
How I found one of the earliest browsers on a NeXTcube - wslh
http://pupeno.com/2015/12/21/how-i-found-one-of-the-earliest-browsers-in-history/
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MrTonyD
When I joined NeXT one of my first assignments was to evaluate a new piece of
software that we were considering releasing. It was software that would
automatically prompt you to sign up for an Internet connection when your new
NeXT machine first booted. It communicated with Virginia to get the new
machine an IP address. I ran it a bunch of times and it usually worked - but
it would sometimes fail. And when it failed, we had no way to debug the
problems on remote systems outside our control. And since there were monetary
charges involved, this got very messy very quickly.

Based on my strong report, Steve decided that NeXT boxes wouldn't
automatically sign you up for an Internet connection - since we couldn't debug
or support the customer when things went wrong.

Candidly, I've looked back on that report and wondered if I set back the
entire industry. We weren't looking at browsers - but we were looking at
access to all communication possibilities across the Internet as well as the
access to University and Government resources (ftp and remote mounts.)

~~~
pupeno
Or maybe you prevented a bunch of people from having a first bad experience
with the internet.

~~~
fit2rule
Or maybe they provided the conditions ripe for Sky Dayton, of Earthlink, to
negotiate with Steve Jobs to have Earthlink bundled on the iMacs when he went
back to Apple ..

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tbrock
Apparently Steve Jobs narrowly missed Berners Lee demonstrating his browser
for inclusion with an upcoming version of next step to catch a plane.

I constantly think about how them meeting that day may have moved the
mainstream adoption of the web up by 5 years.

~~~
DanielKehoe
Harumph. I was an editor for NeXTWorld magazine [1] at the time TimBL invented
the web. "WWWNeXTStepEditor version 0.12" was the first web browser I used.

Mass adoption of the web was held back by lack of ISPs. It may seem strange
now, but in 1991 there was no way to connect to the Internet unless you were
affiliated with a university or a big R&D company. in 1991, TimBl's WWW wasn't
any more relevant to NeXT than Gopher or Brewster Kahle's WAIS or, for that
matter, CompuServe.

Some of us at NeXTWorld, including John Perry Barlow, Simson Garfinkel, and
Seth Ross saw the potential of the WorldWideWeb, but we never wrote about it
at NeXTWorld because most NeXT users couldn't connect to the Internet. I don't
know when Jobs first saw the WorldWideWeb but he had many opportunities and it
never was important until he got excited about WebOjects at Apple. By that
time, Marc Andreessen had released Mosaic, the first web browser for Windows,
and ISPs were sprouting up to enable consumer connections to the Internet.

NeXT computers would have needed to provide a modem, and PPP for TCP/IP over
dialup, and NeXT-provided connection points (through a 3rd party partner?) to
make the web useful to NeXT users outside of academia and government.

[1]
[http://www.fortuityconsulting.com/danielkehoe/earlyweb.html](http://www.fortuityconsulting.com/danielkehoe/earlyweb.html)

~~~
MrTonyD
The prototype I evaluated at NeXT was supposed to work with any modem
(remember Hayes compatibility?) and didn't need PPP, since we had arranged a
proprietary handshake with the organization that gave out IP addresses (I've
forgotten the name. At the time I believe there was just one entity allowed to
give out IP addresses.) We discussed requiring a specific modem - but decided
that we didn't want that to be a requirement for getting an IP address.

Ultimately, it came down to "unsupportability" by NeXT. Several people other
than me told Steve that things would go wrong connecting to the Internet, and
when they did we would be mostly helpless to support them. At the same time,
the organization in Virginia didn't want to support the software either - the
software was a "black box" mostly provided by us on their machines. So we
killed the project. I never heard anybody mention browsers.

~~~
DanielKehoe
It's absolutely fascinating to hear this story. I'd never heard it before.
That was a historically significant moment. Do you recall if the software was
internally developed at NeXT or acquired from a third party?

~~~
MrTonyD
I was told that we had developed most of the software in conjunction with the
group that gave out IP addresses - but that we ended up doing almost all the
work ourselves and setting up their machines at their site. (They were
skeptical about the whole project, and not enthusiastic about the automatic
registration of new IPs. When I spoke to them it was obvious that they wanted
to ignore the whole project.) My impression was that our engineers who had
done the work weren't around Redwood City (or perhaps they had quit - we
weren't doing well and lots of people were leaving at the time.) So I was
figuring out the code on my own and doing the debugging - nobody was taking
ownership of the code. It was an overly complex mess since it both registered
for an IP and then did billing. Very fragile.

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godzillabrennus
You copied that binary right? I think from a historical perspective that would
be important to preserve...

~~~
kalleboo
Looking at the file listing in the terminal in the photo (0_16, 1_0, 2_01), it
looks like it's the exact same files as can be found here
[http://browsers.evolt.org/browsers/archive/worldwideweb/NeXT...](http://browsers.evolt.org/browsers/archive/worldwideweb/NeXT/)

~~~
codezero
Yep, and it turns out according to the README it's the editor, which is still
cool.

> WorldWideWeb_0.16.tar.Z is the only wysiwyg hypertext editor for the NeXT.

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vex
What's with all the secrecy?

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jakejake
The author seems to think that somebody would want this machine so badly as to
break into somebody's house?

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pupeno
No, there's no need to break. This machine, under certain circumstances, can
be publicly accessible without any problems.

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zekevermillion
That is cool! It's also a bit disconcerting that so much computing history is
disappearing, and will not be accessible even in the lifetimes of those who
experienced it. I imagine there will be digital archaeologists in the future
who spend careers finding this kind of stuff and attempting to simulate how it
must have worked back in the long ago times...

~~~
jaxb
and black marketeers, and hoarders, and vandals...

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atemerev
Sir Tim Berners-Lee is actually quite reachable; he participates in numerous
Semantic Web mailing lists these days.

~~~
pupeno
I don't want to send him a public personal message and the one I sent didn't
generate any reply.

