Line Mode Browser

The Line Mode Browser (also known as LMB, WWWLib, or just www) is the second web browser ever created.

The browser was the first demonstrated to be portable to several different operating systems.

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.

History

One of the fundamental concepts of the "World Wide Web" projects at CERN was "universal readership". 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. to write a "passive browser" so basic that it could run on most computers of that time.

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The browser was presented to:

ECP/PT group on 26 February 1991
AS group of CN division 25 April 1991
CN "C5" committee 17 May 1991

http://www.w3.org/Talks/Authors.html

http://www.w3.org/Talks/LineMode.html

CN=Cern

ECP = École Centrale Paris?

C5 = Committee for Coordinating Computer Center Committees http://www.w3.org/Talks/C5_Committee.html

don't know at the moment how to include this in the timeline (and what the abbr. mean)

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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.

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. 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. Berners-Lee announced the browser's availability in August 1991 in the alt.hypertext newsgroup of Usenet.

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.

The first stable version, 1.1, was released in January 1992. Since version 1.2l, released in October 1992, the browser has used the common code library (later called libwww). 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. 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.

The Agora World Wide Web email browser was based on the Line Mode Browser. 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. 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. 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.

Navigation was not controlled by a pointing device such as a mouse or arrow keys, but by text commands typed into the program.

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."

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:

Features

The Line Mode Browser was designed to be able to be platform independent. There are official ports to Apollo/Domain, IBM RS6000, Unix, Windows, VM/CMS, Solaris,

Other features included rlogin and telnet The browser could run as a background process and download files.

References

External links

Line Mode Browser 2013 (CERN)