This browser: Christmas 1990.
Berners-Lee wrote WorldWideWeb on a NeXT Cube running NeXTSTEP, at CERN, late 1990. It was a browser and an editor — you could read the web and write it in the same window. HTTP, HTML, and URLs were invented alongside it. The first web server (info.cern.ch, also a NeXT) was running by Christmas; the page you are reading is its content.
The window itself was archived, not coded.
Every window, menu, and panel was dragged into place inside Interface Builder (CART 015, NeXTSTEP 0.8, 1988) — Jean-Marie Hullot's invention, the one Berners-Lee opened first. Connections were wired in the Inspector. The result was a NIB file: the interface, freeze-dried, ready to thaw. No generated code.
January 1993: NCSA Mosaic for X.
Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina release Mosaic 0.5 at Illinois. The following month, on 25 February 1993, Andreessen proposes the <IMG> tag on the www-talk list and ships it in Mosaic shortly after. Images, inline with text. Berners-Lee argues on the list for typed embedded content and is overruled by deployment. The web becomes visual.
Subsequent browsers kept the reading. They dropped the writing. The distinction between web author and web consumer — which didn't exist in this room — became fixed.
Dreamweaver, CART 006, 1997, was still trying to get the editing back.
From THE LITERATURE · CANON / 001B · the theory wing of CLASSICERY. Hear Vannevar Bush on As We May Think read aloud — the 1945 essay that imagined the memex, the desk that browsed and edited a linked corpus, decades before this NeXT did it. → track 02 →
Notes are stored locally in this browser. Berners-Lee's 1990 prototype supported personal links — annotations layered on top of any document.
WorldWideWeb was written by Tim Berners-Lee on a NeXT Cube running NeXTSTEP, at CERN, in late 1990. (The browser was later renamed Nexus, in 1994, to keep its name separate from the Web itself.) It was the world's first web browser — and the world's first web editor.
To browse: click any underlined link. Images open in a separate window (inline images did not exist yet).
To edit: Navigate → Edit Document. The page becomes editable. Select text, then use Link → Mark Selection and Link to Marked to create hyperlinks.
To view source: Document → View Source.
Historical Note (Navigate menu) explains what Mosaic changed in 1993 — and points at CANON track 02, Bush 1945, the memex essay this room is the long-delayed answer to.
Polite forgery. CERN page content adapted from info.cern.ch. NeXTSTEP chrome approximated. CLASSICERY · CART 014 · GREY SCALE
WorldWideWeb was Tim Berners-Lee's original browser, written on a NeXT Cube running NeXTSTEP at CERN, autumn 1990. By Christmas the browser and the first server (info.cern.ch, another NeXT) were running. CERN only made the project public outside the lab in August 1991.
It was a browser and an editor simultaneously. You could read the web and write it in the same window. No subsequent browser preserved this. The read-write web was the original vision.
Browse the first CERN site. Open the Navigate menu and switch to Edit mode. Use Link → Mark Selection to create a hyperlink. Then open the Historical Note to read what Mosaic changed in 1993 — and follow the link to CANON / track 02, Vannevar Bush's 1945 memex essay, the ancestor this NeXT was the long-delayed answer to.
CART 014 / 019 · GREY SCALE · FROM BERNERS-LEE · CERN · 1990 · ON NeXTSTEP