Viola Web Browser (2009) | Hacker News Reader

Viola Web Browser (2009)

viola.org

There is something very wrong with that page : its source code contains links to porn website in <div> elements with `display: none` styles.

I suppose the page was cracked, or that the domain was bought by black hat SEO. HN should probably not gives it credit by linking it.

Ugh. Well spotted.

Another early browser is MidasWWW. I found some code dump or something a few years ago and tried to build it[0] and after a few modifications to fix some C stuff that i guess at the time were accepted by compilers, i got it mostly working. The main issue (as can be seen from the image) is the main bar placement - from what i could tell the browser was made using a modified version of Motif for some workstation which wasn't 100% compatible with the "standard" Motif. The fix would probably be trivial but at that point i had lost interest :-P.

I uploaded the modified code to Mediafire[1] some time ago when someone asked for it, just in case you want to try compiling it yourself. Note that most of my changes were quick hacks to get things compiling, not proper fixes. The dates in the archive indicate the files i modified. The original code can now be found at GitHub[2] (though i'm not sure if it is the exact same code i used myself - looks similar enough though).

[0] https://i.imgur.com/W37vhBW.png

[1] http://www.mediafire.com/file/sr956k2fokms73d/file

[2] https://github.com/dckc/MidasWWW

I am reminded also of the Cello web browser which I remember briefly using in the early days of the web. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cello_(web_browser)

Considering the uncanny similarity in names, I wouldn't be surprised if one inspired the other.

Cello didn't have Viola's salient features, did it?

What were those?

What I remember from Cello was that it was very simple. It just contained the bare minimum of functionality that a browser needed to support. I don't think there were any extras. It also had a very small executable size.

I think it's correct that the name, at least, and maybe some of the functionality, was derived and inspired from Viola.

ViolaWWW features: stylesheets, scripting, document embedding, at least.

I also used Cello during my first online days during the summer of 1993. I worked as a summer intern at a company that had a connection to the internet. I was not really cleared for access to the connection, but I got hold of a shareware TCP/IP package for Windows (Trumpet Winsock) and an ftp client, which I used to connect to ftp.sunet.se, where I got hold of copies of both Cello and NCSA Mosaic. I remember that I preferred Cello over Mosaic for the first period. It was a bit cleaner and simpler.

Anyone else just get good vibes from seeing this? Before everything became 1984 with a couple of companies controlling the internet..

I mean. Blogs! Blogrolls. RSS. I miss the old days.

Now get off my lawn.

Webrings. Catalogs of sites, described and sorted by humans!

If only...

There were a number of browsers with "applets" in different languages later in the '90s, at least: Hotjava (however it was CapitalIzed) with Java, Grail with Python, MMM with Caml (light?), and something for Tcl (I think). You can find mention of them in the Emacs 21(?) browse-url code; well, maybe not the (why-you-should-not-use-) Tcl one. As far as I remember, nothing came of the proposed Guile version. There ought to have been one for NeWS, but I don't remember. Probably just as well Emacs/W3 didn't join in.

There were also languages with "distributed scope", as opposed to "mobile code", particularly Obliq, and maybe Kali Scheme. I'm not sure why the concept seems to have died.

Creator:

https://web.archive.org/web/20101018012531/http://www.xcf.be...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pei-Yuan_Wei

> Pei-Yuan Wei was born in Pingtung County, Taiwan. He graduated from Berkeley High School in 1986. He received his Bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and was a member of the student club, the eXperimental Computing Facility (XCF).

> In the 1990s, Wei was a founding employee of Global Network Navigator, one of the first Internet-based businesses. Later he worked for various Palm OS-related businesses. Since 2008, Perry has been living in both Taiwan and the US, and has devoted most of his time to taking care of his ill family member

I remember GNN:

https://web.archive.org/web/19961024024732/http://www02.gnn....

What's struck me is how much of the current browser functionality was established by this time: graphics, tables, scripting, bookmarks, and stylesheets. But also the missing elements: the notion that browsed content would be persistently available, for example, was and remains absent. Understandable posibly in an age of 100 MB main storage, less so with terabyte-sized disk common.

Management of the browsed corpus is also apparently out of scope.

There were a number of fairly sophisticated hypertext systems around then (like the basis of viola). I was an early WWW user when it was mainly a question of using the line-mode browser for the CERN documentation, and it seemed incredibly primitive to someone who'd being developing with high-resolution networked hypermedia. The significance of the protocol and naming escaped me, unfortunately.

Call me passeist but I'm intrigued.

also once upon a time I got the old sunOs java based hotspot.. it was so removed from the mainstream understanding of browsing, you had a main button to reclaim memory or see stats :)

ps: do you guys have some numbers on memory use and cpu requirements for these kind of programs ?

> hotspot

hotjava?

I don't know about memory usage, but I was probably running such things on a 48MB Pentium 1 then.

yeah I got confused sorry

I forgot how much ram this sun ultra 10 .. maybe 256MB

I just love the domain name. :)

How do you get a dozen violists to play in tune?

Shoot 11 of them.

bdumtiss

What's the difference between a viola player and Dr. Scholl's Footpads?

Dr. Scholl's bucks up the feet.

Apparently viola jokes as a genre are 300 years old: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viola_jokes

I mostly associate them with the early internet, thanks to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Barry_in_Cyberspace

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