1991 WWW-NeXT Implementation

Lynx design was driven by the need to support browsing Gopher spaces. It really didn’t need a GUI.

You are wrong.

“ The inline images such as the world/book icon and the CERN icon, would have been displayed in separate windows, as it didn't at first do inline images.” https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/FAQ.html#browser

“ Marc [Andreessen] and Eric [Bina] did a number of very important things. They made a browser which was easy to install and use. They were the first one to get inline images working - to that point browsers had had varieties of fonts and colors, but pictures were displayed in separate windows.” https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/FAQ.html#browser

In the last quote Tim Berners Lee is talking about the Mosaic browser Marc and Eric built at NCSA. It is arguably the thing that made Marc Andreessen famous. And It is indisputably the start of the graphical web. I mean, Marc literally and controversially invented the IMG tag for this.

Mosaic came out in 1993, two years after the first WWW (the browser being discussed). So in the earliest years of the web people were absolutely using text mode browsers.

(And if displaying graphics optionally in their own window counts as being graphical to you, email and ftp were already there.)

Yes and no.

Yes, the first web browser/editor was a GUI application from the start, so was the original Tim's idea. But the first browser/editor was working on NeXT machines only, which were very expensive and rare. Only few people actually had the opportunity to experience the web this way and most people seen this software in action as a demonstration only.

The first browser most people used when introduced to the web was a "dumb" command line client https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_Mode_Browser. It was as simple as possible, so that it could be compiled on any platform and used over telnet, it wasn't even using curses library.

So the early web users were experiencing the web via text browsers only until the rise of gui browsers later.

See https://blog.marbu.eu/posts/2023-04-29-the-first-web-browser...

Since the entire point was to display hypertext, of course not. Text browsers were something that appeared much later, and was always weird and fringe. For example I've never used one never installed one.

OmniWeb was I believe the only web browser released for the NeXT/Apple merger Rhapsody project.

The InfiniteMac project runs emulations of NeXT machines in the browser. This one has WorldWideWeb.app version 1.0.

https://infinitemac.org/1991/NeXTStep%202.1

So a determined researcher might be able to compile it from source.

Maybe someone here can do it, but I can't. The Makefile tries to include something at `/usr/lib/nib/app.make`, and I don't have anything there.

There are some clues at https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/444717/how-to-compi... but I'm not sure I'm willing to dive down that rabbit-hole.

No. NeXTstep circa 1990 was very different from OpenStep in 1994. If this was OpenStep-based it would have a chance.

NeXT often provided tools to migrate from one version of the frameworks to the next, so it might be possible to get it there, but it’d be a lot of work and a lot of manual massaging would likely still be required.

Definitely not. It's old enough that `Object` is the base class, lots of functions use the old NX prefix (instead of NS), it predates the retain/release paradigm, etc.

Getting it running wouldn't be an impossible task, because it's a pretty small project (~5k lines of Objective-C) and early 90s Objective-C is a pretty small language. But you'd need to shim all of the long-dead system APIs, or port the code to use their modern cousins.

This is likely url of XFIND gateway[1,2] which was basically a first web service making information from XFIND information system available via web. It was already in operational/demo-able state along with WorldWideWeb browser/editor (NeXT), Line mode browser (dumb command line client) in early stage of the web in the end of 1990. This is because gateways like these were crucial for the web to take of in the particle physics scientific community in the first years of the project.

This may seem obvious and boring now, but back then, it made a real difference (copy pasting a section from my old post [3]):

... a physicist from German particle physics lab DESY who get used to look up information via XFIND at CERN, but using it from DESY was bit clumsy. First of all he had to telnet to CERN, then login to IBM CERNVM machine, then start XFIND there and then finally place his query to XFIND. Moreover as the connection was slow an unstable, one have to repeat this procedure again in case of a network failure. Compared to this using Line Mode Browser from DESY to directly access XFIND Gateway at CERN was a big improvement, which helped the web to spread to DESY.

[1] https://www.w3.org/Talks/FINDGateway.html [2] example http://www.dnp.fmph.uniba.sk/cernlib/asdoc/fatmen_html3/node... [3] https://blog.marbu.eu/posts/2023-04-29-the-first-web-browser...

the graph mind cares what you do, but not who you are

Per Wikipedia: "Firefox was created in 2002 under the codename "Phoenix" by members of the Mozilla community who desired a standalone browser rather than the Mozilla Application Suite bundle."

I do remember from the time that it actually was one young guy who made a strip down version of the Mozilla browser that then got incorporated as a Mozilla product and replaced the Mozilla browser some years after. I don't see that mentioned anywhere though. History says it was Blake Ross[1] coming from Netscape but I don't remember it that way.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blake_Ross

NeXT invented Objective-C and encouraged its use, and the object-oriented paradigm was as popular back then as rust is today. It was just trendy to do so.

NeXTStep was famous for rapid application development. The framework combined with Interface Builder, a GUI builder, is just magic. I read a quote a while ago, Berners-Lee saying that without NeXTStep he couldn't have built the project. Unfortunately I can't find any reference anymore.

Edit: Seems somebody else found it, see other comments.

There's a book on Objective-C:

https://goodreads.com/book/show/1945013.Object_Oriented_Prog...

and also see the magazine articles:

- “No Silver Bullet – Essence and Accident in Software Engineering.”. Fredrick P. Brooks, Jr.

and the rebuttal:

- "There IS a Silver Bullet" by Brad Cox from Byte magazine – the October 1990 issue: https://theopensourcery.com/there-is-a-silver-bullet/

Basically it was Smalltalk bolted onto C and with the elegant and robust NeXT frameworks meant that much of an application's functionality was provided by the underlying system which was revolutionary at the time.

From a different discussion:

>A quick overview of Interface Builder is Steve Job's demo for NeXT --- perhaps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dl0CbKYUFTY > >where they discuss how dragging/drawing allows one to make 80% of the app, and the balance of 20% is one's own code.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40966774

From just skimming, it’s some nice, clean Objective-C. Always pleasant to read!

One way to look at this code is as a quick prototype to get the idea into real thing to play with. And to appreciate that, one have to realize that the original idea included both reading and editing of web pages easily in the same client in WYSIWYG fashion.

See https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb.html for context:

I wrote the program using a NeXT computer. This had the advantage that there were some great tools available -it was a great computing environment in general. In fact, I could do in a couple of months what would take more like a year on other platforms, because on the NeXT, a lot of it was done for me already. There was an application builder to make all the menus as quickly as you could dream them up. there were all the software parts to make a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get - in other words direct manipulation of text on screen as on the printed - or browsed page) word processor. I just had to add hypertext, (by subclassing the Text object)

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