Browser

The Beginning

Like the Web itself, the first Web browser was invented by Tim Berners-Lee at the Swiss particle-physics lab, the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN), in 1990. Berners-Lee, long intrigued by the possibilities of hypertext (see entry), realized that he would need a simple way to display pages of information using the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) language, which computers now use to communicate over the Web. He needed an interface.

According to his 1999 memoir, Weaving the Web, Berners-Lee didn't set out at first to invent a browser. His employers at CERN had a “buy, don't build” credo, he said, which led him to shop around for existing software that could be adjusted to publish hypertext pages on the Internet. Already there were a number of hypertext products on the market, including a point-and-click multimedia manual on repairing automobiles. But to his surprise, Berners-Lee was unable to find anyone who recognized the importance of his browser concept. One product in particular, Owl Ltd.'s hypertext interface known as Guide, looked promising as a Web browser; all it needed was a way to be connected to the Internet. “They were friendly enough,” Berners-Lee wrote of company officials at Owl, “but they too were unconvinced.” Owl, and another promising company Berners-Lee approached called Dynatext, thus missed opportunities to build the first Web browser. Berners-Lee decided he would have to make it himself.

In October 1990, he set about writing the program that would become the first Web browser while using a $10,000 NeXT computer at the CERN lab. The NeXT PC was built by the company that Steve Jobs formed after his ouster in the mid-1980s from Apple Computer. While it was highly advanced, it was also highly incompatible with other computers, which would later prove to be problematic. But the computer's programming utility, NeXTStep, made it fairly easy for Berners-Lee to create a word-processor-styled program that would serve as the shell of the first Web browser.

He still lacked the ability to turn text into instantly recognizable and click-able hypertext, the key piece of the puzzle. But the NeXT computer made that feasible, too. The computer had a spare 32-bit piece of memory intentionally set aside for tinkerers, and this gave Berners-Lee the computing resource he needed to create HTTP. It also allowed him to create what he called the universal resource indicator (URI)—more popularly known as the universal resource locator (URL)—that indicates Web addresses. He also wrote software that made his NeXT computer the world's first Web server, which made it possible for him to store Web pages on a portion of his computer's hard drive, and for others to access them through the Internet.

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