I've been playing with browsh (brow.sh) on terminal. I've fallen in love with 'the modern text-based browser'
Before Netscape: Web browsers of the early 1990s (2011)
21–30 of 83 posts
Re: Before Netscape: Web browsers of the early 1990s (2011)
#22Cello was the first graphical browser I used after Lynx for a short while. Though I appreciated the graphics in Cello, I did initially find the Web (graphics or just text) to be messy compared to the much more orderly Gopher. Once I started dabbling with HTML and made a crude site for my employer, I quickly went from office clerk to webmaster. At that point Gopher was pretty much forgotten.
I also used Cello, on an early Windows NT beta. It was multi threaded and async, much nicer and faster compared to Mosaic. Problem was it was also very buggy and crashed all the time. After some time I returned to Mosaic that would run without crashing.
Re: Before Netscape: Web browsers of the early 1990s (2011)
#23I had Mosaic as well as Spry. I always thought it funny that my wife had an old antique jar in the kitchen (still have it) for flour that was for a brand of lard called "Spry"
Re: Before Netscape: Web browsers of the early 1990s (2011)
#24I 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...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spry_Vegetable_Shortening
I mentioned this in a different comment, but I have a jar from back then with that name. Early "if they'd only done research" brand accident. Or maybe they meant to?
Re: Before Netscape: Web browsers of the early 1990s (2011)
#25sadly, missing one of my favorites: NCD's mariner (yeah, the x11 terminal company).
Re: Before Netscape: Web browsers of the early 1990s (2011)
#26This maybe a little off topic but... wait what? CERN had their own OS? What was its name?
Re: Before Netscape: Web browsers of the early 1990s (2011)
#27I think in those days all the well-known graphical browsers (Mosaic, Netscape) were proprietary, although free for personal use.
I think I used a browser in Emacs for quite a while. There was also the Chimera browser mentioned elsewhere.
Re: Before Netscape: Web browsers of the early 1990s (2011)
#28I 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 experimentin…
[deleted]
Re: Before Netscape: Web browsers of the early 1990s (2011)
#29I think in those days all the well-known graphical browsers (Mosaic, Netscape) were proprietary, although free for personal use. I think I used a browser in Emacs for quite a while. There was also the Chimera browser mentioned elsewhere.
I believe NCSA Mosaic was BSD.
Andreesen was hated at UIUC in the mid 90s for essentially taking the NCSA work and and then getting rich off of it. Then to add insult to injury he called his company Mosaic Communications. The university went after him for the trademark infringement (or whatever), but I don’t think there was anything legally wrong with him taking the code. Not only was Netscape, not the only company spun off of the Mosaic work, but pretty much every browser had some NCSA code in it for years and years.
Re: Before Netscape: Web browsers of the early 1990s (2011)
#30If anyone is wondering what was Netscape’s first big feature differentiator was, it was inline JPEGs. Mosaic could just display GIFs inline. JPEGs would require an external handler, typically LView on Windows, or xv on Linux.