5 ms·

CERN rebuilt the original browser from 1989 (2019)

257 points by tylerdane 8mo ago

deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
tylerdane 8mo ago
Direct link to the browser: https://worldwideweb.cern.ch/browser/ https://worldwideweb.cern.ch/browser/
- Kim_Bruning 8mo ago
  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)
  - krapp 8mo 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.
    - actionfromafar 8mo ago
      Upload the file when you are done, perhaps?
    - zabzonk 8mo ago
      > But that seems pointless. Making notes for your own consumption?
    - Kim_Bruning 8mo ago
      HTTP has PUT and DELETE for a reason ;-)
    - shakna 8mo 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.
      - idiotsecant 8mo ago
        In what way is that not currently possible? All browsers I know of you can edit whatever you want in any page you download
        shakna 8mo ago
        You'll need to do a bit of work to make it the way it used to be. Editing any text on a page, or having your changes save persistently, needs a bit of a... Framework, to keep things together, rather than being the expected mode of interaction. Sure, I can add a p to the tree. But if I refresh, its gone. I'll probably need plugins to keep my own stylesheets and JS changes around.
      - snigsnog 8mo ago
        >Being able to change stylesheets https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/styl-us/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/styl-us/ >disable or enhance various JavaScript scripts https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/?utm_source=addons.mozilla.org&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=search https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tampermonkey/?utm_source=addons.mozilla.org&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=search https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tampermonkey/... Yeah you can't directly alter scripts being ran (as far as I know?) but you can usually override/extend behavior and can definitely add your own >add notes and annotations https://cwmonkey.github.io/greasemonkey/make-note/ https://cwmonkey.github.io/greasemonkey/make-note/ (I haven't actually used this one, just first result)
  - karlgkk 8mo 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.
  - dadoum 8mo ago
    F12, Console, type document.designMode = 'on'
    - wesammikhail 8mo ago
      I had no idea. You just blew my mind
    - dadoum 8mo ago
      (it is slightly different though, as links cannot be followed)
      - _2d30 8mo ago
        F12, Console, type document.designMode = 'off'
      - 1718627440 8mo ago
        In my Firefox installation you can.
    - 1718627440 8mo ago
      Wow.
  - thenthenthen 8mo ago
    The original read/write web
jmclnx 8mo 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 8mo 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#Early_1990s:_world_wide_web 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/Features.html 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.
  - WillAdams 8mo ago
    Well there was this image: https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/07/18/les-horribles-cernettes/ https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/07/18/les-horribles-cern...
    - wahern 8mo ago
      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!" Source: https://musiclub.web.cern.ch/bands/cernettes/firstband.html https://musiclub.web.cern.ch/bands/cernettes/firstband.html
  - dunham 8mo ago
    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.)
lysace 8mo 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 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19249373
- nine_k 8mo ago
  A WASM emulator of 68040 and NeXT, the original OS and compiler, then run WWW on top of that. The performance would likely be comparable %)
  - actionfromafar 8mo ago
    The performance would likely be much better. :-)
    - lysace 8mo ago
      An example from a year later; 1990: https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=windows30 https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=windows30
      - spijdar 8mo ago
        Every version of NeXT is actually catalogued and can be run in the browser at: https://infinitemac.org/ https://infinitemac.org/ I'm pretty sure the CERN WorldWideWeb application is also included in the "bonus software" HDD, but I'm on my phone right now and can't confirm. :-)
- krackers 8mo ago
  You can already run nextstep in browser, see https://aresluna.org/frame-of-preference/ https://aresluna.org/frame-of-preference/ (section "Back to 1992")
j3th9n 8mo ago
Links where called Pointers back then apparently.
java-man 8mo ago
All the links should point to the 1989 internet instead of "Not Found" :-)
fsloth 8mo 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). [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwise
- rurban 8mo 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 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.
  - fsloth 8mo ago
    Ah - I stand corrected - thanks!
  - classichasclass 8mo ago
    It's a shame that Hyper-G has not been better preserved. It had some remarkable features (disclosure, my article: https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2025/05/prior-art-dept-hierarchical-hypermedia.html https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2025/05/prior-art-dept-hierarchi... ).
    - rurban 8mo ago
      Fixed link: https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2025/05/prior-art-dept-hierarchical-hypermedia.html?m=1 https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2025/05/prior-art-dept-hierarchi...
- cxr 8mo ago
gerdesj 8mo ago
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 8mo 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 8mo 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.
hackingonempty 8mo 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 ;-)
ChrisArchitect 8mo ago
(2019) Some previous discussions: 2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34218591 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34218591 2021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26680839 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26680839 2020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25013103 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25013103 2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19249373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19249373
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
jibal 8mo ago
> The WWW project does not take responsability I guess that let them off the hook for incorrect spelling. :-)
mistrial9 8mo 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.
keepamovin 8mo 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 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.
Rapzid 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
  The 2015 movie has the entire second act dedicated to the Next launch no?
  - twoodfin 8mo 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. One of my favorite films of the last 20 years.
shevy-java 8mo ago
Better than chrome!
ulrischa 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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.
- WillAdams 8mo ago
  Menus can be torn off and positioned as desired. I miss that.
- alansaber 8mo ago
  It has a certain charm, like everything engineered without immediate commercial considerations
sylware 8mo 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.
fecal_henge 8mo ago
No link to EDH.
amelius 8mo ago
I wish someone would write a reference implementation in a functional language. At least that would formalize the specification.
karanveer 8mo 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?
- embedding-shape 8mo ago
  The original WWW proposal is quite easy and interesting to read through: https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html 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 8mo 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.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
morphle 8mo 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: https://youtu.be/FvmTSpJU-Xc?t=961 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/gGw09RZjQf8?t=147 https://youtu.be/QTJRwKOFddc?t=234 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZO7av2ZFB8 Croquet in webbrowser: https://codefrau.github.io/jasmine/ https://codefrau.github.io/jasmine/ Demo of webbrowser replacement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1s9ldlqhVkM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1s9ldlqhVkM Squeak and all its predecessors: https://smalltalkzoo.computerhistory.org https://smalltalkzoo.computerhistory.org Etoys: https://squeak.js.org/etoys/ https://squeak.js.org/etoys/
- cxr 8mo ago
  > 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.
dang 8mo ago
Related. Others? WorldWideWeb – the first web browser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34218591 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34218591 - Jan 2023 (18 comments) The Browser – WorldWideWeb Next Application (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26680839 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26680839 - April 2021 (21 comments) The Browser – WorldWideWeb Next Application - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25013103 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25013103 - Nov 2020 (8 comments) CERN 2019 WorldWideWeb Rebuild - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24939929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24939929 - Oct 2020 (7 comments) CERN 2019 WorldWideWeb Rebuild - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19249373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19249373 - Feb 2019 (45 comments) CERN 2019 WorldWideWeb Rebuild: 2019 rebuilding of the original NeXT web browser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19183316 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19183316 - Feb 2019 (1 comment)
jbottoms 8mo ago
Probably should be "Rebuilt the CERN Browser" The Silversmith browser went into service in 1986. It worked with SCI documents under security controls. The user could only access the sections of the document permitted by heir clearance. It includeded in-line images that linked to descriptions providing access to data in a prescribed linked bounding box. The Security mechanism could be configured to resemble the security procedures of WWMCCS (Now SIPRNet)(WorldWide Military Command & Control System), Later renamed WIS (WWMCCS Information System). A modified version providing semantic sezrches was made available to the U.S.Army Material Command in 1988. In 2007 an ACM in Boston a paper described another variant that provided searches using creative strings.

257 points by tylerdane 8mo ago

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

tylerdane 8mo ago

Direct link to the browser: https://worldwideweb.cern.ch/browser/ https://worldwideweb.cern.ch/browser/

Kim_Bruning 8mo ago
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)
- krapp 8mo 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.
  - actionfromafar 8mo ago
    Upload the file when you are done, perhaps?
  - zabzonk 8mo ago
    > But that seems pointless. Making notes for your own consumption?
  - Kim_Bruning 8mo ago
    HTTP has PUT and DELETE for a reason ;-)
  - shakna 8mo 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.
    - idiotsecant 8mo ago
      In what way is that not currently possible? All browsers I know of you can edit whatever you want in any page you download
      - shakna 8mo ago
        You'll need to do a bit of work to make it the way it used to be. Editing any text on a page, or having your changes save persistently, needs a bit of a... Framework, to keep things together, rather than being the expected mode of interaction. Sure, I can add a p to the tree. But if I refresh, its gone. I'll probably need plugins to keep my own stylesheets and JS changes around.
    - snigsnog 8mo ago
      >Being able to change stylesheets https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/styl-us/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/styl-us/ >disable or enhance various JavaScript scripts https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/?utm_source=addons.mozilla.org&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=search https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tampermonkey/?utm_source=addons.mozilla.org&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=search https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tampermonkey/... Yeah you can't directly alter scripts being ran (as far as I know?) but you can usually override/extend behavior and can definitely add your own >add notes and annotations https://cwmonkey.github.io/greasemonkey/make-note/ https://cwmonkey.github.io/greasemonkey/make-note/ (I haven't actually used this one, just first result)
- karlgkk 8mo 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.
- dadoum 8mo ago
  F12, Console, type document.designMode = 'on'
  - wesammikhail 8mo ago
    I had no idea. You just blew my mind
  - dadoum 8mo ago
    (it is slightly different though, as links cannot be followed)
    - _2d30 8mo ago
      F12, Console, type document.designMode = 'off'
    - 1718627440 8mo ago
      In my Firefox installation you can.
  - 1718627440 8mo ago
    Wow.
- thenthenthen 8mo ago
  The original read/write web

jmclnx 8mo 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 8mo 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#Early_1990s:_world_wide_web 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/Features.html 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.
- WillAdams 8mo ago
  Well there was this image: https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/07/18/les-horribles-cernettes/ https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/07/18/les-horribles-cern...
  - wahern 8mo ago
    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!" Source: https://musiclub.web.cern.ch/bands/cernettes/firstband.html https://musiclub.web.cern.ch/bands/cernettes/firstband.html
- dunham 8mo ago
  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.)

lysace 8mo 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 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19249373

nine_k 8mo ago
A WASM emulator of 68040 and NeXT, the original OS and compiler, then run WWW on top of that. The performance would likely be comparable %)
- actionfromafar 8mo ago
  The performance would likely be much better. :-)
  - lysace 8mo ago
    An example from a year later; 1990: https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=windows30 https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=windows30
    - spijdar 8mo ago
      Every version of NeXT is actually catalogued and can be run in the browser at: https://infinitemac.org/ https://infinitemac.org/ I'm pretty sure the CERN WorldWideWeb application is also included in the "bonus software" HDD, but I'm on my phone right now and can't confirm. :-)
krackers 8mo ago
You can already run nextstep in browser, see https://aresluna.org/frame-of-preference/ https://aresluna.org/frame-of-preference/ (section "Back to 1992")

j3th9n 8mo ago

Links where called Pointers back then apparently.

java-man 8mo ago

All the links should point to the 1989 internet instead of "Not Found" :-)

fsloth 8mo 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). [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwise

rurban 8mo 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 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.
- fsloth 8mo ago
  Ah - I stand corrected - thanks!
- classichasclass 8mo ago
  It's a shame that Hyper-G has not been better preserved. It had some remarkable features (disclosure, my article: https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2025/05/prior-art-dept-hierarchical-hypermedia.html https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2025/05/prior-art-dept-hierarchi... ).
  - rurban 8mo ago
    Fixed link: https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2025/05/prior-art-dept-hierarchical-hypermedia.html?m=1 https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2025/05/prior-art-dept-hierarchi...
cxr 8mo ago

gerdesj 8mo ago

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 8mo 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 8mo 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.

hackingonempty 8mo 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 ;-)

ChrisArchitect 8mo ago

(2019) Some previous discussions: 2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34218591 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34218591 2021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26680839 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26680839 2020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25013103 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25013103 2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19249373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19249373

deleted 8mo ago

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jibal 8mo ago

> The WWW project does not take responsability I guess that let them off the hook for incorrect spelling. :-)

mistrial9 8mo 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.

keepamovin 8mo 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 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.

Rapzid 8mo ago

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 8mo ago
The 2015 movie has the entire second act dedicated to the Next launch no?
- twoodfin 8mo 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. One of my favorite films of the last 20 years.

shevy-java 8mo ago

Better than chrome!

ulrischa 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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.
WillAdams 8mo ago
Menus can be torn off and positioned as desired. I miss that.
alansaber 8mo ago
It has a certain charm, like everything engineered without immediate commercial considerations

sylware 8mo 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.

fecal_henge 8mo ago

No link to EDH.

amelius 8mo ago

I wish someone would write a reference implementation in a functional language. At least that would formalize the specification.

karanveer 8mo 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?

embedding-shape 8mo ago
The original WWW proposal is quite easy and interesting to read through: https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html 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 8mo 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.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

morphle 8mo 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: https://youtu.be/FvmTSpJU-Xc?t=961 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/gGw09RZjQf8?t=147 https://youtu.be/QTJRwKOFddc?t=234 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZO7av2ZFB8 Croquet in webbrowser: https://codefrau.github.io/jasmine/ https://codefrau.github.io/jasmine/ Demo of webbrowser replacement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1s9ldlqhVkM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1s9ldlqhVkM Squeak and all its predecessors: https://smalltalkzoo.computerhistory.org https://smalltalkzoo.computerhistory.org Etoys: https://squeak.js.org/etoys/ https://squeak.js.org/etoys/

cxr 8mo ago
> 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.

dang 8mo ago

Related. Others? WorldWideWeb – the first web browser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34218591 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34218591 - Jan 2023 (18 comments) The Browser – WorldWideWeb Next Application (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26680839 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26680839 - April 2021 (21 comments) The Browser – WorldWideWeb Next Application - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25013103 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25013103 - Nov 2020 (8 comments) CERN 2019 WorldWideWeb Rebuild - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24939929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24939929 - Oct 2020 (7 comments) CERN 2019 WorldWideWeb Rebuild - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19249373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19249373 - Feb 2019 (45 comments) CERN 2019 WorldWideWeb Rebuild: 2019 rebuilding of the original NeXT web browser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19183316 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19183316 - Feb 2019 (1 comment)

jbottoms 8mo ago

Probably should be "Rebuilt the CERN Browser" The Silversmith browser went into service in 1986. It worked with SCI documents under security controls. The user could only access the sections of the document permitted by heir clearance. It includeded in-line images that linked to descriptions providing access to data in a prescribed linked bounding box. The Security mechanism could be configured to resemble the security procedures of WWMCCS (Now SIPRNet)(WorldWide Military Command & Control System), Later renamed WIS (WWMCCS Information System). A modified version providing semantic sezrches was made available to the U.S.Army Material Command in 1988. In 2007 an ACM in Boston a paper described another variant that provided searches using creative strings.