1980s to early 1990s
In 1984, expanding on ideas from futurist Ted Nelson,
Neil Larson's commercial DOS Maxthink outline program added angle
bracket hypertext jumps (adopted by later web browsers) to and from
ASCII, batch, and other Maxthink files up to 32 levels deep.[citation needed] In 1986 he released his DOS Houdini network browser program
that supported 2500 topics cross-connected with 7500 links in each file
along with hypertext links among unlimited numbers of external ASCII,
batch, and other Houdini files.[citation needed]
In
1987, these capabilities were included in his then popular shareware
DOS file browser programs HyperRez (memory resident) and PC Hypertext
(which also added jumps to programs, editors, graphic files containing
hot spots jumps, and cross-linked theraurus/glossary files). These
programs introduced many to the browser concept and 20 years later,
Google still lists 3,000,000 references to PC Hypertext. In 1989, he
created both HyperBBS and HyperLan which both allow multiple users to
create/edit both topics and jumps for information and knowledge
annealing which, in concept, the columnist John C. Dvorak says pre-dated
Wiki by many years.[citation needed]
From
1987 on, he also created TransText (hypertext word processor) and many
utilities for rapidly building large scale knowledge systems ... and in
1989 helped produce for one of the big eight accounting firms[citation needed] a
comprehensive knowledge system of integrating all accounting
laws/regulations into a CDROM containing 50,000 files with 200,000
hypertext jumps. Additionally, the Lynx (a
very early web-based browser) development history notes their project
origin was based on the browser concepts from Neil Larson and Maxthink.[4] In
1989, he declined joining the Mosaic browser team with his preference
for knowledge/wisdom creation over distributing information ... a
problem he says is still not solved by today's internet.
Another early browser, Silversmith, was created by John Bottoms in 1987.[5] The browser, based on SGML tags,[6] used
a tag set from the Electronic Document Project of the AAP with minor
modifications and was sold to a number of early adopters. At the time
SGML was used exclusively for the formatting of printed documents.[7] The
use of SGML for electronically displayed documents signaled a shift in
electronic publishing and was met with considerable resistance.
Silversmith included an integrated indexer, full text searches,
hypertext links between images text and sound using SGML tags and a
return stack for use with hypertext links. It included features that are
still not available in today's browsers. These include capabilities
such as the ability to restrict searches within document structures,
searches on indexed documents using wild cards and the ability to search
on tag attribute values and attribute names.
Starting
in 1988, Peter Scott and Earle Fogel expanded the earlier HyperRez
concept in creating Hytelnet which added jumps to telnet sites ... and
which by 1990 offered users instant logon and access to the online
catalogs of over 5000 libraries around the world. The strength of
Hytelnet was speed and simplicity in link creation/execution at the
expense of a centralized world wide source for adding, indexing, and
modifying telnet links.[citation needed] This problem was solved by the invention of the web server.
A NeXT Computer was used by Tim Berners-Lee (who pioneered the use of hypertext for sharing information) as the world's firstWeb server, and also an early Web browser, WorldWideWeb in 1990. Berners-Lee introduced it to colleagues at CERN in
March 1991. Since then the development of Web browsers has been
inseparably intertwined with the development of the Web itself.
In April 1990, a draft patent application for
a mass market consumer device for browsing pages via links "PageLink"
was proposed by Craig Cockburn at Digital Equipment Co Ltd (DEC) whilst
working in their Networking and Communications division in Reading,
England. This application for a keyboardless touch screen browser for
consumers also makes reference to "navigating and searching text" and
"bookmarks" was aimed at (quotes paraphrased) "replacing books",
"storing a shopping list" "have an updated personalised newspaper
updated round the clock", "dynamically updated maps for use in a car"
and suggests such a device could have a "profound effect on the
advertising industry". The patent was canned by Digital as too
futuristic and, being largely hardware based, had obstacles to market
that purely software driven approaches did not suffer from.
[edit]Early 1990s: WWW browsers
In 1992, Tony Johnson released the MidasWWW browser. Based on Motif/X, MidasWWW allowed viewing of PostScript files on the Web from Unix and VMS, and even handled compressed PostScript.[8] Another early popular Web browser was ViolaWWW, which was modeled after HyperCard.
Thomas R. Bruce of the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School started 1992 to develop Cello and released on 8 June 1993 the first web browser which was working on Windows 3.1, NT 3.5, and OS/2.
However, the explosion in popularity of the Web was triggered by NCSA Mosaic which was a graphical browser running originally on Unixand soon ported to the Amiga and VMS platforms, and later the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows platforms. Version 1.0 was released in September 1993,[9] and was dubbed the killer application of the Internet. It was the first web browser to display images inline with the document's text.[10] Prior browsers would display an icon that, when clicked, would download and open the graphic file in a helper application.
This was an intentional design decision on both parts, as the graphics
support in early browsers was intended for displaying charts and graphs
associated with technical papers while the user scrolled to read the
text, while Mosaic was trying to bring multimedia content to
nontechnical users. Marc Andreessen, who was the leader of the Mosaic team at NCSA, quit to form a company that would later be known as Netscape Communications Corporation. Netscape released its flagship Navigator product in October 1994, and it took off the next year.
UdiWWW was the first web browser that was able to handle all HTML 3 features
with the math tags released 1995. Following the release of version 1.2
in April 1996, Bernd Richter ceased development, stating "let Microsoft with the ActiveX Development Kit do the rest."[11][12][13]
Microsoft,
which had thus far not marketed a browser (in fact even as late as 1995
Bill Gates dismissed personal use of the World Wide Web as a passing
fad)[citation needed], finally entered the fray with its Internet Explorer product (version 1.0 was released 16 August 1995), purchased from Spyglass, Inc. This began what is known as the "browser wars" in which Microsoft and Netscape competed for the Web browser market.
The
wars put the Web in the hands of millions of ordinary PC users, but
showed how commercialization of the Web could stymie standards efforts.
Both Microsoft and Netscape liberally incorporated proprietary
extensions to HTML in their products, and tried to gain an edge by
product differentiation, leading to the acceptance of the Cascading Style Sheetsproposed by Håkon Wium Lie over Netscape's JavaScript Style Sheets (JSSS) by W3C.
[edit]Late 1990s: Microsoft vs Netscape
In
1996, Netscape's share of the browser market reached 86% (with Internet
Explorer edging up 10%); but then Microsoft began integrating its
browser with its operating system and bundling deals with OEMs, and within two years the balance had reversed. Although Microsoft has since faced antitrust litigation
on these charges, the browser wars effectively ended once it was clear
that Netscape's declining market share trend was irreversible. Prior to
the release of Mac OS X, Internet Explorer for Mac and Netscape were also the primary browsers in use on the Macintosh platform.
Unable to continue commercially funding their product's development, Netscape responded by open sourcing its product, creating Mozilla.
This helped the browser maintain its technical edge over Internet
Explorer, but did not slow Netscape's declining market share. Netscape
was purchased by America Online in late 1998.
No comments:
Post a Comment