Original NCSA Mosaic Version 1.0 web browser home page; via NCSA. On 14 January 1993, Marc Andreessen put a call out on the WWW-Talk mailing list for people to test a new WWW browser in development. It was initially “hypertext only,” he wrote, “but will soon have multimedia capabilities also.” He followed up on 23...

MidasWWW browser in 1992; via Ancient Web Browsers. Throughout 1992, there were just a scattering of websites on the World Wide Web — somewhere between ten and twenty. A W3C page from late 1992 lists less than 30 web servers online at the time (not all of them had web sites attached to them). So the Web in 1992 was...

Tim Berners-Lee demonstrates the World Wide Web to delegates at the Hypertext 1991 conference in San Antonio, Texas; via CERN After a year and a half of stalling from CERN management, followed by a flurry of development activity over the final quarter of 1990, Tim Berners-Lee and his close colleague Robert Cailliau...

In the final few months of 1990, 35-year Tim Berners-Lee and his colleague Robert Cailliau developed the world’s first web client (a browser/editor), created the HyperText Markup Language (HTML), wrote the first web server, and tied it all together with an Internet communication protocol called Hypertext Transfer...

At the beginning of 1999, one company had all the momentum on the Web: Microsoft. While Netscape was adjusting to corporate life with new owner AOL and trying to figure out its browser strategy, Microsoft was preparing to release version 5 of its browser, Internet Explorer. Like the version before it, IE5 would...

After the birth of web apps in 1993 with CGI scripts, followed by startups like Yahoo using Perl code to create dynamic websites in 1994, and then client-side interactivity arriving in 1995 with Netscape’s JavaScript, the web was evolving fast into a full-stack programming platform. During the same time period,...

The LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python) would not be coined as an acronym for another few years, but all the pieces were in place by the end of 1995 — albeit at varying stages of maturity and adoption. Version 1.0 of Linux had been released in 1994 and commercial Linux distribution makers, like Red...

Apache logo; via Wayback Machine. From January 1995 through till the end of December, the Web grew from just over 10,000 websites to 100,000. But in order to publish a website at that time, you needed to host it on a web server. In simple terms, a web server is a piece of software that specializes in delivering a...

In January 1994, two Stanford University graduate students — Jerry Yang and David Filo — created a web directory named “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web.” It went by various other names in early 1994 (such as “Hierarchical Hotlist” and “Jerry & Dave’s Guide to WWW”), before being christened "Yahoo!" in...

This post is to honour the one-year anniversary of the passing of Bill English, at age 91, on 26 July, 2020. English was Doug Engelbart’s right-hand man in the Mother of All Demos in 1968 and a key developer of the oN-Line System (NLS). The post below was initially part of a book I was writing about Engelbart. The...

By the start of 1998, Netscape was preparing to make a drastic move. Not only was its arch-nemesis Microsoft rapidly catching up in the browser market, Internet Explorer was also arguably a superior technical platform for web development. After 1997, the year of DHTML, Microsoft’s powerful document object model...

As we saw in the previous post, 1997 was a year of growth for JavaScript. However, it was also a year in which its limitations were recognized and a new term was coined that both embraced and extended JavaScript. DHTML, or Dynamic HTML, was essentially a combination of HTML, JavaScript, the newly released CSS...