UdiWWW

~ the eulogy ~

In April 1996 I was a schoolkid in Turkey with no modem and no plans for one. My line came two years later at 14.4k, and by then the browser question had already been settled by two American companies. UdiWWW was over before I could have had an opinion about it, which is the honest position on almost every browser written before Netscape won.

It was written by Bernd Richter at the University of Ulm, in C and C++, for something called the UDINE project. It shipped as a 16-bit build for Windows 3.1 and as a 32-bit build for Windows 95 and NT, which in 1995 meant it ran on essentially every Windows machine that existed. Richter put it in the public domain. There was no company behind it and no business model to fail.

The first release came in 1995 and the last one, version 1.2.000, came on 9 April 1996. Twelve months of a browser, start to finish, made by one person in a university department while Netscape was raising money in California.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it had first ~

UdiWWW was one of the first browsers to implement the proposed HTML 3.0 draft rather than waiting for it to be ratified. That included HTML math, which is the part almost nobody else attempted, because rendering equations in a browser in 1995 meant doing typesetting work that commercial browsers would not touch for another decade. It also handled HTML figures.

It displayed PNG. Netscape did not. Internet Explorer 2.0 did not. The format had been designed in 1995 specifically to get around the Unisys patent on the GIF compression algorithm, and the browsers that everyone actually used took years to support it properly. A public domain program from a German university got there first and got no credit for it, because being right about a file format early is worth nothing if nobody is running your software.

~ the exit line ~

When Richter finished version 1.2 he stopped, and the reason he gave has held up better than the browser did. He would let Microsoft with the ActiveX Development Kit do the rest. That was April 1996, six months before Internet Explorer 3 shipped, and it reads now like somebody looking at the next five years with complete accuracy and deciding not to spend them losing.

Nothing killed UdiWWW. There was no lawsuit and nothing to acquire. One person decided the problem had been handed to companies with a thousand engineers and went to do something else. Most dead software has a villain somewhere in the story. This one has a man closing a compiler.

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