
CERN day 1: rebuilding the first web browser - D_Guidi
https://remysharp.com/2019/02/12/cern-day-1
======
aaronharnly
This reminds me of the wonderful short story by Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre
Menard, Author of the Quixote”. In the story, the character attempts to
authentically rewrite Cervantes’ Don Quixote — not by simply copying the known
text, not even by attempting to re-live Cervantes’ life and spontaneously
writing the novel just as Cervantes did, but by somehow living his own 20th
century life and happening onto writing a novel that is word for word
identical to Don Quixote. It’s a marvelous, impossible premise which speaks to
our fantasies of creativity and fetishization of original artifacts.

“Those who have insinuated that Menard devoted his life to writing a
contemporary Quixote besmirch his illustrious memory. Pierre did not want to
compose _another_ Quixote, which is surely easy enough — he wanted to compose
_the_ Quixote. Nor, surely, need one be obliged to note that his goal was
never a mechanical transcription of the original; he had no intention of
_copying_ it. His admirable ambition was to produce a number of pages which
coincided — word for word and line for line — with those of Miguel de
Cervantes.”

Here’s a PDF of an English translation:

[http://hispanlit.qwriting.qc.cuny.edu/files/2011/06/Borges-P...](http://hispanlit.qwriting.qc.cuny.edu/files/2011/06/Borges-
Pierre-Menard.pdf)

The story has some really funny sections where Borges compares a passage by
Cervantes with an (identical) passage by Menard, comparing their style and
meaning (which are not the same!). It's just fantastic.

~~~
matthewwiese
I am so happy I decided to stumble into the comments section for this article.
Your contribution of this short story by Borges is almost sublime in its
essential similarity to the article of OP. I've already been a fan of Borges,
but I had never heard of this piece of his before. It has positively tickled
all the right literary fancies for me. Thanks much for the comment, as the
story was a pleasant accoutrement to my lunch!

~~~
aaronharnly
Hey, you're welcome! I'm so glad you enjoyed it.

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mhandley
If you want a web server to test against, we're still running CERN 3.0 from
1994 (on early 1990s Sparc hardware too):

    
    
      $ nc www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk 80
      HEAD /staff/m.handley/ HTTP/1.0
    
      HTTP/1.0 200 Document follows
      MIME-Version: 1.0
      Server: CERN/3.0
      Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2019 14:46:10 GMT
      Content-Type: text/html
      Content-Length: 8645
      Last-Modified: Tue, 09 May 2017 12:33:04 GMT
    

It will still speak HTTP 0.9 to you if you omit the HTTP version string in a
GET request.

~~~
saagarjha
Here's what it looks like, in case you're curious:
[https://i.imgur.com/hOOEzGg.png](https://i.imgur.com/hOOEzGg.png)

~~~
milquetoastaf
Tell me more about your Next setup!

~~~
saagarjha
Oh, there's not much, I had originally created it for a CTF challenge of all
things ([https://github.com/o-o-overflow/chall-www](https://github.com/o-o-
overflow/chall-www)) so it has WorldWebWeb, Bash, and a set of developer tools
I managed to scrounge from the internet and from some Cocoa developers who
happened to have the disk lying around. I just keep it around because it's fun
to show off to people ;)

~~~
milquetoastaf
That's so awesome. The NextCube is one of my dream machines, along with an SGI
Indigo and Amiga 2000

Cool challenge too - maybe ill give it a whack

------
adamdoupe
I posted this on the blog but thought I post here too.

Last year I set up a WorldWideWeb.app (version 0.15) running in the Previous
emulator on Ubuntu for a CTF challenge for DEF CON 2018 Quals (they had to
exploit a buffer overflow in HTTP.c). There's a lot of other cruft around to
set up and automate the challenge and getting input to WWW, but there's
Vagrant and ansible scripts to set up and run everything.

There's a lot of work to set up networking in NextStep and getting all the
pieces right (I think I even set up an SSH server running on NextStep).

The source is all here: [https://github.com/o-o-overflow/chall-
www](https://github.com/o-o-overflow/chall-www)

I'd be happy to help, I love this idea of software archeology/preservation.

------
saagarjha
Ooh, I have the source code for WorldWideWeb and a binary copy of it that I
had installed last year on Previous; if I remember correctly I think I got it
to render Google's website (albeit in a very broken way). Maybe this might be
useful?

Edit: Just fired it up and it's trying to connect to cernvax.cern.ch, lol

~~~
ziftface
Any chance you can put it on github?

~~~
YetAnotherNick
Yes, please. That would be really cool.

~~~
saagarjha
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure I just grabbed it from here:
[https://www.w3.org/History/1991-WWW-
NeXT/Implementation/](https://www.w3.org/History/1991-WWW-
NeXT/Implementation/)

------
revjx
Good luck Remy, sounds fun!

Among other things, Remy and his family run an excellent front-end development
conference in Brighton, UK (although I'm simplifying it a lot by calling it
that) called ffconf ([https://2018.ffconf.org/](https://2018.ffconf.org/))

------
saiya-jin
I see they are getting unofficially the best fondue in the town at Bains des
Paquis. Those CERN folks are indeed smart!

~~~
slhck
Immediately recognized the venue from the photo, which triggered some
sensorial cues in my body. Essential part of a good meeting in Geneva.

------
Insanity
That looks really fun!

How did you end up doing this? (Assuming the poster is the author of the blog,
perhaps someone else can answer this question though?)

~~~
theoh
The author of the blog is Remy Sharp. He was first involved with these
projects at CERN in 2013, it looks like: [http://line-
mode.cern.ch/interviews/](http://line-mode.cern.ch/interviews/)

He is a web developer.

"My role was the coding part. I have a lot of experience writing Javascript-
based applications. I could see how Javascript could solve a lot of the
problems to replicate this old browser. So I worked on the back end server
that allows you to visit any other website and get it into the line-mode
browser."

------
thorwasdfasdf
Oh, this really makes me wish I was there, that first day when they turned on
the machine that says "don't power me down" and put that sign on there, at the
beginning of the web, when the first browsers were being developed. So much
potential, so many possibilities, so much innovation soon to occur.

~~~
The_Androctonus
Ironically, Tim BL mentions in his book "Weaving the Web" that when he first
launched the web, nobody cared and people at CERN thought it was useless.

------
Yuioup
"This machine is a ? Do not POWER it down!!"

What does it say there?

~~~
agildehaus
"server". It's a recreation of the note placed on the first webserver.

[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:First_Web_Server.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:First_Web_Server.jpg)

~~~
lolive
What is the book next to the computer?

~~~
maxwell
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enquire_Within_Upon_Everything](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enquire_Within_Upon_Everything)

------
gnufx
I wonder what I'd have thought if I'd seen the NeXT browser at the time. I
must have been one of the first few thousand WWW users, when I think it was
largely providing access to the cernlib docs. At the time, I was working on
fairly advanced networked hypermedia (with NeWS). Using line mode browser --
via X.25 then, I guess -- I thought "how primitive", and "haven't they heard
of Xanadu?". So much for the important feature, the protocol/naming... I don't
remember the reaction to Viola subsequently, but I think I found it before the
Mosaic set-back.

------
malkia
I was fascinated for a while with NeXT, OpenStep, YellowBox, even had it
running under Windows NT. Nowadays work in games development, and the main
tool I happen to work and help with support is Radiant, which is based on
QuakeEd... And QuakeEd was first released for the NeXT -
[https://quake.fandom.com/wiki/QuakeEd](https://quake.fandom.com/wiki/QuakeEd)
... it also had browsers :) lol - material/textures/models/etc.

~~~
donatj
I was making maps in radiant like 15 years ago. I honestly didn't realize it
was still in use.

------
johnklos
"Somehow we'll deliver the WorldWideWeb.app directly to the machine…if only we
could work out how to network the machine…"

Huh? Have these kids been so caught up in GNU/Linux that they've forgotten
about ifconfig and route commands? Configuring the network and mounting an NFS
share should be the very easiest part of their work.

------
C1sc0cat
Interesting my first experience of www was via the ITU gopher which had a link
to I assume the line mode browser.

It was a curiosity at the time I was more exercised by the fact that the ITU
had public access to the x.500 database I supported - god only knows what our
internal security would have said.

~~~
rurban
I did it via modem dialup on the emacs gopher client. Those days our TU Graz
hypertext university system was more advanced (HTP - hyper text protocol, a
gopher with images, search, index and editing) than the primitive www system
at CERN, but they caught up, even if it always had much less features than our
system.

