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WEB HISTORY DAY:
PIONEERING SOFTWARE AND SITES
Program * Abstracts * Exhibit
Theodor Holm Nelson
Professor of Environmental Information,
Keio University SFC Campus
Wake-Up Call From Ted Nelson
Ted Nelson coined the term "hypertext," and along with Doug Engelbart is
one of two independent inventors of hypertext on computers.
In 1960 he began to design electronic documents and literatures for
digital delivery, having decided simply as a leap of faith that all text
would soon migrate to the digital screen. He made this leap of faith on the
basis of one computer course, his readings in science fiction, his desire for
a very different world, and his background in theater and writing - in
particular from grappling, as a writer, with problems of version management
and self-publishing.
Ted's vision of 1960 was a giant network of hyper-linked documents of a
certain structure distributed on servers throughout the world, which he was
later to call Xanadu. (Ted did not hear of Doug Engelbart's parallel work
until he had already published his first design in 1965.)
In 1968, Ted collaborated with his former frisby-mate at Swarthmore, Andy
van Dam, to build HES, the Hypertext Editing System, at Brown University. Like
Doug Engelbart, Ted and Andy had to invent what we now know as real-time
interaction with computers, with no support and some hostility from the
computer science community of the time.
HES was originally going to be built around Ted's hypertext ideas, but
against his wishes the project turned to an emphasis on printout and
formatting, becoming instead the prototype of the word processing systems of
today. While most people would count this as an achievement to be proud of,
Ted considers it a career disaster. He believes that word processing is
based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of text and the nature
of ideas, and believes that the HES project is one of the key junctures
where computerdom went wrong. (All that remained in HES of his hypertext
ideas were the link and the return stack, now immortalized as the "back"
button on Web browsers.)
For years Ted continued improving his Xanadu designs, seeking support from
people who thought very differently. Because his ideas were so different,
many people who talked to Ted thought he was technically ignorant when he was
in fact trying to steer them in other directions, which in those days he tried
to do politely.
But the politeness began to wear thin. Growing sick of the computer
establishment, he wrote up many of his ideas impolitely in Computer
Lib (1974), which became a bible for a number of software visionaries,
and Literary Machines (1981), which detailed the Xanadu project of
that time.
Ted insisted from the beginning that Xanadu have a specific document
structure which is still not widely understood. While Xanadu's design had
basic hypertext features somewhat like those Doug Engelbart built into NLS,
Ted foresaw and dealt with problems that have only just begun to confront the
Web today. Xanadu's highly-generalized link structure would allow many links
to and from the same materials - links that could be followed in either
direction, and would survive most editing changes. This was because the links
were not embedded in the data, but attached sideways to characters and other
elements from a different zone of the document, and themselves individually
addressable. All documents were virtual, structures of addresses pointing to
frozen base files.
But the cornerstone of the Xanadu design was transclusion.
Transclusion is the logical center of Nelson's document universe, and he
believes it must be fully implemented at whatever cost. Transclusion provides
methods for deep intercomparison, version management, re-use and republication,
ownership and fine-grained micropayment. Carried even further, transclusion
provides an alternative to hierarchical directories in new kinds of operating
systems.
Transclusion has been widely misunderstood. A logical structure rather
than an implementation method, transclusion is a special kind of inclusion
by reference, which people tend to mistake either for a kind of link, or
for "only one copy of anything." It means neither of these. It means tracking
all the manifestations of any data, and keeping them connected to their
virtual cosmic original, throughout the docuverse. (Ted strongly opposes
trying to state this in more conventional terms, which he believes confuse
difficult issues to the point of hopelessness.)
Ted firmly believes that this is the structure everyone is groping toward
from many different directions and for many different reasons, and that when
even a few people understand, it will abruptly and universally prevail.
Most people are unaware of the breadth of Ted's paradigm or its theoretical
foundations. However, these are widely appreciated in Japan, where he is
finally implementing this alternative virtuality with the help of his close
collaborator, Marlene Mallicoat.
Ted will discuss the history of his vision, emphasizing features which
need to be brought to the Web today, and his efforts to do so through the
ongoing Xanadu project.
Douglas Engelbart
Founder, Bootstrap Alliance
Lunch With Doug Engelbart
Douglas Engelbart is the inventor of the mouse, and with Ted Nelson one of two independent inventors of computer-based hypertext. In the 1950s, Doug started thinking about ways of augmenting human intellect with computers. At the start of the 60s he began building what became NLS (oNLine System), one of the first two computer-based hypertext systems. Along the way he had to promote the concepts of word processing and real-time interaction with computers, ideas that seem obvious now but which were very radical in those batch-processing days. NLS grew to include all the features we now associate with hypertext, including many which have yet to be implemented on the Web; typed links, links to links, automatic multiple views of the same information for different levels of users, and more. Two fundamentals of NLS remain blue sky concepts in the contemporary software industry; the idea that any document, note, link etc. can be addressed as an independent object, and the "document centric" model of documents being editable by multiple applications rather than belonging to a single one. In the late 60s, Doug's SRI lab become one of the first sites on the infant ARPAnet (direct ancestor of the Internet). Doug's team developed one of the best early email systems, and founded the Network Information Center (NIC), the first attempt to organize a comprehensive "card catalog" for the information available over the net. Both the email system and NIC were direct outgrowths of the work on NLS. Doug will discuss his original NLS system, demo AUGMENT, its successor, and discuss the Journal System, an important and unique component of AUGMENT. He will describe the features which he believes most urgently need to be introduced to the Web today, and his current efforts to do so through the Bootstrap Alliance.
Andries van Dam
Founder/Professor, Brown University Department of Computer Science
Thomas J. Watson Jr. University Professor of Technology and Education
Norm Meyrowitz
Executive Vice President and CTO, Macromedia
The Web Before the Web: HES, FRESS and Intermedia
Andy van Dam and his colleagues at Brown University have produced four
seminal hypertext systems. Andy will discuss HES, the mid 60s system he
developed with his college friend Ted Nelson, and demomstrate FRESS, the late 60s
system he developed after meeting up with Douglas Engelbart and seeing NLS.
FRESS made use not only of alphanumeric display terminals but also of a
then cutting-edge IMLAC graphics minicomputer 16 bit PDP-8, attached to
mainframe via communications line and used as an intelligent terminal, which
let the system incorporate windows and vector graphics.
FRESS could represent any
character (non-Western alphabets, math symbols, etc.) with a system of
vector strokes. FRESS was the first hypertext system to see systematic use
in for-credit courses, including a poetry course in the mid-70s sponsored
by a National Endowment for the Humanities. FRESS was used for over two
decades at Brown for personal hypertext libraries and courses and had
several commercial spinoffs. Andy will also
discuss his late 70s Electronic Document System. This graphics-based
hypertext system presaged Web image maps by featuring various types of
links between graphic objects. It was used
for research into online maintenance and repair manuals, where users
could follow links between pictures, text, and thumbnail views of pages or
diagrams.
Thumbnails were created on the fly to present graphical views of the
chronological path, and had three uses: for a time-based/historical view,
for the ability to show a "you are here" map for any page
showing previous and next links, and for boolean retrieval results showing pages in each page and chapter that satisfied the query. Like NLS, all three
systems had integrated browsing and editing environments.
Andy is the founder of Brown University's Computer Sciences department and
was its first chairman; he is also a pioneer in computer graphics. He
co-founded ACM SIGGRAPH, and co-authored, with Jim Foley, the standard
reference works in computer graphics, Fundamentals of Interactive Computer
Graphics, and with Foley, Feiner, and Hughes, wrote Computer Graphics:
Principles and Practice.
Norm Meyrowitz, the "father" of Shockwave, will demonstrate Intermedia, the
hypermedia system he designed after working with Andy Van Dam. Mr. Meyrowitz helped
found IRIS (Institute for Information and Scholarship), at which he designed Intermedia. Founded by huge grants from IBM and the Annenburg Corporation, IRIS ran under Mr. Meyrowitz's direction from the early to late 1980's, at which point Mathan Mhyrvold of Microsoft tried but failed to buy the Intermedia team.
Intermedia was perhaps the best-realized and most sophisticated of the
mid-eighties hypertext systems, and was used extensively in Brown
University classes on a variety of topics. Less sophisticated hypertext
systems began to be marketed commercially in that era, including Apple's
HyperCard and OWL, and were the ancestors of the proprietary navigation
systems used on many CD-ROMs today.
Tim Berners-Lee
Director and Founder, World Wide Web Consortium
The Web's Inventor
Tim Berners-Lee is the inventor of the World Wide Web. In 1980 he wrote Enquire Within, an information organizing program which foreshadowed the Web in significant ways, including an open-ended set of relationships between documents and typed links. He will discuss and possibly demo Enquire. Tim proposed the World Wide Web in 1989, then again in 1990 in collaboration with Robert Cailliau. Tim wrote the code for the Web much as we know it today in the fall of 1990. All of this occurred at CERN, the giant European physics research laboratory based in Geneva, Switzerland, where Tim was a programmer. Tim will demo the first browser in the world, his original GUI NeXT browser-editor from the fall of 1990, on his original NeXT cube. This browser seamlessly integrated browsing and editing, and resembled a simple word processor plus Web capabilities. Tim later studied the works of Ted Nelson in detail, but invented most of the core concepts of the Web independently. He will discuss his vision of the Web at that time, which included many features since reinvented by the Web community; multimedia capabilities, server APIs, intranets, fuller implementation of SGML standards, and virtual pages. He will also demo features proposed in the pre-Mosaic era which remain "lost"; typed links, multiple options for how to display linked objects (embed, jump to, show in separate window, etc.), scripts to automatically generate documents from Web pages, and full integration of browsing and editing.
Robert Cailliau
Samba, the First Mac Browser
Robert Cailliau was proposing his own hypertext system for documents at
CERN when he discovered the Web project. He joined Tim Berners-Lee in 1990
and adopted the much broader Web philosophy. Robert evangelized the Web to
CERN management, the physics community, and government bodies. He
implemented the first Macintosh browser, Samba, and the current Web
conference series. Robert will discuss early history, particularly the
difficulty of getting the Web concept across, and demonstrate Samba.
Jean-Francois Groff
Director and Founder, Infodesign, Geneva, Switzerland
Building the Web
Just after Tim Berners-Lee created the first version of the Web in late 1990, Jean-Francois Groff joined him as the first technical student on the project. Together, they worked on designing and implementing significant portions of the Web's architecture and protocols. Jean-Francois made significant contributions to the original WWW code library at CERN, and helped worked out many of the features of the Web as we know it as well as many yet to be implemented. Jean-Francois started www-talk in 1991, the online mailing list which served as the central "forum" for the early years of the Web's development. Jean-Francois was a founder of the Virtual Library, a prototype "card catalog" for the Web, and ported a version of the Web to DECNet. Other tasks included an API-based HTTP server, and the login trap which helped early adopters learn about the Web. After leaving CERN in 1992, Jean-Francois founded InfoDesign, the world's first Web services firm. Jean-Francois will assist Tim in demoing the NeXT browser-editor, and discuss in detail many of the now "lost" features he helped develop in the very early 1990s. Jean-Francois will also talk about design decisions and the process of innovation.
Judd Weeks
NCSA
Mosaic: The Browser That Popularized The Web
In Fall of 1992, the Software Development Group at the National Center for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA) was producing Collage, a program to let researchers collaborate over networks. As the project neared completion, programmers at the Group noticed an ambitious project on the Internet called the World Wide Web. They quickly realized that Web compatibility could turn the Collage project into something much broader than a collaboration tool, and the rest is history. Marc Andreessen joined www-talk, the mailing list forum for early Web developers, and received encouragement from Tim Berners Lee, the Web's inventor. Tim had been actively soliciting interested people over the net to develop UNIX and other versions of Web browser-editors. Marc wrote a crude web client interface over Christmas in 1992, and soon enlisted the services of his senior colleague and veteran UNIX programmer Eric Bina. The manager of the Software Development Group, Joseph Hardin, backed the idea. When the SDG demoed an early version to Larry Smarr, NCSA's founder, he was thrilled, and saw Mosaic as a possible successor to popular NCSA Internet applications such as NCSA Telnet in the '80s. Eric and Marc released the first version of Mosaic for X-Windows in early 1993. Backed by NCSA's credibility and resources, Mosaic provided would-be Web users with exactly what they needed to get started. Like many other browsers of the period, Mosaic was essentially an interface on top of the basic WWW code libraries provided by CERN. But unlike earlier and technically more advanced browsers, Mosaic was stable, very simple to install, and included simple bitmapped graphics. It was the first browser backed by sufficient resources to provide technical support and versions on different platforms, which the
programming team moved quickly to produce for Mac and Windows. Key managers and programmers from NCSA will demo early versions of Collage, Mosaic, and the NCSA Web site, and discuss Mosaic's development history.
Brewster Kahle
Founder, Internet Archive
The Web Before the Web: WAIS and Indexed Information
In the late 80s Brewster Kahle, a developer at Thinking Machines, began developing an advanced system for sharing information over networks including the Internet. Though his ultimate vision was strikingly similar, in many ways Brewster's approach was the exact opposite of that taken by the Web and many hypertext-based systems. Rather than encouraging user-directed "browsing" through relatively raw source material, WAIS (Wide Area Information Servers) was designed to give users targeted answers to sophisticated queries, from databases of carefully indexed information. Brewster saw the development of WAIS clients as a simple and inevitable consequence, and concentrated on the server side. WAIS achieved considerable commercial success with major publishing houses, large companies, and government bodies, who had both the need and resources to index their source materials for WAIS. But it failed to catch on with more casual users. In 1989 Brewster moved to the San Francisco Bay area and founded WAIS incorporated, one of the first successful companies based primarily on the Internet-related technology. He later sold WAIS to America Online, and is the founder and director of the Internet Archive. Brewster will demo historic versions of WAIS and discuss its evolution. He will also briefly discuss the Internet Archive and its relation to his original vision for WAIS.
Wendy Hall
Director, Multimedia Research Group
Southampton University
The Web Before the Web: Microcosm
In 1989, Wendy Hall and her team began developing another proto-Web, the
open hypermedia system Microcosm. Like most hypertext systems, and unlike
the Web, Microcosm stores links in a database rather than "hard-wiring"
them into documents. This model can potentially solve many problems of
version control and links to other systems. Microcosm developers will demo
early versions and also Webcosm, the recent Distributed Link Service (DLS)
which brings Microcosm linking principles to the Web. One of Professor Hall's
assistants will be demonstrating Microcosm.
Larry Masinter
Xerox PARC
The Web Before the Web: System 33
In the late 80s Mark Weiser, Steve Putz, and others at Xerox PARC developed
System 33, which foreshadowed some of the Web's multiple document format
capabilities. This document sharing system let users interactively exchange
documents of different sorts over a network, with format conversion on the
fly. Tim Berners-Lee visited PARC in 1992, and incorporated some of System
33's ideas into later Web specifications. A 23-minute videotape about
System 33 and its format capabilities will be shown.
Keith Andrews
IICM, Graz University of Technology, Austria
Frank M. Kappe
IICM, Graz University of Technology, Austria
HyperWave Research & Development
From Hyper-G to HyperWave: The Evolution of the Hyper-G Project
Hyper-G is another independent invention of something very much like the Web. At around the same time Tim began the Web at CERN, Hermann Maurer and his group at Graz University of Technology in Austria began developing Hyper-G. They produced what was in many ways a far more mature networked hypertext system than the Web, using a link database to manage hyperlinks, providing constructs for structuring information, definining rich, searchable metadata for objects, and integrating a full text inverted index. The original Hyper-G server was simultaneously a WWW and a Gopher server, speaking the corresponding protocol to clients.
With the popularity of the Web, emphasis shifted to enhancing Hyper-G's WWW facilities. Today, Hyper-G is a sophisticated Web document management system, marketed commercially under the name Hyperwave. Frank Kappe and Keith Andrews are two of the project's original developers, and they will demonstrate software clients from the text-only 1992 version to current commercial ones.
Pei Wei
Internet Archive
The First Applet Browser: Viola
In 1989, Pei Wei began creating an information sharing system he called Viola on his Amiga personal computer. He developed a vision of clients and servers using executable "applets" as a primary means for parsing and displaying information. The applet model has recently achieved fame through Java, independently reinvented at Sun Microsystems. When Pei heard of the World Wide Web project via the Internet in late 1991, he incorporated Web browsing capabilities into Viola, and wrote a UNIX version. ViolaWWW grew into the most sophisticated of the early Web browsers, and was the browser of choice for pre-Mosaic demos by the CERN team and most others. It was the first browser with support for stylesheets, tables, and nestable HTML elements, features which took years to resurface in later browsers. Viola was one of the primary examples of browsers used by NCSA in developing Mosaic, though the Mosaic team chose to leave out most of Viola's more sophisticated features to get a simple browser out quickly. Pei was hired by O'Reilly and Associates, a key early Web publisher, and developed later versions of Viola for O'Reilly. Pei played a key role in O'Reilly's launch of GNN (Global Network Navigator). He stayed with GNN after its purchase by AOL, and now works for the Internet Archive. Pei will demo and discuss the development of Viola, with a focus on early Viola applet technology.
Michael Grobe
Manager, Distributed Computing Support
Academic Computing Services at the University of Kansas
An Early History of Lynx
Lynx started as an innovative new way of
organizing the CWIS (Campus-Wide Information System) at the University
of Kansas in the early 90s. It soon became yet another proto-Web,
based on HyTelnet, with documents transferred between servers
and browsers via an integrated interface. Early Lynx visions included
many features we now associate with the Web (though minus full
hypertext linking), including easy remote access to "pages"
with text and images. The Lynx team in that era included Computing
Support manager Michael Grobe and their programming student Lou
Montulli. When the Lynx team discovered the World Wide Web project
over the Internet, they quickly adapted Lynx to incorporate Web
browser capability. Programmed mostly by Lou, the Web-enabled
Lynx became the premier text-only Web browser, far easier to use
than CERN's reference text browser, and an important access point
to the early Web for people using terminal connections to mainframes.
Lynx was a major contemporary of the early Mosaic. The name Lynx
was a word play on the Internet navigation protocol Gopher, and
the final choice in a series of names of animals which hunt gophers.
Lou Montulli was later recruited by Netscape Communications as
a founding member, and works there today on core features within
the Netscape client. Michael Grobe and possibly Lou Montulli will
demo historic versions of Lynx and the University of Kansas site,
and discuss its development.
Tom Bruce
Law Department, Cornell University
Cello, the First PC Browser
In 1992, Tom Bruce of the Cornell School
of Law began developing Cello, the first Web browser designed
for the IBM PC and compatibles. His primary motive was to improve
access to legal information, which had long been computerized
but on a variety incompatible, mainframe-based systems. He knew
his legal users were mostly PC-based, and had little access to
contemporary UNIX-based browsers Unlike other browser writers
of that early era, including the Mosaic team, Pei Wei's Viola,
Tony Johnson's Midas, and Ari Lemmke's Erwise, Tom couldn't simply
copy the CERN code libraries developed by Tim Berners-Lee for
the "guts" of his browser. The PC of 1992 was simply
not powerful enough to run that UNIX-oriented code. So unlike
the others he essentially rewrote the functionality of the CERN
library for his own purposes. Cello achieved a fair amount of
use and recognition within the legal community, and some amongst
PC users - on the order of 150 to 200,000 of them. But like other
"one-man show" browser writers, Tom simply couldn't
keep up with the support requests from users and eventually let
the project fade away. Tom and/or assistants will demo and discuss
Cello and the various stages of its development.
Kevin Hughes
Hypermedia Engineer, VeriFone Internet Commerce
Pioneering Sites: The Hawaii Site
In May 1993, when Kevin Hughes set up a
Web site at Honolulu Community College, it became the first educational
institution to integrate sounds, images, and movies over the Web.
This site pioneered the use of many design techniques common on
the Web today, as well as the use of interactive images and narrated
media. The "Hawaii site" became one of the handful of
sites most commonly used for early Web demos, from audiences ranging
from the top members of the European Commission to the U.S. White
House. Kevin went on to work for Marty Tenenbaum of EIT and designed
the early CommerceNet site as well as the Internet Shopping Network,
sites which along with GNN established many conventions for doing
Web-based advertising and shopping. Kevin was entered into the
World Wide Web Hall of Fame at the First International Web Conference
in 1994. He will demo and discuss the early Hawaii site and the
evolution of Web-based design.
Tom Kalil
Welcome to the White House: An Interactive Citizens' Handbook
Vice President Al Gore is well known for his interest in networked information, and proposed an "information superhighway" as a plank in the '92 campaign platform. But his interest and involvement were both longer and deeper. In 1991 he had Brewster Kahle demonstrate WAIS to him, and with his and the President's support the Democrats pioneered the use of email for communication during the '92 campaign.
In the spring of 1994, Tom Kalil, David Lytel, Jock Gill and many others helped produce the first White House Site, and spent many months facilitating the creation of sites by most of the largest government agencies. They did this with crucial backing from the President and Vice President, and technical assistance from NASA's Ames Research Center, the AI Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of chnology, Tony Rutkowski and the Internet Society, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's SUNSite.
Marty Tenenbaum
Founder, CommerceNet
Pioneering Sites: CommerceNet
In 1993 Marty Tenenbaum, the founder of
EIT, launched CommerceNet, the first consortium for companies
interested in doing business over the Web. CommerceNet played
a seminal role in transforming the net into a marketplace, pioneering
core technologies for security and payment, and literally introducing
Corporate America to the net's extraordinary commercial potential.
The CommerceNet web site was designed by Kevin Hughes, whom Marty
had hired based on his work on the Honolulu Community College
site. Marty later hired Marc Andreessen, who worked on the first
commercial web server, prior to co-founding Netscape. Applauded
by Vice President Al Gore as being an influential early player
in the Internet commerce arena, CommerceNet celebrates its 3rd
birthday in 1997. Marty Tenenbaum will give a demonstration of
its early online evolution and present a video of the original
launch event.
Dale Dougherty
Pioneering Sites: Global Network Navigator
In 1993 the publisher O'Reilly and Associates
launched Global Network Navigator, one of the first sites to offer
"one-stop shopping" for news and information. Conceived
of by Dale Dougherty and implemented partly by Pei Wei, GNN set
the standard for many similar sites to come, with regular articles
and snazzy graphics. GNN pioneered many practices for advertising
and doing business over the Web. In 1996, O'Reilly sold GNN to
AOL, where it remained a hugely successful site for nearly two
years. AOL closed down GNN in late 1996, which in many ways was
a sign of its success; AOL wanted to bring the kinds of services
offered by GNN into its core business. Dale Dougherty, GNNís
president, will demonstrate the site and discuss its development.
James Pitkow
GVU Center, Georgia Tech, and Xerox PARC
Tracking the Web: The History of Web Demographics and Usage Collection
James Pitkow established the first major
demographic studies of who uses the Web and how. He also developed
analytical and visual techniques for tracking groups of users
in log files, which remain the basis of much Web usage tracking
today. This talk will cover major demographic trends on the Web
from 1994 to 1997 and the evolution of usage tracking technology.
For each time period, Jim will review major demographic findings
and events along with the controversy behind the numbers. The
emerging demographic and usage trends will also be discussed.
Mark Pesce
Tony Parisi
Founder, Intervista
From Scrolling to Strolling: The Birth of VRML
In 1994, Mark Pesce brought something unexpected
to the first International Web conference, held at the Web's birthplace
in Geneva, Switzerland. It was a full proposal for Virtual Reality
Modeling Language, or VRML, which he had developed with his partner
Tony Parisi. Mark and Tony hoped it would become a general specification
for sending virtual reality worlds over the Web, much as HTML
defines a standard format for documents. Their ideas was that
one could experience a Web site as a virtual room or world, rather
than a static page. The first demo was hardly impressive; a banana
and a few cubes. But many of the other conference-goers were ignited
by the idea, and a host of interested programmers and companies
have been steadily developing VRML specifications and browsers
to this day. Now, Tony Parisi's startup Intervista, Silicon Graphics,
and many others are producing commercial VRML browsers and environments.
If the time for virtual reality has indeed come, the near future
of the Web may be much more interactive than many users realize.
Mark and Tony will demo and discuss early VRML specifications
and browsers, as well as recent work.
Jeffrey Veen
Interface Director, HotWired
Pioneering Sites: The History of HotWired's Interface
Wired Magazine's Web publication HotWired
was the first widely known online periodical, and pioneered the
use of many interface techniques now used today on the Web, as
well as the heavy use of dynamically generated pages and per-user
subscription and preference technology. Jeffrey Veen, HotWired's
Interface Director, will demo various versions of the interface
over its three year history, and discuss how it evolved along
with Web publishing technology.
Jon Mittelhauser
Netscape
Netscape Navigator: The Web Goes Commercial
In 1994 Jim Clark, Marc Andreessen, and
Eric Bina hastily recruited most of the original Mosaic development
team at NCSA, and founded Mosaic Communications. Their goal was
to seize Mosaic's role as leader of the emerging Web market with
a "Mosaic killer". The team settled down to the chore
of writing completely new, cleaner versions of the Mosaic browser
and server, partly because NCSA still owned the code to Mosaic
and partly because they knew a rewrite would clean up their own
rushed original efforts. The results became the first Netscape
Navigator and Netscape Server. NCSA did indeed sue the new company
over the use of the Mosaic name and source code, and after settling
out of court Mosaic Communications changed to Netscape Communications.
Netscape Navigator quickly eclipsed Mosaic as the leading browser,
and dominated the market until Microsoft launched Explorer, igniting
the current "browser wars". Original Netscape developers
will demo historic early versions of Navigator, and discuss its
development. They will also show the hugely successful Netscape
Web site at different stages of its evolution.
Chris Wilson
Microsoft
Internet Explorer: The Browser Wars Begin
In the late summer of 1995 Microsoft released
Windows 95, perhaps the most publicized software release of all
time. Included with Windows 95 was built-in connectivity to the
Microsoft Network (MSN), a proprietary network which Microsoft
hoped would make the World Wide Web redundant. Just after releasing
Windows 95, Microsoft performed one of the fastest turnarounds
of any multi-billion dollar corporation ever; they announced that
they were making MSN a site within the Web, and would from then
on make the Web the key focus of their entire corporate strategy.
They pulled the copies of Windows 95 which included MSN connectivity,
and began work on Internet Explorer, which became a successful
competitor to the then-dominant Netscape Navigator. The race is
still on. Key developers of Internet Explorer will demo early
versions of the software and the Microsoft site at the time. They
will discuss the origins and development of the browser, including
which models were used in its architecture. They will also discuss
the development of the Microsoft site, and the corporate history
of the shift from MSN to a Web-based strategy.
© 2003 The World Wide Web History Project and Arcady Press
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