SlipKnot

» see micromind.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

By the time I made my first connection in 1998, the problem SlipKnot existed to solve had already been taken care of by the people selling the connection. The account came with TCP/IP and Windows had a dialer. The browser talked to the network on its own. That is the whole reason this browser is dead, and it happened to a lot of people at once between 1995 and 1997.

Before that, plenty of internet access looked different. You dialed into a Unix machine at a university or a small provider and got a shell prompt. Everything happened on that machine, not on yours, and your PC was a terminal. Text browsers like lynx worked fine in that arrangement. Anything with an image in it did not, because there was no IP connection running to your computer for a graphical browser to use.

Peter Brooks at MicroMind released SlipKnot 1.0 on 22 November 1994, about three weeks ahead of Netscape Navigator 1.0. It was shareware at $29.95, which made it the first browser anybody could actually buy. The name is a joke about what it did not need: SLIP, not.

~ the case file ~

~ how it worked ~

The method is worth spelling out because nothing works this way anymore. SlipKnot drove your shell session as a puppet. It sent keystrokes down the line to run lynx on the remote Unix host and told it to fetch a page, saving the HTML along with every image into files that stayed on that machine. Then it pulled those files back to your PC over zmodem, which is the same file transfer protocol people were using on dial-up bulletin boards.

Once the text arrived it drew the page immediately and brought the images in behind it, so you were reading while the pictures were still coming. The rendering engine was written in C and the interface in Visual Basic. It was, in effect, screen scraping a text browser and reassembling the result into a graphical one, over a link that was never designed to carry any of it.

~ what it became ~

It won Ziff-Davis's Best Communications Shareware Program of 1995 and was runner-up for best overall shareware that year, which in the shareware economy of the mid-nineties was a serious result. Then the ground moved. Providers started selling SLIP and PPP accounts to home users at prices that made shell accounts pointless, Windows 95 shipped with the networking stack built in, and every reason to own SlipKnot evaporated inside about eighteen months.

Brooks stopped development by mid-1996. The program stayed downloadable until January 1998, quietly, for whoever was still on the wrong side of that transition. The MicroMind pages describing it are still sitting on the web, which is a longer afterlife than the software got.

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