

The Four Finns Who Pioneered the Graphical Browser - bobbud
http://www.xconomy.com/national/2009/03/03/the-greatest-internet-pioneers-you-never-heard-of-the-story-of-erwise-and-four-finns-who-showed-the-way-to-the-web-browser/

======
wallflower
Two years later...

WWW-Talk Marc Andreessen (marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu) Thu, 25 Feb 93 21:09:02 -0800

"I'd like to propose a new, optional HTML tag:

IMG

Required argument is SRC="url".

This names a bitmap or pixmap file for the browser to attempt to pull over the
network and interpret as an image, to be embedded in the text at the point of
the tag's occurrence."

[http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-
talk.1993q1/0182.ht...](http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-
talk.1993q1/0182.html)

~~~
henning
And thus was born the beginnings of Internet porn.

------
Ras_
Recent past of Finnish sci&tech includes a bewildering amount of similar cases
of wasted potential.

Telecommunication is the worst area. Its mega-successes, such as SMS can be
described as lucky mistakes, while several very potent innovations have gone
to waste in state telco's (TeliaSonera) and cell manufacturers.

If a product reached the market, it was often too premature, such as 1999
Benefon Esc GPS-phone (5 years premature), or its launch marketing failed
badly.

I believe Finland produces second most patents per capita. But lack of funding
(esp. in 1-5M range) and lack of marketing/commercialization skills destroys
the ample potential. Finns are generally seen as a "country of engineers".
This might be the key to understanding why recent extraordinary successes like
Skype (Sweden/Estonia) have appeared in neighboring countries. Finland has
succeeded lately in open source sw (Linux, MySQL), not much else.

I would place a lot of the blaim of not identifying these candidates to the
Finnish VC industry. It has been dominated by lazy state controlled
institutions. They haven't been greedy(?) enough to invest in big plays. Only
safe bets or dumping money to major players such as Nokia.

------
lacker
Another story that shows it isn't the idea, it's the execution. As they say in
the article, it was tough to get any funding in Finland at the time, but
that's probably faint consolation now. Who knows what might have happened if
they had actually released it and kept working on it in their spare time.

~~~
zandorg
Academics in Europe have an addiction to grants/funding (and that's as much
their fuel as coffee). I've met a few academic people who were astonished that
I'd work on software for free, for sale or glory.

There's also a perception that you need a PhD to commercialise your ideas and
run a business.

Footnote: I'm from the UK.

