Live data from Hacker News

Before Netscape: Web browsers of the early 1990s (2011)

arstechnica.com

11–20 of 83 posts

Re: Before Netscape: Web browsers of the early 1990s (2011)

#11

I remember the first time I saw Mosaic - a friend of mine was reading a digital graphic novel. I was absolutely gobsmacked at how incredible that was: not only did someone create something in a country far from mine, I was able to look at it in my home—perhaps minutes after its creation. So quickly, we become accustomed to the amazing.

I don't remember my initial impression. I just remember how 10 minutes later I was trying the hardest pretending I had just stumbled onto pictures of naked women by accident LOL.

Re: Before Netscape: Web browsers of the early 1990s (2011)

#12
I used the Atari browser CAB [1]. It had auto reload capabilities, you could have the browser open in a window in the background and it would reload the page while I was editing the html in the foreground window. Very handy for developing. Not sure about timeframe though, 98?

[1] https://atari.clauss-net.de/cab.html

Re: Before Netscape: Web browsers of the early 1990s (2011)

#15
I first used SPRY Mosaic as provided by CompuServe (my first ISP). I had written an article for a late 1995 special edition of Doctor Dobbs Journal which still has my screen image captures of the SPRY Mosaic browser:

http://www.drdobbs.com/web-development/clientserver-developm...

Re: Before Netscape: Web browsers of the early 1990s (2011)

#16

I remember the first time I saw Mosaic - a friend of mine was reading a digital graphic novel. I was absolutely gobsmacked at how incredible that was: not only did someone create something in a country far from mine, I was able to look at it in my home—perhaps minutes after its creation. So quickly, we become accustomed to the amazing.

I remember first seeing Mosaic when I started taking classes at Brown University. The university CS department people had very wisely set it up so that any CS students could not only very easily create their own Web pages from files in their home directory, but also easily do CGI scripts that were publicly accessible. The easy CGI wasn't so great for security, but was fabulous for lowering the barrier to experimenting.

Using that CGI, I wrote several services, mostly in Perl, and one in C. (The C one was so that I could use the GD library to draw some GIF parts of a hypermedia image of the main workstation lab, with faces of people there, which machines were free, etc., since it wasn't doable as well in HTML at the time.)

After seeing it at the university, I also went and and installed Mosaic and a the NCSA or Apache HTTP server at my workplace (where I was in an R&D group), and wrote some demonstrations of it (e.g., doing our engineering documents in it instead of Interleaf/FrameMaker, clickable hypermedia floorplan).

I'd actually already been on the Internet as a kid (gateways, email, Usenet, ftp, etc.), and had already worked with a few offline hypertext systems before I saw the Web (as well as being aware of earlier grand visions), but the Web was obviously going to let us do Internet things we couldn't before, and also accelerate bringing the goodness of the Internet to everyone. (Well, we dropped the ball on some of the goodness, but it still happens, just not as much nor nearly as universally as we'd hoped, and we can still improve that.)

Re: Before Netscape: Web browsers of the early 1990s (2011)

#19
somehow, seeing Mosaic in 1993 or so was not a big deal.. Gopher was in use and the various FTP clients to transfer files, and Mosaic seemed like a small step from those, just unified into a page. Composable HTML was not a thing yet. The GUI was so primitive compared to daily desktop software, that it wasnt very compelling. Public access to a unified Internet was also not a thing yet, networks were restricted and siloed by governance and protocols. Usenet news already had some binaries if you really wanted to distribute or look for something, but the content was limited. basically, not a fan on first looks

Re: Before Netscape: Web browsers of the early 1990s (2011)

#20
post #13

Did anyone else ever use Arachne?

I remember trying it in the mid 90s and then not using it much. I remember it being quite slow. The lack of even rudimentary multi-tasking caused it to hang easily. I could see where it might be useful in a lab with 8086 and 286 machines. But I think even at the time, this software had what seemed like a high cost, like $99. If there had ever been a DOS-only port of Lynx (without requiring Win32), that would have been a better option instead.

Since the 486 I used could run Windows 3.1, Trumpet Winsock and Netscape and later Opera were good enough for the times. It was claimed that Opera was written in assembler (and it did feel like it was faster than other browsers) and it introduced MDI (tabbed) browsing.

Post reply on HN