Line Mode Browser

Last updated

Line Mode Browser
Original author(s)
Developer(s) W3C / CERN
Initial release0.7, 14 May 1991 (1991-05-14) [1]
Stable release
5.4.2 / 24 June 2017;6 years ago (2017-06-24) [2]
Written in C [3]
Operating system Cross-platform, same as Libwww
Type Web browser
License W3C Software Notice and License
Website www.w3.org/LineMode/

The Line Mode Browser (also known as LMB, [4] WWWLib, or just www [5] ) is the second web browser ever created. [6] The browser was the first demonstrated to be portable to several different operating systems. [7] [8] Operated from a simple command-line interface, it could be widely used on many computers and computer terminals throughout the Internet. The browser was developed starting in 1990, and then supported by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as an example and test application for the libwww library. [9]

Contents

History

One of the fundamental concepts of the "World Wide Web" projects at CERN was "universal readership". [10] In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee had already written the first browser, WorldWideWeb (later renamed to Nexus), but that program only worked on the proprietary software of NeXT computers, which were in limited use. [7] Berners-Lee and his team could not port the WorldWideWeb application with its features—including the graphical WYSIWYG editor— to the more widely deployed X Window System, since they had no experience in programming it. [11] The team recruited Nicola Pellow, a math student intern working at CERN, [12] to write a "passive browser" so basic that it could run on most computers of that time. [7] The name "Line Mode Browser" refers to the fact that, to ensure compatibility with the earliest computer terminals such as Teletype machines, the program only displayed text, (no images) and had only line-by-line text input (no cursor positioning). [11] [13]

Development started in November 1990 and the browser was demonstrated in December 1990. [14] The development environment used resources from the PRIAM project, a French language acronym for "PRojet Interdivisionnaire d'Assistance aux Microprocesseurs", a project to standardise microprocessor development across CERN. [15] The short development time produced software in a simplified dialect of the C programming language. The official standard ANSI C was not yet available on all platforms. [11] The Line Mode Browser was released to a limited audience on VAX, RS/6000 and Sun-4 computers in March 1991. [16] Before the release of the first publicly available version, it was integrated into the CERN Program Library (CERNLIB), used mostly by the High-Energy Physics-community. [8] [17] The first beta of the browser was released on 8 April 1991. [18] Berners-Lee announced the browser's availability in August 1991 in the alt.hypertext newsgroup of Usenet. [19] [20] Users could use the browser from anywhere in the Internet through the telnet protocol to the info.cern.ch machine (which was also the first web server). The spreading news of the World Wide Web in 1991 increased interest in the project at CERN and other laboratories such as DESY in Germany, and elsewhere throughout the world. [7] [21] [22]

The first stable version, 1.1, was released in January 1992. [16] [23] Since version 1.2l, released in October 1992, the browser has used the common code library (later called libwww). [1] The main developer, Pellow, started working on the MacWWW project, and both browsers began to share some source code. [24] In the May 1993 World Wide Web Newsletter Berners-Lee announced that the browser was released into the public domain to reduce the work on new clients. [25] On 21 March 1995, with the release of version 3.0, CERN put the full responsibility for maintaining the Line Mode Browser on the W3C. [1] The Line Mode Browser and the libwww library are closely tied together—the last independent release of a separate browser component was in 1995, and the browser became part of libwww. [26]

The Agora World Wide Web email browser was based on the Line Mode Browser. [27] The Line Mode Browser was very popular in the beginning of the web, since it was the only web browser available for all operating systems. Statistics from January 1994 show that Mosaic had quickly changed the web browser landscape and only 2% of all World Wide Web users browsed by Line Mode Browser. [28] The new niche of text-only web browser was filled by Lynx, which made the Line Mode Browser largely irrelevant as a browser. One reason was that Lynx is much more flexible than the Line Mode Browser. [29] It then became a test application for the libwww.

Operating mode

The simplicity of the Line Mode Browser had several limitations. The Line Mode Browser was designed to work on any operating system using what were called "dumb" terminals. The user interface had to be as simple as possible. The user began with a command-line interface specifying a Uniform Resource Locator (URL). The requested web page was then printed line by line on the screen, like a teleprinter. Websites were displayed using the first versions of HTML. Formatting was achieved with capitalization, indentation, and new lines. Header elements were capitalized, centered and separated from the normal text by empty lines. [30]

Navigation was not controlled by a pointing device such as a mouse or arrow keys, but by text commands typed into the program. [31] Numbers in brackets are displayed for each link; links are opened by typing the corresponding number into the program. This led one journalist of the time to write: "The Web is a way of finding information by typing numbers." [6] The page scrolled down when an empty command (carriage return) was entered, and scrolled up with the command "u". The command "b" navigated backwards in history, and new pages were navigated with "g http://..." (for go to) and the URL. [32]

The browser had no authoring functions, so pages could only be read and not edited. This was considered to be unfortunate by Robert Cailliau, one of the developers:

"I think in retrospect the biggest mistake made in the whole project was the public release of the Line-Mode Browser. It gave the Internet hackers immediate access, but only from the point of view of the passive browser—no editing capabilities" [11]

Features

The Line Mode Browser was designed to be able to be platform independent. There are official ports to Apollo/Domain, [33] IBM RS6000, [33] DECStation/ultrix, [33] VAX/VMS, [33] VAX/Ultrix, [33] MS-DOS, [13] Unix, [13] [34] Windows, [34] Classic Mac OS, [34] Linux, [34] MVS, [35] VM/CMS, [35] FreeBSD, [36] Solaris, [36] and to macOS. [36] The browser supports many protocols like File Transfer Protocol (FTP), Gopher, Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP), and Wide area information server (WAIS). [1] [17] [37]

Other features included rlogin [17] and telnet [17] hyperlinks, Cyrillic support (added on 25 November 1994 in version 2.15), [1] and ability to be set up as a proxy client. [38] The browser could run as a background process and download files. [29] The Line Mode Browser has had problems recognizing character entities, properly collapsing whitespace, and supporting tables and frames. [39]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tim Berners-Lee</span> English computer scientist, inventor of the World Wide Web (born 1955)

Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee,, also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web, the HTML markup language, the URL system, and HTTP. He is a professorial research fellow at the University of Oxford and a professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">World Wide Web</span> Linked hypertext system on the Internet

The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling information to be shared over the Internet through simplified ways meant to appeal to users beyond IT specialists and hobbyists, as well as documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet according to specific rules, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Website</span> Set of related web pages served from a single domain

A website is a collection of web pages and related content that is identified by a common domain name and published on at least one web server. Websites are typically dedicated to a particular topic or purpose, such as news, education, commerce, entertainment or social networking. Hyperlinking between web pages guides the navigation of the site, which often starts with a home page. As of May 2023, the top 5 most visited websites are Google Search, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mosaic (web browser)</span> Early web browser (1993–1997)

NCSA Mosaic is a discontinued web browser, and one of the first to be widely available. It was instrumental in popularizing the World Wide Web and the general Internet by integrating multimedia such as text and graphics. It was named for its support of multiple Internet protocols, such as Hypertext Transfer Protocol, File Transfer Protocol, Network News Transfer Protocol, and Gopher. 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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">WorldWideWeb</span> First web browser; renamed Nexus

WorldWideWeb is the first web browser and web page editor. It was discontinued in 1994. It was the first WYSIWYG HTML editor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ViolaWWW</span> Popular web browser in the early 1990s

ViolaWWW is a discontinued web browser, the first to support scripting and stylesheets 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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Cailliau</span> Belgian engineer, computer scientist, and co-inventor of the World Wide Web

Robert Cailliau is a Belgian informatics engineer, computer scientist and author who proposed the first (pre-www) hypertext system for CERN in 1987 and collaborated with Tim Berners-Lee on the World Wide Web from before it got its name. He designed the historical logo of the WWW, organized the first International World Wide Web Conference at CERN in 1994 and helped transfer Web development from CERN to the global Web consortium in 1995. Together with James Gillies, Cailliau wrote How the Web Was Born, the first book-length account of the origins of the World Wide Web.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Libwww</span>

Libwww is an early World Wide Web software library providing core functions for web browsers, implementing HTML, HTTP, and other technologies. Tim Berners-Lee, at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), released libwww in late 1992, comprising reusable code from the first browsers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nicola Pellow</span> British information scientist who worked on the early World Wide Web

Nicola Pellow is an English mathematician and information scientist who was one of the nineteen members of the WWW Project at CERN working with Tim Berners-Lee. She joined the project in November 1990, while an undergraduate maths student enrolled on a sandwich course at Leicester Polytechnic. Pellow recalled having little experience with programming languages, "... apart from using a bit of Pascal and FORTRAN as part of my degree course."

Dan Connolly is an American computer scientist who was closely involved with the creation of the World Wide Web as a member of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of the World Wide Web</span> Information system running in the Internet

The World Wide Web is a global information medium which users can access via computers connected to the Internet. The term is often mistakenly used as a synonym for the Internet, but the Web is a service that operates over the Internet, just as email and Usenet do. The history of the Internet and the history of hypertext date back significantly further than that of the World Wide Web.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Erwise</span> Discontinued graphical web browser

Erwise is a discontinued pioneering web browser, and the first available with a graphical user interface.

Henrik Frystyk Nielsen is a Danish engineer and computer scientist. He is best known for his pioneering work on the World Wide Web and subsequent work on computer network protocols.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MacWWW</span>

MacWWW, also known as Samba, is an early minimalist web browser from 1992 meant to run on Macintosh computers. It was the first web browser for the classic Mac OS platform, and the first for any non-Unix operating system. MacWWW tries to emulate the design of WorldWideWeb. Unlike modern browsers it opens each link in a new window only after a double-click. It was a commercial product from CERN and cost 50 European Currency Units

Variant objects in the context of HTTP are objects served by an Origin Content Server in a type of transmitted data variation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">CERN httpd</span> Early web server

CERN httpd is an early, now discontinued, web server (HTTP) daemon originally developed at CERN from 1990 onwards by Tim Berners-Lee, Ari Luotonen and Henrik Frystyk Nielsen. Implemented in C, it was the first web server software.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arena (web browser)</span> Web browser and Web authoring tool for Unix

The Arena browser was one of the first web browsers for Unix. Originally begun by Dave Raggett in 1993, development continued at CERN and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and subsequently by Yggdrasil Computing. Arena was used in testing the implementations for HTML version 3.0, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), Portable Network Graphics (PNG), and libwww. Arena was widely used and popular at the beginning of the World Wide Web.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">First International Conference on the World-Wide Web</span>

The First International Conference on the World-Wide Web was the first-ever conference about the World Wide Web, and the first meeting of what became the International World Wide Web Conference. It was held on May 25 to 27, 1994 in Geneva, Switzerland. The conference had 380 participants, who were accepted out of 800 applicants. It has been referred to as the "Woodstock of the Web".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dave Raggett</span> English computer specialist

Dave Raggett is an English computer specialist who has played a major role in implementing the World Wide Web since 1992. He has been a W3C Fellow at the World Wide Web Consortium since 1995 and worked on many of the key web protocols, including HTTP, HTML, XHTML, MathML, XForms, and VoiceXML. Raggett also wrote HTML Tidy and is currently pioneering W3C's work on the Web of Things. He lives in the west of England.

ENQUIRE was a software project written in 1980 by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, which was the predecessor to the World Wide Web. It was a simple hypertext program that had some of the same ideas as the Web and the Semantic Web but was different in several important ways.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 Berners-Lee, Tim (23 April 1998). "Change History of Line Mode Browser". World Wide Web Consortium . Retrieved 2 June 2010.
  2. "Getting the W3C libwww Source". www.w3.org. Retrieved 20 September 2022.
  3. Pellow, Nicola (February 1991). "LM_Availability – /Talk_Feb-91". World Wide Web Consortium . Retrieved 10 August 2010.
  4. Nielsen, Henrik Frystyk (April 1995). "How can I download a Document?". World Wide Web Consortium. Archived from the original on 12 January 2012. Retrieved 10 August 2010.
  5. Bolso, Erik Inge (8 March 2005). "2005 Text Mode Browser Roundup". Linux Journal . Retrieved 5 August 2010.
  6. 1 2 Berners-Lee, Tim. "Frequently asked questions – What were the first browsers?". World Wide Web Consortium . Retrieved 26 July 2011.
  7. 1 2 3 4 "Ten Years Public Domain for the Original Web Software". CERN. 30 April 2003. Archived from the original on 29 June 2017. Retrieved 21 July 2005.
  8. 1 2 "How the web began". CERN. 2008. Retrieved 25 July 2010.
  9. Nielsen, Henrik Frystyk (4 May 1998). "WWW – The Libwww Line Mode Browser". World Wide Web Consortium . Retrieved 9 June 2010.
  10. Berners-Lee, Tim. "W3 Concepts". World Wide Web Consortium . Retrieved 20 July 2005. The W3 principle of universal readership is that once information is available, it should be accessible from any type of computer, in any country, and an (authorized) person should only have to use one simple program to access it.
  11. 1 2 3 4 Petrie, Charles; Cailliau, Robert (November 1997). "Interview Robert Cailliau on the WWW Proposal: "How It Really Happened."". Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Archived from the original on 6 January 2011. Retrieved 18 August 2010.
  12. Berners-Lee, Tim; Fischetti, Mark (1999). Weaving the Web . HarperSanFrancisco. p.  29. ISBN   9780062515865. [...] we needed help. Ben Segal [...] spotted a young intern named Nicola Pellow.
  13. 1 2 3 Stewart, Bill. "Web Browser History". Living Internet. Retrieved 2 June 2010.
  14. Cailliau, Robert (1995). "A Little History of the World Wide Web". World Wide Web Consortium . Retrieved 7 August 2010. Technical Student Nicola Pellow (CN) joins and starts work on the line-mode browser.
  15. Eck, C. (December 1985). "PRIAM and VMEbus at CERN" (PDF). VMEbus in Physics Conference. Retrieved 26 July 2011.
  16. 1 2 Crémel, Nicole (5 April 2001). "A Little History of the World Wide Web". CERN. Archived from the original on 19 December 2007. Retrieved 2 June 2010.
  17. 1 2 3 4 Berners-Lee, Tim (January 1992). "What's new in '92". World Wide Web Consortium . Retrieved 25 July 2010.
  18. Gillies, James; Cailliau, Robert (2000). How the Web Was Born. Oxford University Press. pp.  345. ISBN   0-19-286207-3.
  19. Stewart, Bill. "Tim Berners-Lee, Robert Cailliau, and the World Wide Web". Living Internet. Retrieved 26 July 2010.
  20. Berners-Lee, Tim (6 August 1991). "Re: Qualifiers on Hypertext links..." Retrieved 28 July 2010. We have a prototype hypertext editor for the NeXT, and a browser for line mode terminals which runs on almost anything.
  21. Gillies, James; Cailliau, Robert (2000). How the Web Was Born. Oxford University Press. p.  205. ISBN   0-19-286207-3.
  22. Berners-Lee, Tim (7 May 1993). "Public Domain CERN WWW Software" . Retrieved 11 October 2010.
  23. The PC-NFS version (dated 92.01.16) for MS-DOS: wwwpcnfs.zip (NOTE: Firefox browsers may refuse to download the file, claiming that "file contains a virus or malware". VirusTotal results.).
  24. Berners-Lee, Tim (3 November 1992). "Macintosh Browser". World Wide Web Consortium . Retrieved 2 June 2010.
  25. Berners-Lee, Tim (May 1993). "May World-Wide Web News". World Wide Web Consortium . Retrieved 7 June 2010.
  26. Kreutzmann, Dr. Helge (6 January 2010). "WWW-Browsers for Linux" . Retrieved 3 June 2010.
  27. Sendall, Mike (29 March 1995). "World Wide Web Clients". World Wide Web Consortium . Retrieved 10 August 2010.
  28. "History of the Web". Oxford Brookes University. 2002. Archived from the original on 25 September 2010. Retrieved 20 November 2010.
  29. 1 2 Graham, Ian S. (1995). The HTML Sourcebook: The Complete Guide to HTML. John Wiley & Sons. pp.  323. ISBN   0-471-11849-4.
  30. "Line Mode Browser". World Wide Web Consortium. 3 November 1992. Retrieved 21 July 2010.
  31. Pellow, Nicola (February 1991). "Features_of_LM – /Talk_Feb-91". World Wide Web Consortium . Retrieved 10 August 2010.
  32. Berners-Lee, Tim (3 November 1992). "Commands". CERN/World Wide Web Consortium . Retrieved 24 July 2010.
  33. 1 2 3 4 5 Berners-Le, Tim. "Installation". Archived from the original on 11 January 2012. Retrieved 16 November 2010.
  34. 1 2 3 4 Nielsen, Henrik Frystyk (1 April 1999). "List of Platforms for libwww". World Wide Web Consortium . Retrieved 9 June 2010.
  35. 1 2 "WWW people". World Wide Web Consortium . Retrieved 15 June 2010.
  36. 1 2 3 "W3C libwww libraries". PhysioNet. Cambridge, MA: University of São Paulo. 19 March 2008. Archived from the original on 18 May 2015. Retrieved 30 May 2010.
  37. Berners-Lee, Tim; Nielsen, Henrik Frystyk (9 December 1996). "Defining a News Server". World Wide Web Consortium . Retrieved 28 June 2010.
  38. Nielsen, Henrik Frystyk (9 August 1997). "Libwww – the W3C Sample Code Library README". World Wide Web Consortium . Retrieved 11 August 2010.
  39. Tobias, Daniel R. (4 April 2010). ""Brand-X" Browsers – Alphabetical List: A-G" . Retrieved 5 July 2010.

Further reading