[HN Gopher] WorldWideWeb - the first web browser
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WorldWideWeb - the first web browser
Author : zdw
Score : 72 points
Date : 2023-01-02 15:02 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (worldwideweb.cern.ch)
(TXT) w3m dump (worldwideweb.cern.ch)
| mike_hearn wrote:
| 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?
| SeanLuke wrote:
| 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.
| eesmith wrote:
| 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."
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > 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.
| kristopolous wrote:
| 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.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _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)
| kristopolous wrote:
| 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
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| 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
| maliker wrote:
| Authoring built right in as a first class feature. Sure with that
| had caught on.
| gdubs wrote:
| 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.
| CharlesW wrote:
| Also the Mach-inspired XNU kernel at the heart of both macOS
| and iOS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU
| metadat wrote:
| 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)
| ttctciyf wrote:
| 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?
| simmons wrote:
| > 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 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.
| marbu wrote:
| > 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
| ttctciyf wrote:
| > 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!
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(page generated 2023-01-02 23:01 UTC)