CERN's World-First Browser Reborn: Now You Can Browse Like It's 1990 71
A team at Switzerland-based research center CERN has rebuilt WorldWideWeb, the world's first browser created in 1990 for its researchers. From a report: Earlier this month a group of developers and designers convened at CERN, or The European Organization for Nuclear Research, to rebuild WorldWideWeb in celebration of its 30th anniversary. The WorldWideWeb browser was built by Sir Tim Berners-Lee in 1990 on a NeXT machine, following his March 1989 proposal for a 'Mesh' or global hypertext system for CERN that he would later call the World Wide Web. The system aimed to address information loss that came with a high turnover and CERN's constantly changing technology. This was an acute problem at CERN that Berners-Lee predicted the world would also face within the next decade. Besides the browser, Berners-Lee developed 'httpd', the first hypertext server software for serving up early webpages. The WorldWideWeb browser simulator is now available online to view in a modern browser. For anyone curious to know how to use it, the developers have provided written instructions and a video demo.
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Not really a browser (Score:2)
It was easier for anyone to create content (Score:3)
You could easily make your own "hyperdocuments".
It's a bit sad that people only do that on Facebook and other walled gardens today.
And why would I want to do that? (Score:2)
Now You Can Browse Like It's 1990 ...
Why the heck would I want to do that?
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So you want to wait multiple seconds for few hundred javascript tracking scripts, autoplay videeos and flashy ads? Those 1990's pages load in a few milliseconds or so and do not need progress balls, email subscription popups and other distrubanses.
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"Those 1990's pages load in a few milliseconds or so and do not need progress balls"
Not in the 1990's. A big Institution like a college with a thousand users would be using a T1 connection that is rated at about 1.2mbs, A really big one would dish out the Big Bucks for a T3 at around 45mbs.
Now you had to share that line, so your average speed during the 1990's was around 100kbs on these networks (unless you were online off hours) Now this was much better then a modem for during the 1990's they ranged from
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Now You Can Browse Like It's 1990 ...
Why the heck would I want to do that?
Nobody said you would. But someone might, for whatever personal reasons, so now they can. There are many ways you can experience life in the 1400s, or 1776, or 2000BC. Some people watch soap operas. Some eat bugs. I don't know why, it's their life and option, right? Live and let live; sound okay? I don't think they're hurting anyone. You could argue that it's wasted effort, but so is art, sports, entertainment in general. Webpages have gotten so terrible that maybe a return to simpler roots is a go
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Now You Can Browse Like It's 1990 ...
Why the heck would I want to do that?
Nobody said you would. But someone might, for whatever personal reasons, so now they can. There are many ways you can experience life in the 1400s, or 1776, or 2000BC. Some people watch soap operas. Some eat bugs. I don't know why, it's their life and option, right? Live and let live; sound okay? I don't think they're hurting anyone. You could argue that it's wasted effort, but so is art, sports, entertainment in general. Webpages have gotten so terrible that maybe a return to simpler roots is a good thing.
I see, I see...Thanks!
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Cool, thank you! And for the record, I don't understand many of people's pursuits and priorities, but I do enjoy the richness of the variety of life, and somehow often find amusement in others' wackiness. Occasionally youtube "people are awesome" is fun.
Meh... (Score:1)
~1997 [seamonkey-project.org] works for me
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Don't be a chump. Grab a copy of Mosaic from evolt, and drive down memory lane off the information super highway. :D
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sweet (Score:1)
will it run on the amiga?
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Won't need to. The Amiga already have browsers from the 90's.
I shed a tear (Score:4, Insightful)
I remember the telnet interface... It was so exciting.
Who knew this would turn the Internet to a shithole where cheap tricks for data collection and crap dominate in such a short time.
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Who knew this would turn the Internet to a shithole where cheap tricks for data collection and crap dominate in such a short time.
Basically anyone who wasn't an idealistic delusional geek who naively believed that all of humanity's problems could be solved by technology.
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Who knew this would turn the Internet to a shithole where cheap tricks for data collection and crap dominate in such a short time.
That happened because dumb people flooded onto the internet and their choices overwhelmed the choices of the more technical crowd on the net in the 80's who would never have tolerated the shitfest that the non-techie crowd went all-in for.
No. There certainly was a flood of non-technical users, but this is not what ruined the Internet. What ruined it was commercialization, beginning with the its use as a advertising platform, and culminating with its transformation into a surveillance & data mining platform.
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Egg vs chicken. It was hand in hand. Corporate went to lengths to entice september users, which in turn attracted more commercial attention by having numbers and smelling of "money to be made", which bounces back to corporate looking for ways to rope in, lock in, etc.
More users more money spent grooming more users to make more money goto10
The feedback loop continued and now we're drowning in sites being sold on mobile-friendly "upgrades". Looking forward to what's next.
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Sure, growing numbers of users fueled commercialization, but it's the numbers that matter, not whether or not the users are "technical". My point is that blaming the current state of the Internet on "non-technical" users is both erroneous and elitist.
I've been in IT for over 35 years, and frankly it's the elitist part that bugs me the most. I'm tired of "technical" people who believe they're superior because they understand the technical underpinnings of the Internet. It's like a mechanic thinking they're a
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Telnet was less of an interface and more just a direct access to a port. You can still use telnet today
telnet slashdot.org 80
get /
read your data. and do an other telnet session to send your response.
Telnet itself wasn't that exciting, you were probably better off with most of your Local BBS's then what Telnet (BBS's) had to offer. However Public FTP sites were da'bom! I stink at spelling... however I can always spell anonymous (then use my email address as the password)
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You weren't born then probably, so you have no idea. To try out the first public http client ever, you had to telnet to a cern host, log on and then it RAN in all its glory.
Didn't take Nostradamus (Score:2)
Who knew this would turn the Internet to a shithole where cheap tricks for data collection and crap dominate in such a short time.
Didn't use Usenet much I take it...
If I have seen further, it was because I stood on piles of writhing freaks.
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Who knew this would turn the Internet to a shithole
The internet is the single biggest enabler of our modern economy. It also seems to be a place where you like to go to vent your misplaced frustrations I assume you do it for pleasure.
What an incredibly successful "shithole" it has become. What an epic failure.
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Fun fact: (Score:2)
The browser and the operation system it runs on are smaller than a single average pagecall of an average contemporary website. It probably runs on today's feature phones and loads those websites from yesteryear in 300 milliseconds over 3G.
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Thanks to jQuery and Angular, even the simplest website, are now nearly a Megabyte Big.
Yes, but can it access /.? (Score:1)
Well, you can read the front page at least.
When do we celebrate 5000 for the invention of wri (Score:1)
"Now, this cow drawing here is not really a cow. It's a pictogram symbolizing an offering to appease the gods."
Re: Wish the NextSTEP UI were still around and upd (Score:2)
I just started using WindowMaker (based on GNUStep, based on NeXTSTEP) again. I immediately felt like I was arriving back in a time when UX was more important than design and it felt wonderful.
Can we have it back? (Score:4, Insightful)
I mean, looking at the bloated spyware we have to deal with today, that web browser is still light-years ahead of what we have now. Sleek, a clear, easy to use menu system, BORDERS so you know where one part ends and another begins, no interference by the browser when trying to type, the list goes on.
What this world needs is a good web browser. This was it. It's been all downhill from there.
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The sleek easy to use menu system, often meant your most used commands are dug in some menu item.
Borders or useless white space, especially back in the 1990's where your display is 640x400 resolution and on a 14" CRT monitor, we just needed more space.
I don't get your point about interference by the browser when trying to type.
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that web browser is still light-years ahead of what we have now.
Tell me about it. If we all had that browser we wouldn't read such stupidly ignorant comments like yours because posting on Slashdot would be something you wouldn't be capable of anymore.
Sorry but you're in angry rant mode without any thought about the implications of your rant. You wouldn't use that browser because it wouldn't be functional and the internet would return to being a curious experiment rather than the single biggest economic enabler of our modern civilisation.
Guess I could test that my Sgi Octane (Score:2)
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Ah Nostalgia. I see a lot of posts and videos of people showing their nostalgia of the old things. However the equipment they may have gotten for a few hundred dollars today, were wicked expensive devices that you were considered a lucky individual to even see, let alone use.
Browsing the Web was nice with Netscape on an SGI Octane. If I had a $10,000 PC build computer, and try to do things in 30 years, the difference wouldn't be that bad, compared to the actual device I am using.
If you are going to be No
Cool site - love the Usenet at the bottom (Score:2)
Progress (Score:2)
As much as there is clearly a higher level of sophistication in today's websites, which is arguably better in many ways, I'm struck by how little improvement there has been in the space of two decades.
I get the feeling HTML was co-opted and distorted way beyond it's initial scope without enough people pausing to ask whether something better should be developed to replace it rather than just making more and more elaborate incarnations of what in procedural code we would call spaghetti code.
And that's even be
Thanks for the German proxy (Score:2)
It seems like the recreation here is actually an anonymous proxy. You can go to another website and it will send a query from the CERN servers.
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you can now (Score:2)
run a browser in your browser!