Surf the Web Like It's 1990: CERN Rebuilds WorldWideWeb, the First Web Browser

Megalith

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There’s no better way to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the development of the WorldWideWeb by firing up the original 1990 browser, and CERN has made that easy by rebuilding the first web browser and editor as an in-browser app (queue Xzibit Yo Dawg meme). Once upon a time, users had to double click on links.

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.
 
I wonder if any websites still support Adobe's 3D browser, or was that VREAM from ATI? I forget now..
 
If you examine that page a little closer, you'll find a link to wow.jpg:

wow.jpg
 
Interesting.

I had always thought NCSA Mosaic was the first browser. I'd never heard of this before.
 
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Funny how the browser was created on a NEXT machine. (Steve Jobs played a small part in everything it seems even if indirectly)
 
Now there's a term I haven't heard used in twenty years.

Here's another the kiddies may have never heard of. Toyed with it when I had a MacPlus back in '89.

I remember back in the early 90's at the bank I worked for we also would frequently finger other users to see if they were connected to the AS400 mainframe on the thicknet and twinax networks.

Anyone else remember when Excite was testing out an all new 3D search engine concept "Excite Extreme"? Interestingly OS2 still has a bit of a following as well.
 
I remember back in the early 90's at the bank I worked for we also would frequently finger other users to see if they were connected to the AS400 mainframe on the thicknet and twinax networks.

Anyone else remember when Excite was testing out an all new 3D search engine concept "Excite Extreme"? Interestingly OS2 still has a bit of a following as well.

Finger... there's a term I haven't used in more than 20 years as well; literally and rhetorically speaking, that is :D

Excite, then Lycos, and Altavista, yup. Lycos was my no.1 goto back in the day.
 
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I wonder what you can actually load with this browser.

A while back I was on a mission to - for shits and giggles - get Windows 3.11 to work on the internet in a VM.

This proved to be a greater challenge than I expected. It turns out no 16bit browser (at least none I could find) has sufficient compatibility with modern web standards to render properly. Most of the time, functioning modern SSL/TLS seems to have been the problem, but it was far from the only issue.

So, since it was clear I needed a 32 bit browser, but I still wanted the old school Windows look, I gave Windows NT 3.51 a try. This ALMOST worked. Once of the last builds of Netscape Navigator compatible with NT 3.51 actually had SSL support. I ran into a problem though, where the installer refused to install it. I created a drive image that was a couple of Gigabytes in size, and the script that read free disk space had a bug in it, reading it as if I didn't have enough space free to install, even though I had more than enough. Presumably it read 1.7GB free (or whatever it was) as if it were 1.7MB free and that wasn't enough space :p

I meant to reinstall NT 3.51 again on a smaller disk image, but I never got back around to it.
 
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