IBox

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IBox (Internet in a Box) was one of the first commercially available Internet connection software packages available for sale to the public. O'Reilly & Associates (now O'Reilly Media) created and produced the package, in collaboration with Spry, Inc. Spry, Inc. also started up a commercial Internet service provider (ISP) called InterServ. [1] [2]

Contents

The IBox software included the Winsock program and TCP/IP stack that were needed to connect a computer running Microsoft Windows to the Internet in 1994. [3] The IBox package also included a licensed copy of the NCSA Mosaic web browser called AIR Mosaic , [4] [5] AIR Mail (an email client), AIR News (an NNTP news client), AIR Telnet, AIR Gopher, and an FTP Network File Manager.

Combined with InterServ's dial-up access, Internet in a Box provided a complete solution for members of the general public to access the Internet, a network previously available almost exclusively to government and collegiate users, or to the public only indirectly through e-mail gateways provided by hosted systems such as BBSes and CompuServe. The inclusion of a web browser further gave access to the then-nascent World Wide Web.

The pioneering Internet book from O'Reilly, Ed Krol's 'Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog' (US-1993) was included in the US product. The European edition of the product also included Sue Schofield's 'UK Internet Book' (UK 1994).

Spry, Inc.

Spry, Inc. was a small software company headed up by David Pool in Seattle, Washington. Spry was the first company licensing the Mosaic Web browser source code. [6] In 1995 CompuServe bought Spry, Inc. for $100 million in cash and stock of H&R Block (the parent company of CompuServe).

Related Research Articles

The Gopher protocol is a communications protocol designed for distributing, searching, and retrieving documents in Internet Protocol networks. The design of the Gopher protocol and user interface is menu-driven, and presented an alternative to the World Wide Web in its early stages, but ultimately fell into disfavor, yielding to the HTTP. The Gopher ecosystem is often regarded as the effective predecessor of the World Wide Web.

Netscape Navigator Web browser

Netscape Navigator was a proprietary web browser, and the original browser of the Netscape line, from versions 1 to 4.08, and 9.x. It was the flagship product of the Netscape Communications Corp and was the dominant web browser in terms of usage share in the 1990s, but by around 2003 its use had almost disappeared. This was partly because the Netscape Corporation did not sustain Netscape Navigator's technical innovation in the late 1990s.

Netscape Communications Corporation was an independent American computer services company with headquarters in Mountain View, California and then Dulles, Virginia. Its Netscape web browser was once dominant but lost to Internet Explorer and other competitors in the so-called first browser war, with its market share falling from more than 90 percent in the mid-1990s to less than 1 percent in 2006. Netscape created the JavaScript programming language, the most widely used language for client-side scripting of web pages. The company also developed SSL which was used for securing online communications before its successor TLS took over.

World Wide Web System of interlinked hypertext documents accessed over the Internet

The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system where documents and other web resources are identified by Uniform Resource Locators, which may be interlinked by hypertext, and are accessible over the Internet. The resources of the Web are transferred via the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), may be accessed by users by a software application called a web browser, and are published by a software application called a web server. The World Wide Web is not synonymous with the Internet, which pre-dated the Web in some form by over two decades and upon which technologies the Web is built.

Mosaic (web browser) web browser

NCSA Mosaic is one of the first web browsers. It was instrumental in popularizing the World Wide Web and the general Internet by integrating multimedia such as text and graphics. It is a client for earlier internet protocols such as File Transfer Protocol, Network News Transfer Protocol, and Gopher. It was named for its support of multiple Internet protocols. Its intuitive interface, reliability, personal computer support, and simple installation all contributed to its popularity within the web. Mosaic is the first browser to display images inline with text instead of in a separate window. It is often described as the first graphical web browser, though it was preceded by WorldWideWeb, the lesser-known Erwise, and ViolaWWW.

Cello (web browser)

Cello is an early, discontinued graphical web browser for Windows 3.1; it was developed by Thomas R. Bruce of the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School. It was released as shareware in 1993. While other browsers ran on various Unix machines, Cello was the first web browser for Microsoft Windows, using the winsock system to access the Internet. In addition to the basic Windows, Cello worked on Windows NT 3.5 and with small modifications on OS/2.

Webmail is an email service that can be accessed using a standard web browser. It contrasts with email service accessible through a specialised email client software. Examples of webmail providers are AOL Mail, Gmail, Mailfence, Outlook.com/Hotmail.com, Yahoo! Mail and IceWarp Mail Server. Additionally, many internet service providers provide webmail as part of their internet service package. Similarly, some web hosting providers also provide webmail as a part of their hosting package.

CompuServe was an American online service provider, the first major commercial one in the United States – described in 1994 as "the oldest of the Big Three information services ."

MSN TV

MSN TV was a web access product consisting of a thin client device which used a television for display, and the online service that supported it. The device design and service was developed by WebTV Networks, Inc., a company started in 1995. The WebTV product was announced in July 1996; in April 1997, the company was purchased by Microsoft Corporation and absorbed into MSN.

Bonjour is Apple's implementation of zero-configuration networking (zeroconf), a group of technologies that includes service discovery, address assignment, and hostname resolution. Bonjour locates devices such as printers, other computers, and the services that those devices offer on a local network using multicast Domain Name System (mDNS) service records.

An online service provider (OSP) can, for example, be an Internet service provider, an email provider, a news provider (press), an entertainment provider, a search engine, an e-commerce site, an online banking site, a health site, an official government site, social media, a wiki, or a Usenet newsgroup. In its original more limited definition, it referred only to a commercial computer communication service in which paid members could dial via a computer modem the service's private computer network and access various services and information resources such as bulletin board systems, downloadable files and programs, news articles, chat rooms, and electronic mail services. The term "online service" was also used in references to these dial-up services. The traditional dial-up online service differed from the modern Internet service provider in that they provided a large degree of content that was only accessible by those who subscribed to the online service, while ISP mostly serves to provide access to the Internet and generally provides little if any exclusive content of its own. In the U.S., the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act (OCILLA) portion of the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act has expanded the legal definition of online service in two different ways for different portions of the law. It states in section 512(k)(1):

(A) As used in subsection (a), the term "service provider" means an entity offering the transmission, routing, or providing of connections for digital online communications, between or among points specified by a user, of material of the user’s choosing, without modification to the content of the material as sent or received.
(B) As used in this section, other than subsection (a), the term "service provider" means a provider of online services or network access, or the operator of facilities therefore, and includes an entity described in subparagraph (A).

ViolaWWW

ViolaWWW is a discontinued browser, the first to be popular for the World Wide Web (WWW). It was first released in 1991/1992 for Unix and acted as the recommended browser at CERN, where the WWW was invented, but eventually lost its position as most frequently used browser to Mosaic.

Shell account

A shell account is a user account on a remote server, traditionally running under the Unix operating system, which gives access to a shell via a command-line interface protocol such as telnet or SSH.

Spyglass, Inc., was an Internet software company based in Champaign, Illinois.

A web desktop or webtop is a desktop environment embedded in a web browser or similar client application. A webtop integrates web applications, web services, client–server applications, application servers, and applications on the local client into a desktop environment using the desktop metaphor. Web desktops provide an environment similar to that of Windows, Mac, or a graphical user interface on Unix and Linux systems. It is a virtual desktop running in a web browser. In a webtop the applications, data, files, configuration, settings, and access privileges reside remotely over the network. Much of the computing takes place remotely. The browser is primarily used for display and input purposes.

A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. It further provides for the capture or input of information which may be returned to the presenting system, then stored or processed as necessary. The method of accessing a particular page or content is achieved by entering its address, known as a Uniform Resource Identifier or URI. This may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content. Hyperlinks present in resources enable users easily to navigate their browsers to related resources. A web browser can also be defined as an application software or program designed to enable users to access, retrieve and view documents and other resources on the Internet.

InterCon Systems Corporation was founded in April 1988 by Kurt D. Baumann and Mikki Barry to produce software to connect Macintosh computers together. At the time, there was no real concept of the Internet and there was still a question of whether the TCP/IP protocols or OSI protocols would be adopted widely. Over the next 9 years, the company grew from three employees to over 100 and sold software in the US, Europe and Japan.

tkWWW

tkWWW is an early, now discontinued web browser and WYSIWYG HTML editor written by Joseph Wang at MIT as part of Project Athena and the Globewide Network Academy project. The browser was based on the Tcl language and the Tk (toolkit) extension but did not achieve broad user-acceptance or market share, although it was included in many Linux distributions by default. Joseph Wang wanted tkWWW to become a replacement for r r n and to become a "swiss army knife" of networked computing.

AirMosaic

AirMosaic was an early commercial web browser based on the NCSA Mosaic browser.

DR-WebSpyder A graphical web browser for DOS and Linux

DR-WebSpyder is a DOS web browser, mail client and operating system runtime environment that was developed by Caldera UK in 1997. It was based on the DR-DOS operating system and networking components from Novell as well as the Arachne web browser by Michal Polák of xChaos software. The system was designed to run on low-end desktop systems, but being able to boot and execute from disk as well as from ROM or network, it was also tailored for x86-based thin clients and embedded systems with or without disk drives. Using the web browser as its principal user interface, it could be also used for kiosk systems and set-top boxes. Named Embrowser, it has been ported to Linux in 1999 and was called Embedix Browser since 2000.

References

  1. Goldberg, Steven (October 24, 1994). "Internet access? It's in the box". Network World. IDG Network World. 11 (43): 43–44. ISSN   0887-7661.
  2. Peschel, Joe (November 7, 1994). "Spry's Internet In A Box package brings the Iway on-ramp to your computer". InfoWorld. Vol. 16 no. 45. San Mateo, CA: InfoWorld Media Group. p. 118. ISSN   0199-6649.
  3. Stewart, Bill. "Web Browser History" . Retrieved 16 August 2010.
  4. Sink, Eric (15 April 2003). "Memoirs From the Browser Wars" . Retrieved 16 February 2011.
  5. Cockburn, Andy; Jones, Steve (6 December 2000). "Which Way Now? Analysing and Easing Inadequacies in WWW Navigation". CiteSeerX. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.25.8504 .Missing or empty |url= (help)
  6. December, John; Randall, Neil (1994). World Wide Web Unleashed. Sams Publishing. ISBN   0-672-30617-4.