MacWWW

~ the last words ~

The Wikipedia infobox for MacWWW has a blank where the final release date belongs. Open the source and there is a comment sitting in the gap, left by an editor, saying they do not know it and could not find it. That is the death date of the first web browser ever written for a Macintosh. An empty field with an apology in it.

Robert Cailliau worked at CERN alongside Tim Berners-Lee and is the second name on the web's founding paperwork. In december 1992 he put out a Macintosh browser, and Nicola Pellow joined him later, bringing code across from the Line Mode Browser she had written. The two programs shared enough that the shared part eventually became libwww. Version 1.00 arrived on 12 may 1993 with a release note that reads like an engineer's shrug: they knew there was much to improve, but it worked on System 7 and on System 6.0.5.

1992 is six years before I had a modem, and the machine in question was a Macintosh, which was not what anybody around me owned. There is no personal angle available here. What I can say is that I have opened a browser every day since 1998 and did not know until this week that the first one for the Mac had a price on it.

~ the record ~

~ what it could not do ~

It displayed text. No images and no lists. Nothing on screen told you a page was still loading either, so a slow page and a broken one looked identical. Links did not open in place either. You double clicked one and got a new window, which is closer to how HyperCard behaved than to how the web eventually settled.

It was also the only browser ever released that ran on System 6, a record you set by being early rather than by being good. The 1994 book The World Wide Web Unleashed handed it the verdict that has followed it ever since: interesting, but only as a curiosity.

~ fifty ecu ~

CERN sold it. Fifty European Currency Units, the accounting unit that came before the euro, charged for a browser out of the laboratory that had just given the web itself away for nothing. It is a small fact and it keeps snagging on the way past.

The explanation is mundane enough. CERN was a physics laboratory rather than a software house, and a piece of software with a price attached has a support arrangement and a line in a budget, which is how a laboratory stops a side project from eating its staff. It does mean that for a window in 1993, if you owned a Macintosh and wanted onto the web, the official route ran through an invoice.

~ the inheritance ~

Mosaic shipped and then MacWeb shipped, and both of them showed pictures. That was the end of it. Nothing was withdrawn and nothing was announced. The browser simply stopped being updated, and 1.03 sat where it was until the FTP directory at info.cern.ch went away along with everything else in it.

You can still download 1.03 from the browser archive at evolt.org, which is a mirror of a mirror. The part that mattered was never in the application anyway. It went sideways into libwww, and libwww went into everything.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »