Conventional wisdom has it that Mosaic was the first graphical web browser. Even though Mosaic – the basis for Netscape – certainly kickstarted the web revolution, it wasn’t the first graphical web browser at all – that honour goes to Erwise, developed by four Finnish college students in 1991. It was more advanced than Mosaic, ran on the X Window System, but didn’t catch on in the end. The four developers recently gave an interview detailing Erwise and its history.
Kim Nyberg, Kari Sydänmaanlakka, Teemu Rantanen, and Kati Borgers were the four college students who developed the first graphical point-and-click web browser in Helsinki, Finland, in 1991, and completed it in April 1992. It had all sorts of abilities that Mosaic, released a year later, did not have, such as word search on webpages. This search system was interesting because if it couldn’t find a word on the currently displayed webpage, it would trail the internet to find it in other pages – 12 at the time. More impressive was Erwise’s ability to load multiple pages at the same time; you could click on a hyperlink and another window would open the linked page.
How did a few Fins come up with the idea to code a graphical web browser? Tim Beners-Lee realised that a graphical browser would make the web much easier to use, and figured it would be a good project for students. He placed several requests around the world, and Ari Lemmke, the instructor of the four students, picked it up, and suggested the four started working on it “or something Linux-related”. The group opted for the browser project.
Several other projects followed Erwise, and of course Mosaic was the one that would eventually become the mother of all graphical web browsers. “At first they did a lot of things quite wrong with Mosaic. There were problems we had already solved,” Nyberg laughs. Nyberg would even send an email with some advice to the people behind Mosaic.
This raises the question: why didn’t Erwise become the mother of all web browsers? The problem was that at the time, Finland was in a deep economic depression, the country was bankrupt, and venture capital was non-existent – venture capital that was abundant in Silicon Valley, where Mosaic would attract more than enough of it to kickstart the web revolution.
We could not have created a business around Erwise in Finland then. The only way we could have made money would have been to continue our developing it so that Netscape might have finally bought us. Still, the big thing is, we could have reached the initial Mosaic level with relatively small extra work. We should have just finalized Erwise and published it on several platforms.
Rantanen wanted to get a job to do just that, but there wasn’t even enough money to do that.
This just goes to show that great and innovative ideas get lost because there is no money. Not too long ago I saw a story on Dutch TV about a Dutch 16-year old girl who has devoted her life to become a world-class figure skater. She receives all the support from her family, who devote all their cash to her dream, and because that family happens to be wealthy enough, she gets the opportunity to achieve her dream
While I obviously hope she gets where she wants to go, it did make me wonder just how much talent and how many good ideas are wasted because there is no rich family, no investors, no good ol’ luck.
Depressing.
Link typo:
a hef=…</a
should be:
a href=…</a
For anyone interested, the address the link would take you to, if working (all one line):
http://www.xconomy.com/national/2009/03/03/the-greatest-internet-pi…
Wow, I love these history lessons. We’ve come a long way, but not really. It’s still a matter of clicking into a window full of text. But ignore me, I have just finished a paper on new media, interfaces and mediation
It’s worth knowing where all the stuff we take for granted today originally came from. Especially in IT these “history lessons”, which I often consider basic knowledge, are a good chance to invest some time to learn something new. As usual, it’s possible to see that several concepts that the oh so clever marketing guys present to the public as “all new”, “just invented” or “milestone” often have already been around for a while.
i thought ie is based in mosaic, not netscape
Proudly presenting: The Not Trolling response!
Marc Andreessen was one of the original developers of Mosaic, and was funded by Jim Clark (SGI) to develop Mosaic into Netscape. In fact, Netscape Navigator 1.0 was little more than a rebranded NCSA Mosaic. Same code base.
Spyglass, Inc. was founded by NCSA to commercialize NCSA stuff. They developed their own “fork” of Mosaic. Microsoft licensed Spyglass Mosaic to create Internet Explorer. In fact, Internet Explorer 1.0 was little more than a rebranded Spyglass Mosaic. Same code base.
In a roundabout sort of way, both IE and Netscape were based on the original NCSA Mosaic. Of course, by a few versions later, there was probably very little of the original code left, as evidenced by the horrible incompatibility of Netscape and IE all through the 90s.
And before Netscape Navigator hit 1.0, it was called ‘Mosaic Netscape’. When I worked at an ISP way back when, we used to give customers a couple of floppies that included Trumpet Winsock for Win3.1 and the 0.9 version of Mosaic Netscape. You can even see a screenshot of it in the Wikipedia Netscape article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Navigator
It should probably be pointed out that the world’s very first web browser, the browser that Tim Berners-Lee created the WWW on, was called WorldWideWeb, and was graphical. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb) It was, however, available only on NeXT computers, and was virtually unknown to the public. Apparently even to this day, if articles like this are still getting published.
Edited 2009-03-04 01:43 UTC
Not at all. What about counter question: “How many good ideas were not even born because its potential medium (human being) was rich enough and had no need for any vision?”
A good example is Sablikova, a speedskater. There’s no speedskater stadium or any other suitable facility in Czech Republic. She was forced to train her style on some kind of modified door, somehow. Really, classic wooden door! Maybe thanks to this insufficient conditions, support and whatever, her dream and need for achievement was even stronger.. at the end she won gold medal in Nagano and other high appraised events. On top of that, she introduced a new technique in speedskatering which is now imitating by others. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sablikova
How can you train speed skating on a door? Must be a very long door then…
As I heard if you don’t have a stadium you have to wait for winter and go on the next lake.
I guess that’s what she probably did.
Still you are right: Challenges are important for humans. Some of the greatest achievments were made by people facing tough challenges.
I would say she used the door to train the technique during summertime. I was surprised too when I heard it for the first time 🙂
Speed skating on a wooden door?
You sure you got your information right?
Even the wikipedia article you linked threw up no results when I searched for the text ‘door’ or ‘wood’.
I’m guessing they may have meant “floor” instead of “door”.
Yes, the door. Can’t imagine it either but I would guess she trained her technique on it.
Sorry, but I still can’t find any reference of this on the internet. All the sites Google throws up state she trained abroad.
Where did you read / hear about this?
I’ve done semi-professional speed-skating for 4-5 years. Busy right now, but will explain later
.
Creative to use a door, but the dimensions are about right so why not 🙂
Take a plain door with smooth paint or varnish surface, put it flat on the floor. Nail two two-by-fours on top of each other along the top and bottom edges of the door. Put on some socks giving you low friction to the door surface. Stand sideways on the door, and use your legs to push you from one two-by-four side to the other. You have now an easy way to simulate the skating motion.
Finally someone with a clue instead of the endless “a door is too small to skate on” comments
It would work like the thing on the right side of this page: http://www.rosiewear.com/training_tools.shtml
A door would be a cheaper way to do the same thing, and not a bad idea if it’s what you are stuck with.
Ahhh. Now it all makes sense.
I know this thread has gone somewhat off topic, but I for one enjoyed reading about this.
Thank you
MamiyaOtaru:
I found your opening sentence a little trolling.
I think you’ll find that myself and the others who commented “a door is too small to skate on” only did so enquiring how the door was used rather than boasting any kind of knowledge on the subject (as you seemed to suggest we were).
So it’s not all that surprising our posts were clueless given the whole point of our posts were to establish the use of the door!
I thought Nexus (previously known as WorldWideWeb) was the first browser. As the first release of Erwise was 1992 actually and Nexus was released for NeXT machines in end of year 1991. But i might have learned it wrongly.
Update:
” The first successful build (of Nexus) was completed on Christmas Day, 1990″ and Erwise was released on April 1992.
Edited 2009-03-04 18:27 UTC
Pretty sure a Xerox machine really did have the first graphical browser, along with mouse and graphic’s tablet. It did browse the corporate lan at that time, there was no internet.
Nexus/WorldWideWeb was the first Web Browser, but the first browser might have been Project Xanadu or NLS. I’m no historian, but NLS was shown in Engelbart’s demo where he introduced the mouse, so it would probably be the first graphical browser.
This one : http://xanadu.com/tech/ ?
That looks like it.
Browser as in Internet browser, so browsing local filesystem etc. does not count.
I thought that Da Vinci invented the very very very first Web Browser (called vvvFWB ) between 1517 and 1518 a few days after having drafted the World Wide web itself …
^^
Edited 2009-03-05 09:15 UTC
The myth about this being the worlds first graphical browser was debunked on slashdot …