
Before Netscape: Web browsers of the early 1990s (2011) - ryanwatkins
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/05/before-netscape-forgotten-web-browsers-of-the-early-1990s/
======
hliyan
Looking at the second screenshot in this article (the one titled "An early
CERN Web browser, circa 1990"), I feel this is what I'd like the modern web to
be: crisp, clean, high density information, using colors only where it is
relevant.

Modern web pages have become a seizure-inducing cacophony of colors, fonts,
animations, ads, videos and intrusive modals ("please sign up", "subscribe to
our newsletter", "do you accept cookies?", "please disable ad-block", "people
in <your town> are excited about this new weight loss product!") etc.

~~~
bartread
I'm going to get flamed for this but, if all you're interested in is the text,
you could do worse than Lynx. I mean, it's not pretty, but it does get to the
point. For sites that absolutely require JavaScript to load content you're
screwed, but it does a surprisingly decent job on many others. Can be helpful
if you need to avoid becoming distracted.

~~~
andai
I actually used text based browsers as my main thing for a few weeks, when I
had really bad internet. Ran it thru ssh on a VPS, much faster that way. I
found the w3m browser gave the best formatting and mouse support.

~~~
augustk
When I have a slow internet connection I use the Dillo browser with CSS and
image loading disabled. Dillo is also really snappy even on an old computer.

[https://www.dillo.org/](https://www.dillo.org/)

------
telesilla
I remember the first time I saw Mosaic - a friend of mine was reading a
digital graphic novel. I was absolutely gobsmacked at how incredible that was:
not only did someone create something in a country far from mine, I was able
to look at it in my home—perhaps minutes after its creation. So quickly, we
become accustomed to the amazing.

~~~
neilv
I remember first seeing Mosaic when I started taking classes at Brown
University. The university CS department people had very wisely set it up so
that any CS students could not only very easily create their own Web pages
from files in their home directory, but also easily do CGI scripts that were
publicly accessible. The easy CGI wasn't so great for security, but was
fabulous for lowering the barrier to experimenting.

Using that CGI, I wrote several services, mostly in Perl, and one in C. (The C
one was so that I could use the GD library to draw some GIF parts of a
hypermedia image of the main workstation lab, with faces of people there,
which machines were free, etc., since it wasn't doable as well in HTML at the
time.)

After seeing it at the university, I also went and and installed Mosaic and a
the NCSA or Apache HTTP server at my workplace (where I was in an R&D group),
and wrote some demonstrations of it (e.g., doing our engineering documents in
it instead of Interleaf/FrameMaker, clickable hypermedia floorplan).

I'd actually already been on the Internet as a kid (gateways, email, Usenet,
ftp, etc.), and had already worked with a few offline hypertext systems before
I saw the Web (as well as being aware of earlier grand visions), but the Web
was obviously going to let us do Internet things we couldn't before, and also
accelerate bringing the goodness of the Internet to everyone. (Well, we
dropped the ball on some of the goodness, but it still happens, just not as
much nor nearly as universally as we'd hoped, and we can still improve that.)

------
jim_lawless
I first used SPRY Mosaic as provided by CompuServe (my first ISP). I had
written an article for a late 1995 special edition of Doctor Dobbs Journal
which still has my screen image captures of the SPRY Mosaic browser:

[http://www.drdobbs.com/web-development/clientserver-
developm...](http://www.drdobbs.com/web-development/clientserver-development-
and-the-world-w/184409740)

~~~
pugworthy
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spry_Vegetable_Shortening](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spry_Vegetable_Shortening)

I mentioned this in a different comment, but I have a jar from back then with
that name. Early "if they'd only done research" brand accident. Or maybe they
meant to?

------
godzillabrennus
How about the forget tradition of Netscape developers dunking their heads in
toilets?

[http://totic.org/nscp/swirl/swirl.html](http://totic.org/nscp/swirl/swirl.html)

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
To be fair, I'd stick my head in a toilet for $100,000. $200? Not so much.

------
chungleong
Anyone here ever used the web-browser that comes with GeoWorks/New Deal?
Pretty amazing software. In the late 90's I was studying in Poland. In the
computer lab of my dorm there were two Windows PCs and half a dozen text
terminals. People were always waiting to use the more modern machines. The
terminals were only good for e-mail (via telnet). They were XT-class machines
with Hercules graphics. One day I decided to put a copy of GeoWorks on one of
them. From then on I could always surf the web whenever I want. People were
quite amazed to see a full GUI on a 12" monochrome screen.

------
codezero
I recently built xmosaic on macOS with very little extra installed/modified.
It was quite fun.

[https://twitter.com/radiofreejohn/status/1132137894158618624](https://twitter.com/radiofreejohn/status/1132137894158618624)

------
tzury
Lynx is still in use these days, and has been around since 1993.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_\(web_browser\))

------
UglycupRawky
Back then I used lynx on the text terminals at university and shortly after
upgraded my PC at home (running Linux) from 4 MB to 8 MB of RAM (which did
cost about an arm and a leg) so that I could run Mosaic with its statically
linked Motif libs on it... When I think back the thing that amazes me most is
the fact that I ran a Unix system along with X11 and a Motif application in
all of 8 MB of RAM.

I still use lynx now and then even today. Haven't seen any Motif app for a
long while, though.

------
mistrial9
somehow, seeing Mosaic in 1993 or so was not a big deal.. Gopher was in use
and the various FTP clients to transfer files, and Mosaic seemed like a small
step from those, just unified into a page. Composable HTML was not a thing
yet. The GUI was so primitive compared to daily desktop software, that it
wasnt very compelling. Public access to a unified Internet was also not a
thing yet, networks were restricted and siloed by governance and protocols.
Usenet news already had some binaries if you really wanted to distribute or
look for something, but the content was limited. basically, not a fan on first
looks

------
jamespo
There were so many more of these, many will remember HotJava but what about
Oracle's entry:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_PowerBrowser](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_PowerBrowser)

~~~
daniel_iversen
And you can (barely) still download and run the Amaya browser from the W3C
today (that was from the mid 90s)

------
jonathankoren
If anyone is wondering what was Netscape’s first big feature differentiator
was, it was inline JPEGs. Mosaic could just display GIFs inline. JPEGs would
require an external handler, typically LView on Windows, or xv on Linux.

~~~
dboreham
Netscape's huge differentiator was running on 16-bit Windows. All the other
browsers needed either NT or a Unix workstation. This was prior to Windows95
so regular folks were still running Windows 3.1.

~~~
mbreese
I remember running Mosaic on Windows 3.11 with WinSock in the 93/94 time
frame. Maybe this was a 3.11 thing though... I never tried it with standard
3.1.

------
incompatible
I think in those days all the well-known graphical browsers (Mosaic, Netscape)
were proprietary, although free for personal use.

I think I used a browser in Emacs for quite a while. There was also the
Chimera browser mentioned elsewhere.

~~~
jonathankoren
I believe NCSA Mosaic was BSD.

Andreesen was _hated_ at UIUC in the mid 90s for essentially taking the NCSA
work and and then getting rich off of it. Then to add insult to injury he
called his company Mosaic Communications. The university went after him for
the trademark infringement (or whatever), but I don’t think there was anything
legally wrong with him taking the code. Not only was Netscape, not the only
company spun off of the Mosaic work, but pretty much every browser had some
NCSA code in it for years and years.

~~~
incompatible
I don't remember that, and can't find a source for it. The source code was
released, but I don't think it ever had a license that allowed commercial use,
and was it licensed commercially to many others.

Edit: including to Spyglass, for their browser, which was later licensed by
Microsoft for Explorer.

~~~
nostrademons
I think Netscape was a clean rewrite of the source code of NCSA Mosaic, but
with the benefit of past experience and being able to look at the code. Not
illegal, but still somewhat dodgy, and understandable that people who worked
on the NCSA version might get mad. I remember hearing that Andreesen was none
too popular at UIUC after founding Netscape, and the lawsuit over the
trademark; there's a source for that here:

[https://www.jwz.org/doc/about-jwz.html](https://www.jwz.org/doc/about-
jwz.html)

------
krapp
Did anyone else ever use Arachne?

~~~
michrassena
I remember trying it in the mid 90s and then not using it much. I remember it
being quite slow. The lack of even rudimentary multi-tasking caused it to hang
easily. I could see where it might be useful in a lab with 8086 and 286
machines. But I think even at the time, this software had what seemed like a
high cost, like $99. If there had ever been a DOS-only port of Lynx (without
requiring Win32), that would have been a better option instead.

Since the 486 I used could run Windows 3.1, Trumpet Winsock and Netscape and
later Opera were good enough for the times. It was claimed that Opera was
written in assembler (and it did feel like it was faster than other browsers)
and it introduced MDI (tabbed) browsing.

~~~
UncleSlacky
Arachne's still (freely) available though it hasn't been updated since 2013
(and 2010 for the last Linux (curses) version). There is now a version for 386
and better which should be a bit quicker:
[http://www.glennmcc.org/](http://www.glennmcc.org/)

There's also a DOS version of Lynx (DOSLynx) that's been around for some time:
[http://www.fdisk.com/doslynx/doslynx.htm](http://www.fdisk.com/doslynx/doslynx.htm)

------
FabHK
I used MacWeb [1] on my PowerBook 145b in the early 90s. Lovely solid machine,
25 MHz Motorola CPU, 4 MB RAM, and a massive 80 MB hard disk. And yes, it was
possible to surf the web with that, with information dense content, mostly
text (the "T" in HTML and HTTP!).

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacWeb](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacWeb)

------
gioele
Let's all remember that the first client-side scripting language was Tcl
(inside ViolaWWW).

[http://www.viola.org/viola/vw/brief.html](http://www.viola.org/viola/vw/brief.html)

> (If this were rendering on ViolaWWW, the button could actually be live on
> this document page!)

Loss of functionality well before JavaScript. ;)

------
Beloid7man
_rolls out 300bps acoustic coupler to slowly watch lynx update on a remote
system...._

Ok, so I really used 2400bps and later 14k4 all the way up to 56k (speed!) for
IP based traffic. It didn't take long using 300bps to demonstrate the wisdom
of upgrading.

------
dredmorbius
Interesting to see Viola mentioned so prominantly here, and to see its impact
on Andreesen, Mosaic, and Netscape. Whilst I'd never used it myself, I ran
across it a year or so back when looking at how the n=modrn browser mechanics
were estabished: navigation, history, bookmarks, scropting. Viola extended
many of these concepts, and explored ground that's since been lost; Applets,
scripting (Tcl), stylesheets, frames, forms, equations editor, columnar
layouts, sidebar as integral element, and more.

Its descriptive pages are well worth revisiting.

[http://www.viola.org](http://www.viola.org)

------
mmargerum
I remember running WebExplorer on OS/2 in the mid 90s. Was pretty good!

------
tyingq
There was also tkwww in 1992.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TkWWW](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TkWWW)

------
Moru
I used the Atari browser CAB [1]. It had auto reload capabilities, you could
have the browser open in a window in the background and it would reload the
page while I was editing the html in the foreground window. Very handy for
developing. Not sure about timeframe though, 98?

[1] [https://atari.clauss-net.de/cab.html](https://atari.clauss-
net.de/cab.html)

------
Mountain_Skies
Cello was the first graphical browser I used after Lynx for a short while.
Though I appreciated the graphics in Cello, I did initially find the Web
(graphics or just text) to be messy compared to the much more orderly Gopher.
Once I started dabbling with HTML and made a crude site for my employer, I
quickly went from office clerk to webmaster. At that point Gopher was pretty
much forgotten.

~~~
Maarten88
I also used Cello, on an early Windows NT beta. It was multi threaded and
async, much nicer and faster compared to Mosaic. Problem was it was also very
buggy and crashed all the time. After some time I returned to Mosaic that
would run without crashing.

------
1-6
I've been playing with browsh (brow.sh) on terminal. I've fallen in love with
'the modern text-based browser'

------
ngcc_hk
Mosaic, gopher and text based one. Use the text to play go (WeiQi) and lost as
refreshed under 19.2k modem is too slow.

------
HeraldEmbar
Lynx was widely used at my university when I started there in 1993. I remember
vaguely not liking Mosaic and other early inline graphic browsers, not because
they weren't revolutionary, but because they were too slow on our relatively
slow networks and phone connections.

------
datalus
This maybe a little off topic but... wait what? CERN had their own OS? What
was its name?

~~~
kbumsik
NeXTStep, Steve Jobs made a company NeXT after being kicked out from Apple.
This OS became the foundation of the Mac OSX. [1]

Aside from NeXTStep, it was even before Linux was born. There were many
historic BSD derivatives in that moment.

[1]: [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/473758/what-does-the-
ns-...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/473758/what-does-the-ns-prefix-
mean)

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
_> So in his spare time, [Berners-Lee] wrote up some software to address this
shortfall: a little program he named Enquire. It allowed users to create
"nodes"—information-packed index card-style pages that linked to other pages.
Unfortunately, the PASCAL application ran on CERN's proprietary operating
system. "The few people who saw it thought it was a nice idea, but no one used
it. Eventually, the disk was lost, and with it, the original Enquire."_

Sounds like this was pre-NeXT, or at least on another in-house OS. It would be
interesting to see what it was all about.

~~~
jhbadger
The Wikipedia article on ENQUIRE says it ran under SINTRAN III (the standard
OS for many Norsk Data mainframes in the 1970s-1980s). So not a CERN-specific
OS, just one not known to many people outside European users of mainframes at
the time.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENQUIRE](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENQUIRE)

------
GaurVimen
Having been involved in the BBS scene from the very early 80s and being
involved with all things computer related since then, I have experience with
all the browsers listed, and could name a few others.

------
eli
I clearly remember using the web browser bundled with early NYC ISP The
Pipeline in like 94. Netscape eventually came and blew it away, but it wasn’t
bad for what (I think) was the work of basically one guy.

------
pugworthy
I had Mosaic as well as Spry. I always thought it funny that my wife had an
old antique jar in the kitchen (still have it) for flour that was for a brand
of lard called "Spry"

------
acheron
My first graphical web browser was Slipknot. From what I remember you would
telnet into a shell account and it essentially acted as a graphical front end
for Lynx.

~~~
acheron
(Realizing I miswrote that yesterday — obviously the point of Slipknot was
that you would dial up to your shell account, because you didn’t have telnet
access on your machine.)

------
xrd
Install mosaic to really get into the mood.

[https://snapcraft.io/mosaic](https://snapcraft.io/mosaic)

------
Vizarddesky
Ahh, I am young. I started with Netscape 2. But I do remember some older
machines with Mosaic... by 1996 Mosaic was already useless.

------
mhd
I quite liked Arena and Chimera (the Xaw one, not the predecessor of Camino)
in my early Linux days. Although Netscape 2/3 quickly took over.

~~~
theoh
That Chimera was pretty nice, all right:

[http://freshmeat.sourceforge.net/projects/chimera-
www](http://freshmeat.sourceforge.net/projects/chimera-www)

In a similar category, but using Gtk, was Ralph Levien's gzilla
[https://www.levien.com/gzilla/](https://www.levien.com/gzilla/)

------
jerrysievert
sadly, missing one of my favorites: NCD's mariner (yeah, the x11 terminal
company).

------
pay2q
Just imagine how many little bits of diarrhea and pubes they ingested

