CERN day 1: rebuilding the first web browser • Hacker News Board

Re: CERN day 1: rebuilding the first web browser

#31

Post by adamdoupe » Tue, Feb 12, 2019, 6:17 PM UTC

I posted this on the blog but thought I post here too.

Last year I set up a WorldWideWeb.app (version 0.15) running in the Previous emulator on Ubuntu for a CTF challenge for DEF CON 2018 Quals (they had to exploit a buffer overflow in HTTP.c). There's a lot of other cruft around to set up and automate the challenge and getting input to WWW, but there's Vagrant and ansible scripts to set up and run everything.

There's a lot of work to set up networking in NextStep and getting all the pieces right (I think I even set up an SSH server running on NextStep).

The source is all here: https://github.com/o-o-overflow/chall-www

I'd be happy to help, I love this idea of software archeology/preservation.

Re: CERN day 1: rebuilding the first web browser

#32

Post by steve76 » Tue, Feb 12, 2019, 6:45 PM UTC

aaronharnly wrote: post #8

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 no…

It reminds me of the movie "The Bleeding Edge"

Somethings up. I bet they are doing stuff, and making sure you don't degrade cognitively.

You're around smart people. Great. Dr. Jonathan Crane was smart too.

Re: CERN day 1: rebuilding the first web browser

#33

Post by aaronharnly » Tue, Feb 12, 2019, 6:55 PM UTC

matthewwiese wrote: post #30

aaronharnly wrote: post #8

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 no…

I am so happy I decided to stumble into the comments section for this article. Your contribution of this short story by Borges is almost sublime in its essential similarity to the article of OP. I've already been a fan of Borges, but I had never heard of this piece of his before. It has positively tickled all the right literary fancies for me. Thanks much for the comment, as the story was a pleasant accoutrement to m…

Hey, you're welcome! I'm so glad you enjoyed it.

Re: CERN day 1: rebuilding the first web browser

#34

Post by donatj » Tue, Feb 12, 2019, 7:21 PM UTC

malkia wrote: post #28

I was fascinated for a while with NeXT, OpenStep, YellowBox, even had it running under Windows NT. Nowadays work in games development, and the main tool I happen to work and help with support is Radiant, which is based on QuakeEd... And QuakeEd was first released for the NeXT - https://quake.fandom.com/wiki/QuakeEd ... it also had browsers :) lol - material/textures/models/etc.

I was making maps in radiant like 15 years ago. I honestly didn't realize it was still in use.

Re: CERN day 1: rebuilding the first web browser

#35

Post by nanna » Tue, Feb 12, 2019, 8:59 PM UTC

aaronharnly wrote: post #8

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 no…

This makes me think of Terry Gilligam's recent film, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018), which spirals recursively into a retelling of a retelling of a retelling of a ... of Don Quixote. A mind bending film - 30 years in the making! - shame it's plagued by rights issues which prevent its general release. If it screens in a film festival near you, go see it!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Killed_Don_Quixote

Re: CERN day 1: rebuilding the first web browser

#36

Post by thorwasdfasdf » Tue, Feb 12, 2019, 10:05 PM UTC

Oh, this really makes me wish I was there, that first day when they turned on the machine that says "don't power me down" and put that sign on there, at the beginning of the web, when the first browsers were being developed. So much potential, so many possibilities, so much innovation soon to occur.

Re: CERN day 1: rebuilding the first web browser

#37

Post by The_Androctonus » Tue, Feb 12, 2019, 10:09 PM UTC

thorwasdfasdf wrote: post #36

Oh, this really makes me wish I was there, that first day when they turned on the machine that says "don't power me down" and put that sign on there, at the beginning of the web, when the first browsers were being developed. So much potential, so many possibilities, so much innovation soon to occur.

Ironically, Tim BL mentions in his book "Weaving the Web" that when he first launched the web, nobody cared and people at CERN thought it was useless.

Re: CERN day 1: rebuilding the first web browser

#38

Post by gnufx » Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 12:04 AM UTC

I wonder what I'd have thought if I'd seen the NeXT browser at the time. I must have been one of the first few thousand WWW users, when I think it was largely providing access to the cernlib docs. At the time, I was working on fairly advanced networked hypermedia (with NeWS). Using line mode browser -- via X.25 then, I guess -- I thought "how primitive", and "haven't they heard of Xanadu?". So much for the important feature, the protocol/naming... I don't remember the reaction to Viola subsequently, but I think I found it before the Mosaic set-back.

Re: CERN day 1: rebuilding the first web browser

#39

Post by bschne » Thu, Feb 14, 2019, 8:18 PM UTC

aaronharnly wrote: post #8

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 no…

Borges is amazing! I just recently finished reading "Fictions" (a collection of short stories) and was blown away by all the references and topics he manages to cover in sometimes just a few pages. Sometimes I kept googling authors, philosophical concepts, etc. every few lines while reading.

Re: CERN day 1: rebuilding the first web browser

#40

Post by rurban » Fri, Feb 15, 2019, 6:52 AM UTC

C1sc0cat wrote: post #6

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.

I did it via modem dialup on the emacs gopher client. Those days our TU Graz hypertext university system was more advanced (HTP - hyper text protocol, a gopher with images, search, index and editing) than the primitive www system at CERN, but they caught up, even if it always had much less features than our system.