
Web History: Browsers - rmason
https://css-tricks.com/chapter-2-browsers/
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DEADBEEFC0FFEE
Very nice read. I love history and was using the web fairly early, before that
Gopher and such.

The mind expanding concept of putting images, in cells of a table to create
layout really captured my imagination. I remember sitting with my brother
creating 3x3 table, fancy border with content in the middle cell. Heady times.

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rmason
I'd been on the web 5-6 years before the Mosaic browser came along and the
experience went from OK to terrific. I had to change ISP's because my current
one said that the web was 'a fad' and 'a waste of bandwidth'. I think they
were out of business in under a year. I knew some of this early history but
learned an awful lot from this piece.

My father was an early antique car collector and by heading the first group of
collectors in Detroit he met a lot of retired employees of the car company's,
guys who invented a great many of the stuff that seems like it's always been
there. Somebody had to be first. If it wasn't for the collectors a lot of this
information would have been lost to history.

You think Ford Motor cares to publicize who invented the Ford script, once
called the most famous logo in the world. He's the first employee at Ford and
the chief designer of the Model T and his name was C. Harold Wills.

Now people are going to learn who first thought up bookmarks or cookies. Henry
Ford is famous for saying 'history is bunk'. But I believe knowing this early
web history is important if only for the fact that it will convince future
engineers they can invent something meaningful.

~~~
Lammy
"History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We
want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker's
damn is the history that we make today." (Chicago Tribune, 1916).

~~~
reshie
learn from the past live in the present prepare for the future.

saying by someone

~~~
labster
Those who quote George Santayana are doomed to repeat him.

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leephillips
“Unix-like operating systems like X-Windows”

Huh?

~~~
cel1ne
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System)

~~~
leephillips
I know what it is. I just can’t understand how anybody could be confused
enough to call it an operating system.

~~~
DonHopkins
X-Widows is the first Fully Modular Software Disaster.

[https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-x-windows-
disaster-128d39...](https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-x-windows-
disaster-128d398ebd47)

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frandroid
I did not know NeXT/Macs were so central to the Web's origins!

