Comment by DanielKehoe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanielKehoe | Hacker News Reader

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Harumph. I was an editor for NeXTWorld magazine [1] at the time TimBL invented the web. "WWWNeXTStepEditor version 0.12" was the first web browser I used.

Mass adoption of the web was held back by lack of ISPs. It may seem strange now, but in 1991 there was no way to connect to the Internet unless you were affiliated with a university or a big R&D company. in 1991, TimBl's WWW wasn't any more relevant to NeXT than Gopher or Brewster Kahle's WAIS or, for that matter, CompuServe.

Some of us at NeXTWorld, including John Perry Barlow, Simson Garfinkel, and Seth Ross saw the potential of the WorldWideWeb, but we never wrote about it at NeXTWorld because most NeXT users couldn't connect to the Internet. I don't know when Jobs first saw the WorldWideWeb but he had many opportunities and it never was important until he got excited about WebOjects at Apple. By that time, Marc Andreessen had released Mosaic, the first web browser for Windows, and ISPs were sprouting up to enable consumer connections to the Internet.

NeXT computers would have needed to provide a modem, and PPP for TCP/IP over dialup, and NeXT-provided connection points (through a 3rd party partner?) to make the web useful to NeXT users outside of academia and government.

[1] http://www.fortuityconsulting.com/danielkehoe/earlyweb.html

The prototype I evaluated at NeXT was supposed to work with any modem (remember Hayes compatibility?) and didn't need PPP, since we had arranged a proprietary handshake with the organization that gave out IP addresses (I've forgotten the name. At the time I believe there was just one entity allowed to give out IP addresses.) We discussed requiring a specific modem - but decided that we didn't want that to be a requirement for getting an IP address.

Ultimately, it came down to "unsupportability" by NeXT. Several people other than me told Steve that things would go wrong connecting to the Internet, and when they did we would be mostly helpless to support them. At the same time, the organization in Virginia didn't want to support the software either - the software was a "black box" mostly provided by us on their machines. So we killed the project. I never heard anybody mention browsers.

It's absolutely fascinating to hear this story. I'd never heard it before. That was a historically significant moment. Do you recall if the software was internally developed at NeXT or acquired from a third party?

I was told that we had developed most of the software in conjunction with the group that gave out IP addresses - but that we ended up doing almost all the work ourselves and setting up their machines at their site. (They were skeptical about the whole project, and not enthusiastic about the automatic registration of new IPs. When I spoke to them it was obvious that they wanted to ignore the whole project.) My impression was that our engineers who had done the work weren't around Redwood City (or perhaps they had quit - we weren't doing well and lots of people were leaving at the time.) So I was figuring out the code on my own and doing the debugging - nobody was taking ownership of the code. It was an overly complex mess since it both registered for an IP and then did billing. Very fragile.

> and it never was important until he got excited about WebOjects at Apple.

Not sure exactly what you mean by that since WebObjects was created at NeXT way before Steve was back at Apple. In fact before the acquisition Steve was the main WebObjects promoter so way before being back at Apple. True at Apple, Steve did continue to promote WebObjects internally for a couple years but afterwards he moved on.

Ah, you're absolutely right. I forgot WebObjects was a NeXT project. Now I'm wondering when Steve Jobs first saw the WorldWideWeb.

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