WorldWideWeb (Nexus)

~ the last words ~

the first time i loaded a web page, in 1998, a browser was a window you looked through. it did not occur to me it could have been anything else. the first one ever written was a window you could reach into and change.

Tim Berners-Lee wrote it at CERN over the second half of 1990, in Objective-C, on a NeXT computer, using the NeXTSTEP tools that made building a real application fast enough for one person to finish. the earliest working version was done by november. by christmas it was talking to the world's first web server, which was another program on the same desk. it went out to the public in august 1991, by which point CERN's only other client was a stripped-down thing for text terminals.

it did more than what we now think a browser does. it opened pages over HTTP, but also FTP and Usenet news. it handled different file types by their declared type rather than by guessing. it had style settings and a spell checker. and it edited: point at a page, type into it, save it back. the first WYSIWYG HTML editor arrived in the same binary as the first HTML viewer, and for a moment nobody thought that was strange.

Berners-Lee has put the reasoning plainly for decades. "If you think surfing hypertext is cool, that's because you haven't tried writing it." the web he was describing was a shared document you were expected to mark up, not a broadcast you watched.

~ the record ~

~ the half that did not survive ~

the browsers that won kept the reading and dropped the writing. Mosaic could not edit. Netscape could not edit, not really, until it bolted on a separate program to do it. Internet Explorer never seriously tried. by 1998, when i got there, the split was so total that i grew up assuming publishing was a different activity requiring different software and usually somebody else's server.

i write software for a living, and this is still the strangest fact about the web to me: the very first client shipped a capability the winning clients discarded, and the industry then spent thirty years selling it back one product at a time. wikis, then blogging platforms, then the document tools everybody now rents by the seat. all of it is the missing half of a 1990 program, re-implemented inside somebody else's walls.

~ why it lost ~

hardware. the NeXT machine was a beautiful, expensive dead end that sold a few tens of thousands of units worldwide, so a browser written for NeXTSTEP could reach almost nobody. CERN's answer was the Line Mode Browser, deliberately ugly and portable, so that anyone on a terminal could at least see the web. then in 1993 Mosaic showed up for Windows and the Mac, with images in the page, and the argument was settled.

the last act was a naming problem. the program was called WorldWideWeb and so was the thing it opened, which confused everyone, so in 1994 it was renamed Nexus. version 0.17 was the end of it. CERN had already put the web software into the public domain on 30 april 1993, which is the decision that actually mattered, and by then the interesting work had moved to Illinois and then to California.

~ what came back ~

in february 2019, for the web's thirtieth birthday, a group of developers and designers spent a week at CERN rebuilding WorldWideWeb inside a modern browser. it lives at worldwideweb.cern.ch and you can open a page in it right now, in the gray NeXTSTEP chrome, with the editing intact. it is a good five minutes. it is also a slightly sad five minutes, because the thing you notice is not how primitive it looks but how much of it you were never offered.

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