Hacker News Reader

Comment by zokier | Hacker News Reader

One interesting thing about web is that it was graphical from day 1, in contrast to e.g. email or ftp that had more text console roots. So things like lynx were always niche, and even anachronistic. There was no era when people widely used text-mode browsers.

View on HN

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.)

Folks who want a bit more background on this should read Tim Berners-Lee's book _Weaving the Web_ (which to some degree was written using the "Navipress" web browser since it also functioned as an interactive editor (for sites which supported the "Push" protocol --- later it was bought by AOL and became "AOLPress")

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/821987.Weaving_the_Web

Another good book one can reach for more details is:

https://books.google.cz/books/about/How_the_Web_was_Born.htm...

One of the authors, Robert Cailliau, was officially assigned to the web project along with Tim Berners-Lee in it's early stages in CERN.

The editor part of the original browser is also graphical so you can select text and make links, headings, lists without the need to write HTML IIRC.

He is indeed wrong. Very wrong. I used gopher and email servers for more than a year before I started using Mosiac, and then it was another year or two before I let the image tag work. I have met Marc, and he, of course would agree, because both him, and I where actually there.

For folks who are curious, here is the story of the first (documented) photo on the web:

https://web.archive.org/web/20121205020416/https://motherboa...

Mosaic had support for XBM format prior to introducing color images. I did set up the Office of the Swedish Prime Minister around February-March of 1993, on a SUN SparcStation 1 if I remember correctly, running in a cabinet on a floor below the actual office on a 64kbps leased line. It was really a gopher site, but with that XBM support, albeit only black and white, found it useful to create an HTML “welcome” page to that gopher content of press releases, talks and articles.

There is world of difference between rendering rich text in graphics mode, and working in text mode, even if you don't have any images involved.

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...

Also most people could telnet to a host that already had the line mode browser installed. I believe that’s how a lot of non-NeXT users at CERN would be using it.

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.

You’ve probably used a machine with Lynx or GNU Emacs installed.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com