Amusingly enough, the first Mac web browser in 1993, MacWWW, aka Samba, was also a character-based web browser. It had a bad habit of crashing ... a l

Say hello to the early days of web browsers

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2021-08-10 17:00:07

Amusingly enough, the first Mac web browser in 1993, MacWWW, aka Samba, was also a character-based web browser. It had a bad habit of crashing ... a lot. Today, it's perhaps the least well-known of the early browsers.

The very first graphical web browser was Viola, which was created in 1991. Heavily influenced by Apple HyperCard, this Unix X Window System browser was invented by Pei-Yuan Wei, a Taiwanese computer science student. He had been working on hyperlinks and the internet, and had he been a bit faster off the mark, he (and not Tim Berners-Lee) might have gone down in history as the inventor of the World Wide Web.

Mosaic was the first popular web browser. It was initially on Unix in 1993, but it was quickly ported to the Mac and Windows PC. It set both the look of the web browser today, and both Firefox and Internet Explorer can trace their roots to its original code. 

By 1993, people outside of the scientific community were learning about the web and they wanted to be able to use it from Windows PCs instead of Unix workstations. So, it was that Tom Bruce developed the first web browser specifically for Windows: Cello. Bruce did this in conjunction with his work on the Legal Information Institute (LII), the first legal information site on the web. 

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