The Finns Who Invented the Graphical Browser 148
waderoush writes "If you thought Mosaic was the first graphical Web browser, think again. In their first major interview, three of the four Finnish software engineers behind Erwise — a point-and-click graphical Web browser for the X Window system — describe the creation of their program in 1991-1992, a full year before Marc Andreessen's Mosaic (which, of course, evolved into Netscape). Kim Nyberg, Kari Sydänmaanlakka, and Teemu Rantanen, with their fellow Helsinki University of Technology student Kati Borgers (nee Suominen), gave Erwise features such as text searching and the ability to load multiple Web pages that wouldn't be seen in other browsers until much later. The three engineers, who today work for the architectural software firm Tekla, say they never commercialized the project because there was no financing — Finland was in a deep recession at the time and lacked a strong venture capital or angel investing market. Otherwise, the Web revolution might have begun a year earlier."
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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ha ha (Score:2, Funny)
It was the first COMPLETE web browser.. (Score:2)
The moment they started working on it they were Finnish...ed.
I'll be here all week.
Re:Correction. (Score:5, Informative)
Erwise was a popular web browser in the early days of the World Wide Web. At the time of its release in April 1992, one month prior to ViolaWWW, it was the world's first web browser with a graphical user interface for non-NeXT computers.
Re:Correction. (Score:5, Insightful)
So, you're saying that it was the first browser, except for the first one. Got it.
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Good post.
What do you call other Hypertext/clickable graphics interfaces like Q-Link (1985) and ANSI (circa 1987)? Is the only key difference between them and a web browser that they were limited to Phoneline connections & not internet connections?
Aside -
What to see what BBSing in the late 80s/early 90s was like? Then click here for a demo - the only difference is that our speeds were about one-tenth as fast (1k or 2k modem) - http://www.flashterm.com/ [flashterm.com]
The Slashdot story is misleading... (Score:5, Insightful)
Flashterm makes me laugh.
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Yes, Hypertext was not new in 1993 or even 1991-1992. Hypercard had pretty much the same function set as a web browser (except of course, the network aspect). And before that, other software "knew" about
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Since you refer to modem speeds as "1k or 2k" then I suspect you weren't really part of that era.
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300 baud - acoustic coupler, for phones they don't make anymore.
2400 - no more phone cups!
9600 - almost too fast to read (still 80x25 char screens)
14.4K, maybe 28.8K... I forget. Went to cable around then and never looked back.
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I had a 300bps non-acoustic coupler modem. It plugged into the cartridge slot of my C=64. There was a 1200bps, but we couldn't afford it. 2400bps was the stuff of legend and I think (?) the absolute limit of the C=64 serial port was 9600. How could it be so fast?! ;-)
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Hayes Pocket 2400 baud inline modem, FTW!
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Heheh, I didn't contribute much apart from an excited and barely-coherent review of "Platoon" (which is an awesome game on the C=64 by the way). Mostly I downloaded SID tunes and crappy free-/shareware games.
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>>>9600 - almost too fast to read (still 80x25 char screens)
Wow you read fast! At the time most magazines referred to 300 bit/s modems as "reading speed". I could read slightly faster than that, but not as fast as 1200 which zipped across at about one line per 2 seconds. I couldn't keep up.
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P.S.
>>>14.4K, maybe 28.8K... I forget. Went to cable around then and never looked back
Lucky dude. I was using dialup modems right up to 2007, when they finally installed DSL for $15 a month. I could have gone with cable as early as 1997, but the $120 cost was outrageous. Even now I think $50 a month is too high, and I wish Comcast would offer a lower price tier.
If anybody cares (and they probably don't) the official V. standards are:
300 bit/s 300 baud
1200 bit/s 600 baud
2400 bit/s 600 baud or 120
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I can't think of any reason why a 2400 speed modem on an 80386 would be slower than a 300 speed on a 6502 Commodore. I suspect your friend was exaggerating, because 300 is very, very slow and I doubt your 2400 modem was running slower than that.
I upgraded from a 1200 C=64 to a 2400 Amiga (68000), and as you would expect, it was twice as fast.
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And then there also were the great Trailblazers, 19200K !
Asymetric though, can't remember what the downlink speed was. We used those between UUCP nodes back in 2400 days.
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>>>Since you refer to modem speeds as "1k or 2k" then I suspect you weren't really part of that era.
Dear AC: It's called rounding. I chose to round to 1k and 2k instead of saying 1.2k and 2.4k to keep my post easy to understand for readers. Clear? Good. Also if you still have doubts I was part of the era, look at my name. (Hint- Commodore=64 was an 80s computer which used 300, 1200, and 2400 baud modems. Yes I was there.)
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Get off my Lawn!
I had to whistle into the phone in my day....
Actually my first was a 300baud with accoustic coupler....
Re:Correction. (Score:5, Informative)
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Explains... (Score:1)
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Indeed.
Maybe they'd have the record for the second one, though.
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Depends on what you mean by "Graphical" (Score:4, Interesting)
WorldWideWeb 1.0 had a windowed, point-and-click UI, so it would be "graphical" compared to, say, Lynx.
The real title of "first graphical browser" goes to whichever application first displayed inline graphics on a page. I'm not sure exactly which one this was...NCSA Mosaic often gets credit for this, but the feature was also added to later versions of ViolaWWW and WorldWideWeb.
Inline graphics were a major factor in the success of the Web over existing internet hypertext systems like Gopher.
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Gopher RULED!
Because with Gopher you could use Veronica !
(which sounds a bit better than "Google" IMO)
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The real title of "first graphical browser" goes to whichever application first displayed inline graphics on a page.
That would be the browser that invented the <img> tag [w3.org].
Mosaic.
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This all really reaks of "holy shit, people could build a GUI in 1990?" FWIW... it's not the web it's browsing, but apple beat them on the concept by 4 years [wikipedia.org].
Hypercard (Score:1, Informative)
Why not just say Hypercard was the first graphical browser?
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Because it wasn't. The first hypertext system was the Hypertext Editing System created in 1967. The first graphical browser with point and click interface was the NLS system which was part of the Augment project created in 1968 by Doug Engelbart. There weren't any point and click inteface before then because he also created the mouse as part of that project.
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Because the article specifically says WEB browser?
Hypercard has got to be one of the first ever implementations of the "hypertext" concept, though. Not applicable to this article, alas.
Re:Hypercard (Score:5, Insightful)
Not even close. HyperCard was originally released with System Software 6 in 1987. Douglas Engelbart demonstrated a working hypertext system [google.com] almost twenty years earlier, in 1968.
About the same time as Amiga Guide (Score:1)
Common... a graphical "gopher" was just a natural step. Hardly news worthy.
Nothing at CERN? (Score:2)
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Whoa! Andressen != MOSAIC (Score:3, Informative)
Also, nobody thinks Mosaic was the first. If anything, the card these Finns trump is Tim Bruce, who wrote Cello.
This is worse than Bill Gates inventing the personal computer, when all he did was steal CP/M. Let's do a little better at getting history correct.
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Beaten hollow by first browser written by Tim Berners-Lee
It was the First Browser
the First Graphical Browser
the first HTML Editor
the First Multi window Browser
The only claim I can see here is Non-NeXT or maybe tabbed .... (NeXT did windows not tabs)
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This is worse than Bill Gates inventing the personal computer, when all he did was steal CP/M. Let's do a little better at getting history correct.
No offense, but Bill Gates did not steal CP/M. He had the smarts and vision to purchase a product called 86-DOS [windowsreinstall.com] when other people thought that home computers would be nothing but toys.
Now I say this as someone who is typically critical of shear number of flaws in Windows and the BILLIONS of dollars spent to develop that ship-wreck. You might not like his products, but you can't argue with his early business savvy.
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Fair enough.
But Microsoft was there in the beginning, with the Altair.
In the eight-bit era, MBASIC was the glue that held dozens of incompatible systems together.
By 1980 Microsoft was offering a full range of languages for the micro - and poised to move into other markets.
As for CP/M:
Microsoft promised to deliver a serviceable OS in time for the projected la
Opera Was First! (Score:5, Funny)
Despite the company and browser not existing at the time, I can confidently say that Opera had all these features before Erwise. There will be naysayers, of course.
Interesting... (Score:1)
whatever... (Score:4, Interesting)
To tell you the truth, I had never heard of Erwise until today. A have a few questions about Erwise:
- Did it support graphics other that XBM?
- Did it render HTML, or some other markup language?
I did some consulting for a company called HyperMedia Corporation in 1991-92. As part of that work, I watched closely the development of HTML, NCSA Mosaic, and the lot. HMC's markup language was proprietary and binary. The first thing that struck me about HTML was the ease of editing--you didn't need a dedicated editor. Then, I remember seeing early builds of NCSA's browser (to become Mosaic) when they first added, IIRC, gif support. I remember being absolutely floored with the ability to create attractive content in only a few minutes. My first thought after seeing it was, "I need to find a new job!" Sure enough, within a few months HMC was out of business.
The end result is that there were many factors that led to the success of NCSA Mosaic and Netscape. First, Mosaic ran on platforms other than the X Window System, so it was more accessible. Second, it was among the first to support usable graphics (i.e. not XBM), at least on an accessible platform (Emacs' browser & WorldWideWeb.app had early image support, too, but both were on platforms that had very narrow distribution possibilities). Third, it used standard HTML.
Erwise might have had all of these, with the one caveat that it supported only Unix/X Window System. Hard to say from this article. However, I think it's a little simplistic to say that funding was the only thing holding these guys back from Netscape-like success.
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OK, just realized the article has 3 pages :-). Looks like it did render HTML. The rest still holds.
Mosaic -- Netscape? (Score:1)
Re:Mosaic -- Netscape? (Score:4, Interesting)
Not really, at least not directly. Check this: [wikipedia.org]
Real men use gopher... (Score:3, Funny)
Harumph!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol) [wikipedia.org]
8-)
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And WAIS. Real Men use Gopher and WAIS. And Archie. Real Men use Gopher and WAIS and Archie. And the Spanish Inquisition.
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And Veronica... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronica_(computer) [wikipedia.org]
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and 'talk'.., and in general shell accounts.
IMHO, XWindows was only invented to get more command lines on one screen...
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And the Spanish Inquisition.
Huh, I didn't expect that.
So... (Score:5, Funny)
Who are they suing?
+1, Sad (Score:2)
n/t
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Who are they suing?
Now, now, these are Finns we're talking about.
They just clench their fists in their pockets, mumble something about "perkele, saatana", have a sip of Koskenkorva and move on...
Graphical BBS Terminal Client (Score:2)
Does anyone else remember Roboterm [bbsdocumentary.com]? It was a graphical BBS terminal client (which would show downloaded graphics when talking to a roboterm board). Neat but proprietary:
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Any chance of maybe having a look at that? I'd love to get something like that running.
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There's a link for binaries [bbsdocumentary.com] at the same site as the review. I haven't tried them, but it's a place to start.
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Yes, I ran a Roboterm BBS for a few years, it was miles ahead of regular text/ANSI graphics based BBS software, although it did require a proprietary client (that you could download for free of course) and that turned some people off.
Its funny that I hadn't ever thought of Roboterm as a precursor to HTML in any way. It was a very clever system and really easily configured etc.
Sadly, when the WWW emerged, the BBS died a slow death, but something was lost then as well. BBSes created a sense of community that
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When someone logs into my website, I don't hear the modem fire off, with the distinctive sound of a successful handshake, hear my wife groan as I get out of bed to go see who was logging in. Nor can I interrupt their browsing to chat with them directly.
Yes, I can make a website that lets me know when someone has loaded a page, and I can even venture to say I could make a chat box that appears and lets me chat with them given some time playing with AJAX and php, but its not the same thing, nor does it have t
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I ran a Telegard (and later Renegade) board, but I enjoyed visiting the Roboterm boards in town. I really miss the sound of that modem connect sometimes.
Info files and man pages (Score:4, Insightful)
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The venerable Unix info files and even man pages also do the same thing. Web browsers was a logical improvement of existing ideas. It was not evolutionary, not revolutionary.
Sometimes, the evolutionary is revolutionary. What happens is that a small advance leads to a phase change; things go from being obscure to being world-beating. It's happened before, it will happen again.
Simple Reason (Score:1)
They didn't get credit because they never Finnished it.
-1 Slur
Prior art to rip down current copywrong (Score:2, Insightful)
WWW might have begun a year earlier? (Score:3, Insightful)
Or if they tried to profit off it, might have never happened at all.
The openness of the early days is why we have it today.
My First Graphical User Interface (Score:1)
I created one back in May of 1967. I used Crayola Crayons (tm) and several sheets of paper. My mom published them up on the fridge.
IE: Alfa and Omega (Score:1)
"Internet Explorer: what page do you want to rape today?"
Lost opportunity (Score:2)
> Otherwise, the Web revolution might have begun a year earlier.
OMG! You mean I could have been using myspace a year earlier and I'd have twice as many friends by now?! We could have had lolcats twelve months earlier and my application in the lolcat programming language would already be finished?! It's like a year of my life has been stolen. Who do I sue?
IE6 (Score:2)
Based on NCSA Mosaic. NCSA Mosaic(TM); was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Distributed under a licensing agreement with Spyglass, Inc. Contains security software licensed from RSA Data Security Inc. Portions of this software are based in part on the work of the Independent JPEG Group. Multimedia software components, including Indeo(R); video, Indeo(R) audio, and Web Design Effects are provided by Intel Corp. Unix version contains software licensed from Mainsoft Corporation. Copyright (c) 1998-1999 Mainsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Mainsoft is a trademark of Mainsoft Corporation. Warning: This computer program is protected by copyright law and international treaties. Unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this program, or any portion of it, may result in severe civil and criminal penalties, and will be prosecuted to the maximum extent possible under the law.
Seems Netscape is not the only one?
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Somewhat, according to WP:
The Internet Explorer project was started in the summer of 1994 by Thomas Reardon and subsequently led by Benjamin Slivka, leveraging source code from Spyglass, Inc. Mosaic, an early commercial web browser with formal ties to the pioneering NCSA Mosaic browser. In late 1994, Microsoft licensed Spyglass Mosaic for a quarterly fee plus a percentage of Microsoft's non-Windows revenues for the software. Although bearing a name similar to NCSA Mosaic, Spyglass Mosaic had used the NCSA Mosaic source code sparingly.
What MS did to Spyglass [wikipedia.org] sort of epitomizes their assholery.
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Finnish Depression?!? (Score:2)
Doug Engelbart invented hypertext. (Score:2)
Here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart [wikipedia.org]
He also invented the mouse, the GUI, and ARPANET.
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AFAIK he also wasn't directly involved in the development of ARPANET, though the first host was running in the Stanford Research Institute's Augmentation Resear
Graphic vs. Graphical (Score:2)
[OffTopic]
These words are different parts of speech, right?
"This is a graph (noun)."
"This is a graphic (adjective) representation"
i'm not sure graphical is a word at all. It doesn't parse to anything meaningful unless you go to graphically. "We are representing this information graphically (adverb, in a graphic way).
There's no such thing as a graphical, so there couldn't be a graphical designer. Why would it be a graphical interface, and not a graphic interface?
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(citation needed)
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How dare you, saying NI to an old woman?
What times are these..? etc (Score:2)
Roger, is that you?
Re:?tsop tsrif (Score:4, Funny)
?täsoopiyauo tsauyriifäää
I'm sorry, this is a story about Finns. Corrected that for you.
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What bugs me to some extent on this note, even though you were modded down (Which a good 50% of the time here is a pack of pricks just causing trouble)?
Is that folks from other nations may "hate on us", but, they fail to realize something: THIS NATION IS COMPOSED OF THEIR NATIONALS WHO MIGRATED HERE, thus, i.e.? We ARE they also.
Now - I can understand disliking the U.S.A. in some of its governmental policies (especially the BUSH administration, thank God they are gone now), but, not its people as a whole.
I'
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Oh, but not anymore/there were often differences between the population that stayed and the one that emigrated (nevermind an argument "the mix is more than sum of its parts", it's hard to quantify it in any way...).
Actually, often those very differences were the reason for migration.
Which in some cases ended up quite good for the US, for example immigration of people that on one hand were excluded from success (because in the past more than now success didn't depend on you, much more on the social role in w
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You missed one important part of my post, when I said that back then practically EVERY social group would be described by us as religious wackjobs - so in the case of US that includes not only New England of the past, but also those "secular" settlements. They were secular only to the degree that was possible back then, in both Europe and US, but...from our point of view, still nutjobs.
And you can't really argue with me that this didn't survive in the US to a much greater degree then in general Europe - I f
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It's rare, but exists. My theory is that 99% of people in most groups are nice, but the 1% give that group a bad reputation. Rather than paint a whole group with a reputation, I've just decide that 1% of people are jerks no matter where you go.
In a decade of traveling internationally, the only 2 examples of hated towards Americans I can recall:
1) Nearly got my ass kicked by some old drunk guy for saying hi to a girl in a pub in Sydney (not hitting on her, saying hi). From his foul mouthed commentary, he
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It's not really about individuals.
It's more what people think about your country as a whole in comparison to what they were thinking 10 of 15 years ago - back then you were the model everybody loved and aspired to, with a lot of power throughout the world but putting that power in a good use.
Now, often, you're just an overwight bully.
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I was in Russia recently, and while the vast majority of Russians were extremely nice to me, some random guy on the subway cussed me the fuck out.
I was just standing there minding my own business and idly chatting with a coworker when this guy just starts laying into me. I don't speak Russian so I have no idea what he was actually saying, but it's not hard to tell when somebody is saying something extremely unpleasant to you even if you don't speak the language. Plus there were liberal sprinklings of "Ame
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Russia is a special case though...not only they never forgot their aspirations for beeing the most powerfull superpower, don't forget that even for a second.
But also...it was largery you, Americans, who beat them at that aspiration. Not only that, you also caused a major setback. And that's just on a "national pride" level...also don't forget for a second that many Russians think they were better of during USSR era (and in many cases that's quite correct, nevermind typical nostalgia for the times when one w
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No the problem is that there is a difference between a problem-solver and a visionary.
A problem-solver comes up with a solution to a specific problem. The genesis of Cello [wikipedia.org], for example, was one guy saying to himself "I need a windows-based program that can access legal sites in html" and then solving the problem.
But it takes a visionary to realize when a solution has a much great potential. It was Marc Andreessen (and guys like him) who came along and said "You know, a Windows based browser could have a g
Re:Ideas worth a cent a docen. (Score:5, Interesting)
A problem-solver comes up with a solution to a specific problem. The genesis of Cello, for example, was one guy saying to himself "I need a windows-based program that can access legal sites in html" and then solving the problem.
Which is not to say Tom Bruce, author of Cello, wasn't ALSO a visionary; the Legal Information Institute [cornell.edu] he founded in the early days of the web (thus creating the need for his web browser for lawyers' Win3.1 PCs in the first place) is perhaps the foremost reference site on the Constitution of the United States and related issues, and it didn't come to be that way by chance.
Andreesen's vision happened to involve making a pile of money; Bruce's did not.
Yup, the money bias. (Score:1, Insightful)
And the thing is, Andreesen's vision wasn't particularly novel or innovative; everything he thought up was already out there, read the other posts in this thread. The world without him would be almost exactly the same; Andreesen might as well not have existed at all. The only difference between him and your next door neighbour is that he took something and had good enough PR to tie his nametag to it. And his case isn't unique. The more I learn from history the more I see that most of the names you come by b
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