WorldWideWeb – the first web browser | Hacker News Reader

WorldWideWeb – the first web browser

worldwideweb.cern.ch

84 pointszdw18 comments

Wouldn't mind a bit more explicaton of exactly what I'm looking at. For example:

> References to other information are represented like *this*[a hyperlink]. Double-click on it to jump to related information.

I remember accessing the web at a pretty early stage by telnet to info.cern.ch which presented a text client pretty much like an old version of lynx, but double clicking on that would get you nowhere. You had to press Enter, iirc.

Does the featured link emulate some internal client at Cern?

> Does the featured link emulate some internal client at Cern?

It's a javascript emulation of first browser/editor running on a NeXT machine. Only very few people actually used this setup.

For more context, see https://worldwideweb.cern.ch/

> I remember accessing the web at a pretty early stage by telnet to info.cern.ch which presented a text client pretty much like an old version of lynx, but double clicking on that would get you nowhere. You had to press Enter, iirc.

I guess that was the line mode browser? CERN did a javascript rebuild of it as well in 2013 https://line-mode.cern.ch/, but the emulator is no longer running. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_Mode_Browser

> I guess that was the line mode browser?

Seems you must be right and I did not "rc" since you had to supply the number of the link you wanted, rather than hit enter on it, lynx style :) Thanks for the reminder!

I remember using that text client as well. If I recall correctly, it was just called "www" and presented links as footnotes that you could select by number. I remember thinking it was quite clumsy and would never be as elegant and clean as Gopher. ;) I always assumed that was the first web browser, but it makes sense that this NeXT-ish/GUI-ish client was the first, given the circumstances of its development.

I've got a NeXT turbo slab and I've used this software. It's a pretty convincing clone.

Fundamental protocols have changed so much since the next days that it's hard to get it online. My 1Gb switch doesn't mind its 10Mb/s connection but even things like NFS, DNS or DHCP have moved away from what the NeXT knows how to do. There's a very old version of ssh available but modern ssh refuses to talk to it so you're back to telnet which is fine - the encryption overhead is unreasonable on a 68k.

I run a special proxy machine that accommodates it and it has compatible versions of these on it.

The newest browser you can use is onniweb and part of the proxy is dehttps'ing things ... It's quite a bit of work.

Not even TIFF formats are the same. Imagemagick does not support the format the NeXT exports.

The easiest way of getting graphics off is actually to "print it" as a PostScript file and then ftp it over or cp it using an older NFS.

The entire interface is PostScript based which is why it has high compatibility with Sun NeWS (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS). I've long suspected there's a way to go from NeXT via NeWS -> NeWS/2 on OS/2 and then VNC to a modern machine but I've never taken the time to set up the pipeline.

It does have a SCSI chain but not only has all that hardware become really expensive but it also doesn't get you much unless you really want more local storage.

One of the interesting things is when you export screenshots they'll come across in color. I've wondered if there's modern ways of getting this device to emit color with some cheap hardware but I don't know enough about the pipeline.

I also have ViolaWWW on an HPUX machine. That thing is another story

Note that unlike almost all of its successors, WorldWideWeb supported not just browsing but also WYSIWYG editing.

PS. unsuited Vint: http://jodenda.free.fr/images/divers/TimVint.png

Amaya was both a browser and an editor. And it was developed until the GTK2 days. Ditto with Netscape and the Mozilla suite, now Seamonkey.

NeXT was such a cool ecosystem. It's not very known out of tech circles, but is there at some interesting technological crossroads. The first web browser. DOOM. And of course, the decision to base MacOS and then ultimately iOS on the Objective-C frameworks.

Also the Mach-inspired XNU kernel at the heart of both macOS and iOS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU

The Browser – WorldWideWeb Next Application (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26680839 - April 2021 (21 comments)

The Browser – WorldWideWeb Next Application - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25013103 - Nov 2020 (8 comments)

The Browser – WorldWideWeb NeXT Application - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24955122 - Oct 2020 (1 comment)

WorldWideWeb - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19494518 - March 2019 (1 comment)

CERN 2019 WorldWideWeb Rebuild: 2019 rebuilding of the original NeXT web browser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19183316 - Feb 2019 (1 comment)

The quit button doesn't quit. Print button doesn't print, and a multitude of other menu items are also no-ops. Still a neat toy.

I prefer a solid web-based Netscape emulator, for example:

https://www.dejavu.org/1995win.htm

or..

https://at.staticfiles.at/snippets/interaktiv/2015-01-netsca... (note: working print button! And fatally, no working URL bar)

I've always been surprised at how flat and grey NeXTStep was. Jobs was famously all about design and visuals yet NeXT is easily one of the ugliest operating systems out there. Both Win 3.11 and MacOS had more color. And then of course OS X focused heavily on beautiful icons and artwork. What happened at NeXT that its UI worked out so differently?

> What happened at NeXT that its UI worked out so differently?

The original NeXT cube, at which most of the investment in UI design was directed, was a high-resolution (for the time) grayscale system; color NeXT systems and NeXTStep on 3rd party hardware came later. So,NeXT’s UI elements from the beginning leaned heavily on detail (and, IIRC, animation), rather than color.

really? You need to recalibrate your aesthetics.

Here's GEM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEM_(desktop_environment)#/med...

Windows 2: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/86/Aldus_Pagemak...

Risc OS: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/5b/AcornArthur11...

Amiga: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e4/Amiga_Workben...

NextStep: http://toastytech.com/guis/ns08dock.png

You could say that's the ugliest in the same way you can have whatever opinion you want ... I don't think you'd have a lot of people agreeing with you though.

As a disclaimer I think the modern Apple interfaces feel like a blaring pop music video when you have a headache ... so take it as you will.

The original hardware was grayscale, including the NeXTcube Berners-Lee used. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT_MegaPixel_Display

> The original MegaPixel Display was a monochrome 17" monitor displaying 4 brightness levels (black, dark gray, light gray and white) in a fixed resolution of 1120 x 832 at 92 DPI (just shy of a true megapixel at 931,840 total pixels) at 68 Hz

I believe NeXT wanted the higher resolution, to display a full page on a screen, more than they wanted color. Having both would have been very expensive.

It wasn't until the NeXTstation Color that NeXT hardware included color.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTstation informs me the NeXTstation/Turbo had 256 KB VRAM for 4 colors (black, white and two shades of gray), and the NeXTstation Color/Turbo Color had 1.5 MB VRAM for 4,096 colors (12-bit).

It adds that the grayscale NeXTstation was US$4,995 (equivalent to $10,400 in 2021) and the color one was US$7,995 (equivalent to $16,600 in 2021).

By comparison, in 1990, https://everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_ii/specs/mac_iifx.htm... informs me "The Macintosh IIfx can support multiple displays -- originally at great cost -- using multiple video cards in NuBus expansion slots. The Macintosh IIfx also can support multiple resolutions, 512x384 and 640x480 are common. Portrait (vertical orientation) displays also were popular."

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but I think it's fair to say that NeXTSTEP is considered to be extraordinary for its time, and one of the most influential GUIs in history. When NeXTSTEP 0.8 came out in 1989, here's what it and some competitors looked like:

NeXTSTEP 0.8: http://toastytech.com/guis/ns08.html

Windows 2.1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_2.1x

MacOS 6.0.4: https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/System_6.0.4

The last version of NeXTSTEP was 4.x in 1996. Here's what it looked like compared to its competitors at the time:

NeXTSTEP 4.x: https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/openstep42

Windows 95: https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/win95

MacOS wasn't quite 8 yet but we'll be nice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_8

Note that Windows 95 (and OS/2) had copied NeXTSTEP GUI elements wholesale, including the 3D styling, the design of many widgets, the close and miniaturize icons, etc. It was direct and unabashed theft.

Of course NeXTSTEP had huge technological advances beyond just how its GUI looked, but that's what we're talking about. At any rate, I hope by this point that you are convinced that (1) when NeXTSTEP came out, its GUI styling was revolutionary, (2) by the time NeXT closed up shop, others were copying it rather openly, and (3) NeXTSTEP was still much better looking than they were.

Fun fact: NeXTSTEP had live window dragging in version 0.8, in 1989. By the time NeXTSTEP ceased to exist as a product, Windows and MacOS still didn't have it.

OK, good points. I think my mental timeline for NeXT was a few years off. I was comparing the 1989 greyscale release with Windows 3.1, not Windows 2. I still think by 95 Microsoft and Apple had caught up and surpassed it though. NeXT had higher resolution icons but the rest of the look hadn't evolved at all. Maybe it's the shade of grey that does it, NeXT was a darker look than the others by the end.

Authoring built right in as a first class feature. Sure with that had caught on.

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