CERN day 1: rebuilding the first web browser

That looks really fun!

How did you end up doing this? (Assuming the poster is the author of the blog, perhaps someone else can answer this question though?)

The author of the blog is Remy Sharp. He was first involved with these projects at CERN in 2013, it looks like: http://line-mode.cern.ch/interviews/

He is a web developer.

"My role was the coding part. I have a lot of experience writing Javascript-based applications. I could see how Javascript could solve a lot of the problems to replicate this old browser. So I worked on the back end server that allows you to visit any other website and get it into the line-mode browser."

Interesting my first experience of www was via the ITU gopher which had a link to I assume the line mode browser.

It was a curiosity at the time I was more exercised by the fact that the ITU had public access to the x.500 database I supported - god only knows what our internal security would have said.

This reminds me of the wonderful short story by Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”. In the story, the character attempts to authentically rewrite Cervantes’ Don Quixote — not by simply copying the known text, not even by attempting to re-live Cervantes’ life and spontaneously writing the novel just as Cervantes did, but by somehow living his own 20th century life and happening onto writing a novel that is word for word identical to Don Quixote. It’s a marvelous, impossible premise which speaks to our fantasies of creativity and fetishization of original artifacts.

“Those who have insinuated that Menard devoted his life to writing a contemporary Quixote besmirch his illustrious memory. Pierre did not want to compose another Quixote, which is surely easy enough — he wanted to compose the Quixote. Nor, surely, need one be obliged to note that his goal was never a mechanical transcription of the original; he had no intention of copying it. His admirable ambition was to produce a number of pages which coincided — word for word and line for line — with those of Miguel de Cervantes.”

Here’s a PDF of an English translation:

http://hispanlit.qwriting.qc.cuny.edu/files/2011/06/Borges-P...

The story has some really funny sections where Borges compares a passage by Cervantes with an (identical) passage by Menard, comparing their style and meaning (which are not the same!). It's just fantastic.

"This machine is a ? Do not POWER it down!!"

What does it say there?