CERN has published a javascript implementation of their original web browser. The browser itself, WorldWideWeb, is text only and predates not only graphical browsing but also cookies, the pox javascript, and HTTPS. Their site dedicated to the browser also has a brief history of the application which was built in 1989 as a progenitor to what we know as "the web" today, timeline spanning three decades on either side of its release, instructions for its use, a look at some of the original code of WorldWideWeb, how the WorldWideWeb browser was rebuilt, various historical and technical resources, and who did the work to make this possible. Interestingly some current web sites are apparently standards compliant enough that they function, somewhat, in the old browser.
Hello, World
In December 1990, an application called WorldWideWeb was developed on a NeXT machine at The European Organization for Nuclear Research (known as CERN) just outside of Geneva. This program – WorldWideWeb — is the antecedent of most of what we consider or know of as "the web" today.
In February 2019, in celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the development of WorldWideWeb, a group of developers and designers convened at CERN to rebuild the original browser within a contemporary browser, allowing users around the world to experience the rather humble origins of this transformative technology.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Thursday February 21 2019, @07:08PM (1 child)
I seem to remember Microsoft "borrowing" NCSA Mosiac as the foundation for Internet Explorer and they brought out a crashtastic port for Solaris/SPARC back in the day. Or am I misremembering? Those were the days when you usually had a separate application for rendering the JPEGs. And people were still using gopher.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 22 2019, @05:31AM
I recalll something along the lines that they borged a browser based on a commercially licensed Mosaic, Spyglass?
Oh, you're not misremembering that corpulent pile of dogshite....I worked at a place where the M$ loving manglement tried forcing everyone to use it...yes, M$ loving manglement in charge of a Unix shop, go figure...anyhoo, muggins here was supposed to Install it and support it, led to me saying 'non serviam' at a rather stormy meeting where i detailed exactly how craptasticly crashtasticly awful it was.