Web History: Browsers

Very nice read. I love history and was using the web fairly early, before that Gopher and such.

The mind expanding concept of putting images, in cells of a table to create layout really captured my imagination. I remember sitting with my brother creating 3x3 table, fancy border with content in the middle cell. Heady times.

I'd been on the web 5-6 years before the Mosaic browser came along and the experience went from OK to terrific. I had to change ISP's because my current one said that the web was 'a fad' and 'a waste of bandwidth'. I think they were out of business in under a year. I knew some of this early history but learned an awful lot from this piece.

My father was an early antique car collector and by heading the first group of collectors in Detroit he met a lot of retired employees of the car company's, guys who invented a great many of the stuff that seems like it's always been there. Somebody had to be first. If it wasn't for the collectors a lot of this information would have been lost to history.

You think Ford Motor cares to publicize who invented the Ford script, once called the most famous logo in the world. He's the first employee at Ford and the chief designer of the Model T and his name was C. Harold Wills.

Now people are going to learn who first thought up bookmarks or cookies. Henry Ford is famous for saying 'history is bunk'. But I believe knowing this early web history is important if only for the fact that it will convince future engineers they can invent something meaningful.

“Unix-like operating systems like X-Windows”

Huh?

I did not know NeXT/Macs were so central to the Web's origins!