Before Netscape

Some of you reading this blog may never have used an Internet browser other than Google Chrome or Firefox. But the World Wide Web goes back well before those browsers, to 1991 when Tim Berners-Lee released the code libraries that made Internet browsers possible. This article from Ars Technica looks at the very first browsers, including the first one I used, Mosaic. (On second thought, I may have used a text-mode browser before Mosaic, but the memory is dim).

Some years later Berners-Lee returned to CERN. This time he relaunched his "World Wide Web" project in a way that would more likely secure its success. On August 6, 1991, he published an explanation of WWW on the alt.hypertext usegroup. He also released a code library, libWWW, which he wrote with his assistant Jean-François Groff. The library allowed participants to create their own Web browsers.

"Their efforts—over half a dozen browsers within 18 months—saved the poorly funded Web project and kicked off the Web development community," notes a commemoration of this project by the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. The best known early browser was Mosaic, produced by Marc Andreesen and Eric Bina at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).

Mosaic was soon spun into Netscape, but it was not the first browser. A map assembled by the Museum offers a sense of the global scope of the early project. What's striking about these early applications is that they had already worked out many of the features we associate with later browsers. Here is a tour of World Wide Web viewing applications, before they became famous.