a similar experience (except for the low bandwidth and latency) was about ... yesterday, when I used Lynx. It's still a great browser in my opinion. I prefer text, and it's fast on sites like nytimes.com or linuxtoday.com which both spend so much time loading crap and analytics when using a regular browser that they're almost unusable in my low bandwidth environment.
I still like Lynx and don't care that I don't receive all the pics and javascript shininess and flas
Gave up. (Score:1)
Figuring out how to view a website took too long. No obvious way to do after looking at the help pages and list of commands. Typing in a web address results in nothing happening.
No need for an emulator on Linux (Score:2)
On Fedora, in your favorite terminal:
yum install w3c-libwww-apps
www http://www.site.foo/ [site.foo]
It's like gopher on steroids. (Score:1)