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: 3, Funny) by urza9814 on Thursday February 21 2019, @04:27PM (5 children)
...a web browser...written in Javascript...
WHY????
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 21 2019, @05:01PM (3 children)
They also recreated a motif GUI because they can and because it's cool.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 21 2019, @06:20PM (1 child)
That old NeXTStep UI brings back memories ... sigh
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday February 21 2019, @09:48PM
And not all of them happy...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday February 21 2019, @07:48PM
But unfortunately they didn't implement the newsgroup parts. The links give errors.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 21 2019, @09:06PM
CERN are big on "Science" and sharing. Oh, very BIG on sharing. See this Defcon video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMtu7vV_HmY [youtube.com]
at 1:00:49 to 1:01:23 is the segment starring CERN. Morons with thick glasses and lab coats.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 21 2019, @05:49PM (1 child)
1) Their own fucking front page needs javascript to show anything intelligible.
2) HTF did a TLD .cern get created?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 21 2019, @05:54PM
https://icannwiki.org/.cern [icannwiki.org]
(Score: 2) by bart on Thursday February 21 2019, @07:00PM (3 children)
I'm happy that my site http://www.vandeenensupport.com/index-en.html [vandeenensupport.com] works perfectly on this :-)
I prefer not to do web development, so I'm happy to have a plain html website :-)
(Score: 4, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Thursday February 21 2019, @07:59PM (2 children)
I just tried soylentnews.org; it can be read (with some doublings in the comment titles, but AFAIK that's a side effect of the JS-free comment hiding implementation on this site; CSS certainly didn't exist back then), but unfortunately posting doesn't work (the input field doesn't react on the input; I don't know if the problem is due to CERN's implementation being incomplete in that respect, due to some JS incompatibilities of my browser, or if the SN posting interface maybe uses some feature that was only introduced in later versions of HTML).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 22 2019, @08:26AM (1 child)
Hmmm... I block JS by default, also for SN. I can read and post (as AC, maybe the account requires JS).
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday February 22 2019, @09:22AM
I meant the JS that WorldWideWeb browser is (re)implemented in, not the JS that is part of SoylentNews (it is clear to me that this would not be executed by WoldWideWeb because at that time there was no JavaScript in the web).
And while I usually browse without JavaScript (although I indeed enable it on SN because I trust this site), quite obviously I couldn't try their WorldWideWeb reimplementation without temporarily enabling JavaScript; I decided that CERN should be trustworthy enough to do so (and in addition, they didn't include any code or content from third-party sites).
So the three options I mentioned are
(And BTW, I just noticed that SN mishandles line breaks in nested <ul>)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 21 2019, @07:31PM (2 children)
I saw something similar in 1993, on SunOS or Ultrix machines. It was called WWWW, and I think the command was wwww. Pages were rendered with numbers next to the links. To select a link, you would type a number and then hit enter. It was slightly worse than gopher.
Anybody know of it? Is it still around somewhere?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 21 2019, @08:57PM
Wow, someone should SO recreate this wwww in Rust. Comes on 3 DVDs to install.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 22 2019, @02:15AM
You can get the same experience in a modern browser with any of the "vim-keybindings" extensions or specialized browsers (luakit, qutebrowser, wyeb, etc).
(Score: 2) by Arik on Friday February 22 2019, @12:50AM (2 children)
WWW was written in Obj-C, the source code is public domain, go download the damn thing and compile it if you want to. Rewrite in javascript? If you're trying to spit on TBL's grave you're early, he's still alive.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 22 2019, @01:41PM (1 child)
They probably want to show the experience also to non-technical people. Aunt Tillie won't even know what "Obj-C", "source code" and "compile" mean.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Friday February 22 2019, @03:34PM
You realize that once one person compiles it and makes the binary available on that platform "Aunt Tillie" can run it like any other program?
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?