In 1992ish I worked at RNEC Manadon (UK, Devon). I was asked by my boss to investigate this new www thing.
I telnetted to the nearest VAX from my Win 3.1 PC. I then telnetted to the X.25 PAD and used that to go via the US to Switzerland and CERN. It looked just like gopher and WAIS to me and that's how I reported back - "it looks the same as gopher".
When Tim BL invented www, html and that, browsers were telnet and graphics was a nonsense.
hackingonempty•about 18 hours ago
The experience was very different on a NeXT computer.
WAIS was modeled after the built in DigitalLibrarian software. You would select a site in the upper pane, and enter a search term in the box in the middle, and a list of documents would come back in the bottom pane that you could double click and open. Very search engine like.
Gopher was structured and I think Gemini today still sticks with the format. You load a site and the hierarchy of links appeared in a column browser up top and selected documents appeared in the bottom pane.
WWW didn't seem like much in comparison because they were freeform documents without app level navigation support and there wasn't support for images or much formatting and people had not learned to make web pages so it was really hard to see the future of what it would grow to become.
I'm not known for picking winners :-(
hinkley•about 18 hours ago
My early career was defined by showing up ten minutes late to several revolutions in a row.
I had a friend who was the most junior developer on the Mosaic team and one day he took me to his office to show me a text document with an image in the middle of it. In theory I met Marc Andreesen and Eric Bina that day but I just wanted to go do something with my friend. I did not get it. At all. A year later my girlfriend had to re-explain it to me and then another few months later I applied to work there in a support role. I don't think she knew what to do with the level of enthusiasm I wasn't bringing to this opportunity.
A year after that I'm sitting in a bar after a tech convention in Chicago, wearing my Mosaic t-shirt, and someone said, 'where did you get that shirt?' When I told them we were on the team, you'd have thought I'd said we were Madonna's backup band.
I never entirely understood that "I'd rather be lucky than good" sentiment until my luck ran out, and now I know.
lelandfe•about 4 hours ago
Love it. This is all soo very Nelson Bighetti.
FpUser•about 17 hours ago
>"My early career was defined by showing up ten minutes late to several revolutions in a row."
Ha, I missed so many great things. The most obvious was not to buy $10K worth of bitcoin when it just started.
Luckily (or not) I am an easy going person and do not dwell on things.
dist-epoch•about 12 hours ago
But you were lucky. You were in the right places at the right time, just didn't realize it.
This is lack of vision, not lack of luck.
cxr•about 4 hours ago
> WAIS was[…] Gopher was[…]
> You load a site and the hierarchy of links appeared in a column browser up top and selected documents appeared in the bottom pane.
You're mentioning formats and protocols but describing application UI designs.
donw•about 17 hours ago
Something that just occurred to me: RAGs are almost Gopher for AIs.
jibal•about 17 hours ago
> people had not learned to make web pages
Because there wasn't a widespread usable browser until Mosaic came along, 2 1/2 years after WWW.
jcims•about 18 hours ago
I worked at an EDI company in the mid 90s. X.25 was the wild west. We had a router set up on it that would happily stand up a ppp session to anyone that knew the node name. No password, right on the core network lol.
icedchai•about 17 hours ago
It certainly was! I remember connecting to Tymnet and Sprintnet/Telenet as a teenager, probably around 1990 or 91. Someone on a local BBS gave me a username that let me connect to QSD and another European chat system. Someone on there had taken over the "system" account on a VAX and was giving out accounts that let you use it as PAD. This went on for weeks. The company must've freaked when they got their x.25 bill. Zero security in those days. The early Internet was just as bad.
sigmoid10•about 6 hours ago
Everything connected to the internet was really bad until automatic updates that are enabled by default (or enforced by sysadmins) became a thing. Wordpress, Mysql, Active Directory... all those things had unpatched exploits that you could trivially tap in to until the 2010s if you knew how to use nmap and metasploit. Add insecure wifi standards like wep and basically every other network was fair game for people who had some basic skills. Heck, facebook only made https mandatory in 2013 after someone made a browser plugin that let literally everyone steal cookies on public networks and log in to other people's accounts. Gen Zers never saw this, but the modern web as a secure place where you can comfortably buy stuff or do banking without worries is a relatively recent invention.
qingcharles•about 17 hours ago
I got on the 'Net in 1993. The Web was very "meh". A lot of tutorials on how to write HTML, very little useful content yet. IRC and Usenet were where the action was.
flomo•about 14 hours ago
Wired Magazine famously agreed with you. Usenet was where it was at then.
Internet commercialization wasn't really on until 1994. Then anyone could get dial-up IP, they could put ads on their webpages, and etc.
razingeden•about 17 hours ago
I remember that. I had almost zero interest in www until geocities came along and then …it was something else to compose and publish a “website”
The whole thing was atrocious but at least introduced me to the concept.
In fact, I had to spend like three days downloading Netscape to try it out because I didn’t even have a graphical browser yet.
fsloth•about 20 hours ago
Fun fact: Erwise[0] was the first _graphical_ browser developed by a group of students in Helsinki University of Technology with Sir Berners Lee. Sadly there was no funding in Finland available at the time and they had to abandon the project and most of the group ended up working at Tekla, contributing to a bunch of cool AEC CAD technology (Tekla is now a Trimble subsidiary).
No, as indicated in the submission the original WorldWideWeb.app (developed on a NeXTCube) is a graphical Web browser.
rurban•about 13 hours ago
Not really. In Graz we had our better Hyper-G graphical browser before CERN, with a completely integrated system to ensure link consistency. Every browser was also the editor. In 1989. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2105.08057
At CERN they wanted to enrich gopher with multimedia data to share building plans and images of their complicated plans, in Graz we wanted to provide a rich teaching and information platform for students. Sadly we went commercial and not open source, so worse got better. Well, a session-less server as httpd was actually better.
It's a real shame both Job's movies skip right over his NeXT and Pixar days..
In 1983 he predicted 10-15 years until home network connectivity is "solved". 10 years later the world wide web released to the public, originally developed on his company's NeXT platform in 1989..
nebula8804•about 11 hours ago
The 2015 movie has the entire second act dedicated to the Next launch no?
twoodfin•about 4 hours ago
Indeed, to the exclusion of the iPod or iPhone launches.
And it gets the core idea right, too, that NeXT was a commercial failure but built the core OS technology launchpad for the mobile revolution—after saving Apple, of course.
It’s told in a wildly ahistorical framing, but I find the stage play-like “your life passes before your eyes” structure to be much truer to Jobs’ story—and more entertaining—than the Isaacson book.
Did you notice you can click anywhere in the text and edit it?
Something was lost along the way.
(Nowadays you need a separate wiki engine on a site to be able to do that)
dadoum•about 19 hours ago
F12, Console, type
document.designMode = 'on'
dadoum•about 18 hours ago
(it is slightly different though, as links cannot be followed)
wesammikhail•about 18 hours ago
I had no idea. You just blew my mind
thenthenthen•about 11 hours ago
The original read/write web
karlgkk•about 19 hours ago
> (Nowadays you need a separate wiki engine on a site to be able to do that)
No you don’t. These browser simply PUTs the request and your web server simply edits the document. Versioning is optional, of course.
krapp•about 20 hours ago
Do we know that they didn't have some backend code handing the editing?
I don't think a web where every page is globally editable by default would be a good idea, but I can't imagine at all how it would work without a backend, unless all of the changes are just local. But that seems pointless.
shakna•about 19 hours ago
Being able to change stylesheets, disable or enhance various JavaScript scripts, add notes and annotations, and other things, is exactly the idea of a user agent.
The user makes a request, and then does whatever they like with the answer. Not just whatever is sensible, but whatever they want to do.
If that concept somehow became accepted again... I think the accessible web might well become a solved problem, rather than an endless slog.
Kim_Bruning•about 20 hours ago
HTTP has PUT and DELETE for a reason ;-)
zabzonk•about 20 hours ago
> But that seems pointless.
Making notes for your own consumption?
actionfromafar•about 20 hours ago
Upload the file when you are done, perhaps?
hackingonempty•about 18 hours ago
It has been about 16 years since I fired up my old NeXTStation Color where I had a copy of 1.0 or a late beta.
The last time I tried about the only site that worked was useit.com, former home of Nielsen Norman UX experts ;-)
keepamovin•about 16 hours ago
I love what the CERN team did here visually with the NeXT UI. Rebuilding a historical browser inside a modern one is a fun rabbit hole, but man, it is the same technical wall to hit every time: iframes.
You build this beautiful retro UI, you wire up the address bar, and then you try to load a modern site and just hit a wall of CORS, X-Frame-Options, and CSP blocks. Which, tho is probably precisely things should work. Otherwise people arbitrarily iframe the open web opening up a massive clickjacking-pocalypse. It makes total sense for security....sigh.
But I sitll wanted a way to get around it to capture that 90s nostalgia (tho NeXT and this browser were actually from the late 80s), the real open web inside a retro recreation not just a crippled, iframe-blocked imitation. Or "everything links to archive org" stuff.
To make that work, I had to make a custom embedder API. It basically pipes a fully isolated remote Chromium instance right into the retro shell through an iframe in a custom element. The engine is real, and it respects the native security boundaries because the browser is physically isolated, but it wears that heavy 90s UI so you get the 90s feel.
If you want to mess around with a different flavor of 90s nostalgia that can actually surf the modern web, I put up a live version here: https://win9-5.com/demo. Sound on for the retro modem dial-up elevator music. The non-graybeards may never have experienced the modem's mating call in the wild.
amelius•about 7 hours ago
I wish someone would write a reference implementation in a functional language.
At least that would formalize the specification.
ulrischa•about 12 hours ago
When watching this I'm shocked how bad the UX Was these days. The scrollbar left, the triple steped menu...
What was improved sometimes is only visible when we see how it was back in the past.
gapan•about 11 hours ago
> When watching this I'm shocked how bad the UX Was these days. The scrollbar left, the triple steped menu...
Perhaps the only thing "bad" about it is that you're simply not used to it. I can certainly think of someone used to that UI thinking the same thing about today's interfaces, with disappearing scrollbars, flat design and confusing icons.
Jaxan•about 10 hours ago
The deeply nested menu for entering the url, that’s bad, I agree. But why is a scrollbar on the other side better or worse?
I have the minimap configured on the left in vs code and use it as scrollbar. It’s quite nice actually.
gapan•about 10 hours ago
> The deeply nested menu for entering the url, that’s bad, I agree.
I'm not saying it is perfect, but it was not that bad, really. It's only one level down. And then you could also use a keyboard shortcut for it, which is always faster than anything mouse-driven if your hands are on the keyboard, which they would be, if you wanted to type a URL.
And even if you had to use the mouse, there is an interface feature we have lost: tear-off menus. If you found that you needed something in a nested menu often, you could simply tear-off that submenu and pin it on your desktop so you can always have direct access.
alansaber•about 6 hours ago
It has a certain charm, like everything engineered without immediate commercial considerations
WillAdams•about 6 hours ago
Menus can be torn off and positioned as desired.
I miss that.
karanveer•about 7 hours ago
i want to meet those people who did this originally in 1989 and to ask them, did they ever think it would be this today?
Part of the original requirements was the decentralized nature, which I always found extra interesting:
> CERN Requirements - Non-Centralisation - Information systems start small and grow. They also start isolated and then merge. A new system must allow existing systems to be linked together without requiring any central control or coordination.
Doesn't directly answer your question I suppose, but gives at least one perspective on how at least one person saw it at that point :)
dboreham•about 2 hours ago
It wasn't a rocket science amazing idea in 1989. It was a pretty obvious thing anyone in the space could see would be interesting to try -- hypertext already existed. The internet was just taking off. The idea that you could host pages that hyperlinked to each other on the internet was totally obvious and if you'd explained it to anyone active in the internet at the time (obviously not that many of those people), they'd have nodded. I should add that almost nobody had a computer with a graphics display in 1989 (I did, at work) so that further constrains the set of folk to whom the idea would make sense. The fact that everyone now has many 64-bit computers with extremely high resolution displays is probably the more surprising thing to 1989-dude.
sylware•about 10 hours ago
That makes me think about the whatng cartel apocalypse.
People lost themselves, forgetting how important noscript/basic (x)html (aka basic HTML forms, nowdays which could be augmented with <audio> and <video>)) has been for web technical independence.
All that is very sad, and toxic.
lysace•about 20 hours ago
It's a javascript-based imitation, much like all of those js-based imitations of various Windows versions.
The original source code isn't really involved, which is a shame, since it is actually available.
IMHO this should have been (something along the lines of) GNUstep + TimBL's original code (mirror: https://github.com/cynthia/WorldWideWeb) + Emscripten + getting Emscripten to work with ObjC. Now, that would have been cool.
This is the most commented HN posting on this from that time (2019):
TimBL's original NeXT is still on display at CERN, I've seen it.
I've even stood in the office that was his when he wrote it (it was empty when I was there, but had recently been in use by some incredibly high-end physicist).
nine_k•about 20 hours ago
A WASM emulator of 68040 and NeXT, the original OS and compiler, then run WWW on top of that.
I guess that let them off the hook for incorrect spelling. :-)
j3th9n•about 12 hours ago
Links where called Pointers back then apparently.
fecal_henge•about 9 hours ago
No link to EDH.
mistrial9•about 17 hours ago
network users at that time already had software for ftp and other common tools. Gopher sort of linked logically to an ftp idea. Mosaic was often introduced in the same sentence as "uses a format called HTML" .. Mosaic seemed interesting but also it was obvious that pages in that format would have to become popular, to make more of them. There wasn't a big reason to switch your daily software to Mosaic since stable apps were better for their existing uses. It was a very rare thing to have access to a NeXT machine (maybe not on YNews).
From my point of view it was Netscape that made a big splash, a year+ later, with a lot of publicity and good graphic design. Mosaic itself was an awkward demo with an interesting nerdy story.
java-man•about 20 hours ago
All the links should point to the 1989 internet instead of "Not Found"
:-)
jmclnx•about 21 hours ago
Interesting, for some reason I thought lynx was the first browser. I thought I read that a while ago.
But it makes sense it is a GUI browser since it was developed on a NeXT
wahern•about 20 hours ago
WorldWideWeb didn't originally support inline images, and while using a graphical toolkit rendered pages more like Lynx, albeit with the ability to vary fonts. Lynx wasn't the first WWW browser, but came along shortly after, a year or so after WorldWideWeb, and is the oldest browser still maintained. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_web_browser#Ear...
I'm having trouble pinning down when WorldWideWeb got inline image support, but based on https://www.w3.org/History/1991-WWW-NeXT/Implementation/Feat... I'm guessing sometime between 1992 and 1994, when there are screenshots with inline images, so maybe after Lynx was published.
WorldWideWeb could display images, but originally only in a separate window when you clicked on them, similar to the way audio, PDFs, and other multimedia worked (and sometimes still work). The wording of one of the people involved seems to confirm this:
> How was I to know that I was passing an historical milestone, as the one above was the first picture of a band ever to be clicked on in a web browser!"
It's been a very long time, but my recollection was the Mosaic did images first, and it was non-standard. (The beginning of the end.) I might be thinking of some other feature though.
I was also disappointed that the editing went away after the first browser. (There was "Amaya" which had editing, but it was a research thing and not a commonly used browser.)
hinkley•about 18 hours ago
IIRC, Viola also got scooped by Mosaic, which was the first browser most people used, before you could buy one shrinkwrapped at a store.
There was also OmniWeb on the Next machine, but there weren't a lot of NeXT machines around.
Mosaic was the first browser to support images because HTML didn't support images and Marc Andreesen and Eric Bina sat in a coffee shop on campus while Marc talked himself into going rogue and making his own tag while Eric didn't talk him out of it (source, Eric Bina, ACM lecture at UIUC ca 1995)
morphle•about 4 hours ago
You can't fix a broken wheel. Let the downvotes illustrating the ignorance of HN pop culture start....
This web link post, the original NEXT webbrowser as a web page, tries to celebrate and revive the reinvention of the broken wheel.
The World Wide Web, browser and html standards are a very broken wheel. Alan Kay, the inventor of personal computing, explains why:
This lecture Alan aimed at this particular audience, the computer science (programming) students at University of Illinois, where they programmed the second browser, the second broken wheel 20 years after Alan and Dan had showed them how do do it better.
Dan Ingalls implemented most of Alan Kay's invention of the personal computer, in the following demo's he shows how to fix the webbrowser's broken wheel a bit.
The Lively Kernel would be another way to fix html but retain the web. Two demos says it all:
> The Lively Kernel would be another way to fix html but retain the web.
The Web is not HTML (and it's not JavaScript). It's URLs. It's a machine-readable graph of clickable references on cross-linked Works Cited pages. It's certainly not Smalltalk-over-the-Internet, and it's not trying to be (at least it wasn't when TBL created it).
The biggest problem facing the Web in the 90s and still today is that everyone who saw it then hallucinated TBL describing an SRI-/PARC-style application platform because that's what they wanted it to be—including people like Alan Kay—who then perversely go on to criticize it for being so unaligned with that vision.
It is both surprising and unsurprising (given this reaction) that the industry managed to make it all the way through the 90s without Wikipedia showing up until after the crash.
Discussion (85 Comments)
I telnetted to the nearest VAX from my Win 3.1 PC. I then telnetted to the X.25 PAD and used that to go via the US to Switzerland and CERN. It looked just like gopher and WAIS to me and that's how I reported back - "it looks the same as gopher".
When Tim BL invented www, html and that, browsers were telnet and graphics was a nonsense.
WAIS was modeled after the built in DigitalLibrarian software. You would select a site in the upper pane, and enter a search term in the box in the middle, and a list of documents would come back in the bottom pane that you could double click and open. Very search engine like.
Gopher was structured and I think Gemini today still sticks with the format. You load a site and the hierarchy of links appeared in a column browser up top and selected documents appeared in the bottom pane.
WWW didn't seem like much in comparison because they were freeform documents without app level navigation support and there wasn't support for images or much formatting and people had not learned to make web pages so it was really hard to see the future of what it would grow to become.
I'm not known for picking winners :-(
I had a friend who was the most junior developer on the Mosaic team and one day he took me to his office to show me a text document with an image in the middle of it. In theory I met Marc Andreesen and Eric Bina that day but I just wanted to go do something with my friend. I did not get it. At all. A year later my girlfriend had to re-explain it to me and then another few months later I applied to work there in a support role. I don't think she knew what to do with the level of enthusiasm I wasn't bringing to this opportunity.
A year after that I'm sitting in a bar after a tech convention in Chicago, wearing my Mosaic t-shirt, and someone said, 'where did you get that shirt?' When I told them we were on the team, you'd have thought I'd said we were Madonna's backup band.
I never entirely understood that "I'd rather be lucky than good" sentiment until my luck ran out, and now I know.
Ha, I missed so many great things. The most obvious was not to buy $10K worth of bitcoin when it just started.
Luckily (or not) I am an easy going person and do not dwell on things.
This is lack of vision, not lack of luck.
> You load a site and the hierarchy of links appeared in a column browser up top and selected documents appeared in the bottom pane.
You're mentioning formats and protocols but describing application UI designs.
Because there wasn't a widespread usable browser until Mosaic came along, 2 1/2 years after WWW.
Internet commercialization wasn't really on until 1994. Then anyone could get dial-up IP, they could put ads on their webpages, and etc.
The whole thing was atrocious but at least introduced me to the concept.
In fact, I had to spend like three days downloading Netscape to try it out because I didn’t even have a graphical browser yet.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwise
No, as indicated in the submission the original WorldWideWeb.app (developed on a NeXTCube) is a graphical Web browser.
At CERN they wanted to enrich gopher with multimedia data to share building plans and images of their complicated plans, in Graz we wanted to provide a rich teaching and information platform for students. Sadly we went commercial and not open source, so worse got better. Well, a session-less server as httpd was actually better.
In 1983 he predicted 10-15 years until home network connectivity is "solved". 10 years later the world wide web released to the public, originally developed on his company's NeXT platform in 1989..
And it gets the core idea right, too, that NeXT was a commercial failure but built the core OS technology launchpad for the mobile revolution—after saving Apple, of course.
It’s told in a wildly ahistorical framing, but I find the stage play-like “your life passes before your eyes” structure to be much truer to Jobs’ story—and more entertaining—than the Isaacson book.
One of my favorite films of the last 20 years.
Something was lost along the way.
(Nowadays you need a separate wiki engine on a site to be able to do that)
No you don’t. These browser simply PUTs the request and your web server simply edits the document. Versioning is optional, of course.
I don't think a web where every page is globally editable by default would be a good idea, but I can't imagine at all how it would work without a backend, unless all of the changes are just local. But that seems pointless.
The user makes a request, and then does whatever they like with the answer. Not just whatever is sensible, but whatever they want to do.
If that concept somehow became accepted again... I think the accessible web might well become a solved problem, rather than an endless slog.
Making notes for your own consumption?
The last time I tried about the only site that worked was useit.com, former home of Nielsen Norman UX experts ;-)
You build this beautiful retro UI, you wire up the address bar, and then you try to load a modern site and just hit a wall of CORS, X-Frame-Options, and CSP blocks. Which, tho is probably precisely things should work. Otherwise people arbitrarily iframe the open web opening up a massive clickjacking-pocalypse. It makes total sense for security....sigh.
But I sitll wanted a way to get around it to capture that 90s nostalgia (tho NeXT and this browser were actually from the late 80s), the real open web inside a retro recreation not just a crippled, iframe-blocked imitation. Or "everything links to archive org" stuff.
To make that work, I had to make a custom embedder API. It basically pipes a fully isolated remote Chromium instance right into the retro shell through an iframe in a custom element. The engine is real, and it respects the native security boundaries because the browser is physically isolated, but it wears that heavy 90s UI so you get the 90s feel.
If you want to mess around with a different flavor of 90s nostalgia that can actually surf the modern web, I put up a live version here: https://win9-5.com/demo. Sound on for the retro modem dial-up elevator music. The non-graybeards may never have experienced the modem's mating call in the wild.
At least that would formalize the specification.
Perhaps the only thing "bad" about it is that you're simply not used to it. I can certainly think of someone used to that UI thinking the same thing about today's interfaces, with disappearing scrollbars, flat design and confusing icons.
I have the minimap configured on the left in vs code and use it as scrollbar. It’s quite nice actually.
I'm not saying it is perfect, but it was not that bad, really. It's only one level down. And then you could also use a keyboard shortcut for it, which is always faster than anything mouse-driven if your hands are on the keyboard, which they would be, if you wanted to type a URL.
And even if you had to use the mouse, there is an interface feature we have lost: tear-off menus. If you found that you needed something in a nested menu often, you could simply tear-off that submenu and pin it on your desktop so you can always have direct access.
I miss that.
Part of the original requirements was the decentralized nature, which I always found extra interesting:
> CERN Requirements - Non-Centralisation - Information systems start small and grow. They also start isolated and then merge. A new system must allow existing systems to be linked together without requiring any central control or coordination.
Doesn't directly answer your question I suppose, but gives at least one perspective on how at least one person saw it at that point :)
People lost themselves, forgetting how important noscript/basic (x)html (aka basic HTML forms, nowdays which could be augmented with <audio> and <video>)) has been for web technical independence.
All that is very sad, and toxic.
The original source code isn't really involved, which is a shame, since it is actually available.
IMHO this should have been (something along the lines of) GNUstep + TimBL's original code (mirror: https://github.com/cynthia/WorldWideWeb) + Emscripten + getting Emscripten to work with ObjC. Now, that would have been cool.
This is the most commented HN posting on this from that time (2019):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19249373
I've even stood in the office that was his when he wrote it (it was empty when I was there, but had recently been in use by some incredibly high-end physicist).
The performance would likely be comparable %)
https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=windows30
Some previous discussions:
2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34218591
2021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26680839
2020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25013103
2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19249373
I guess that let them off the hook for incorrect spelling. :-)
From my point of view it was Netscape that made a big splash, a year+ later, with a lot of publicity and good graphic design. Mosaic itself was an awkward demo with an interesting nerdy story.
:-)
But it makes sense it is a GUI browser since it was developed on a NeXT
I'm having trouble pinning down when WorldWideWeb got inline image support, but based on https://www.w3.org/History/1991-WWW-NeXT/Implementation/Feat... I'm guessing sometime between 1992 and 1994, when there are screenshots with inline images, so maybe after Lynx was published.
https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/07/18/les-horribles-cern...
> How was I to know that I was passing an historical milestone, as the one above was the first picture of a band ever to be clicked on in a web browser!"
Source: https://musiclub.web.cern.ch/bands/cernettes/firstband.html
I was also disappointed that the editing went away after the first browser. (There was "Amaya" which had editing, but it was a research thing and not a commonly used browser.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViolaWWW
There was also OmniWeb on the Next machine, but there weren't a lot of NeXT machines around.
Mosaic was the first browser to support images because HTML didn't support images and Marc Andreesen and Eric Bina sat in a coffee shop on campus while Marc talked himself into going rogue and making his own tag while Eric didn't talk him out of it (source, Eric Bina, ACM lecture at UIUC ca 1995)
This web link post, the original NEXT webbrowser as a web page, tries to celebrate and revive the reinvention of the broken wheel.
The World Wide Web, browser and html standards are a very broken wheel. Alan Kay, the inventor of personal computing, explains why:
https://youtu.be/FvmTSpJU-Xc?t=961
Some of the comments of youtube are fun too.
This lecture Alan aimed at this particular audience, the computer science (programming) students at University of Illinois, where they programmed the second browser, the second broken wheel 20 years after Alan and Dan had showed them how do do it better.
Dan Ingalls implemented most of Alan Kay's invention of the personal computer, in the following demo's he shows how to fix the webbrowser's broken wheel a bit.
The Lively Kernel would be another way to fix html but retain the web. Two demos says it all:
https://youtu.be/gGw09RZjQf8?t=147
https://youtu.be/QTJRwKOFddc?t=234
Their Squeak, Etoys and Croquet fixed it completely:
Early Croquet demo (there are several others): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZO7av2ZFB8
Croquet in webbrowser: https://codefrau.github.io/jasmine/
Demo of webbrowser replacement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1s9ldlqhVkM
Squeak and all its predecessors: https://smalltalkzoo.computerhistory.org
Etoys: https://squeak.js.org/etoys/
The Web is not HTML (and it's not JavaScript). It's URLs. It's a machine-readable graph of clickable references on cross-linked Works Cited pages. It's certainly not Smalltalk-over-the-Internet, and it's not trying to be (at least it wasn't when TBL created it).
The biggest problem facing the Web in the 90s and still today is that everyone who saw it then hallucinated TBL describing an SRI-/PARC-style application platform because that's what they wanted it to be—including people like Alan Kay—who then perversely go on to criticize it for being so unaligned with that vision.
It is both surprising and unsurprising (given this reaction) that the industry managed to make it all the way through the 90s without Wikipedia showing up until after the crash.