Palaeo-browsers of the primitive web

The Viola Browser. Love the color scheme

Ars Technica profiles the forgotten web browsers of the early 1990s:

When Tim Berners-Lee arrived at CERN, Geneva's celebrated European Particle Physics Laboratory in 1980, the enterprise had hired him to upgrade the control systems for several of the lab's particle accelerators. But almost immediately, the inventor of the modern webpage noticed a problem: thousands of people were floating in and out of the famous research institute, many of them temporary hires.

"The big challenge for contract programmers was to try to understand the systems, both human and computer, that ran this fantastic playground," Berners-Lee later wrote. "Much of the crucial information existed only in people's heads." 

So in his spare time, he wrote up some software to address this shortfall: a little program he named Enquire. It allowed users to create "nodes"—information-packed index card-style pages that linked to other pages. Unfortunately, the PASCAL application ran on CERN's proprietary operating system. "The few people who saw it thought it was a nice idea, but no one used it. Eventually, the disk was lost, and with it, the original Enquire."

Samba, the first Mac browser. 'Disque dur'! le Français d'internet est fantastique

Some years later Berners-Lee returned to CERN. This time he relaunched his "World Wide Web" project in a way that would more likely secure its success. On August 6, 1991, he published an explanation of WWW on the alt.hypertext usegroup. He also released a code library, libWWW, which he wrote with his assistant Jean-François Groff. The library allowed participants to create their own Web browsers.

"Their efforts—over half a dozen browsers within 18 months—saved the poorly funded Web project and kicked off the Web development community," notes a commemoration of this project by the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.

This is another step toward mapping the early history of the digital age. Also  a nice example of how the search for a unique inventor or moment of origin for historical movements is a distraction. These palaeo-browsers are an important part of the heritage of the digital age, and at the same time irrelevant. They were part of the evolutionary web that led to Netscape, which eclipsed them all. Here's Netscape's daddy, the original Mosaic browser. I remember using this on some machines when I first got to college in 1994.

Herc lost his Dongle

These days it seems like all I have to do is look at my Facebook feed to get ideas for Archaeopop. Patrick Crowley over at Columbia put this chortle-worthy gem on his feed today, and I'm pirating it!


Patrick sez:

I think this image came from some technology nostalgia blog, but for the life of me I don't think I could find it again. I suppose I liked not only the comparison between the dongle-less new technology and the penis-less Hercules Farnese, but also the further implication that because "dongles are history," so is the "complete" statue in its ancient state. At the risk of reading too much into the ad, I think it's a cute document in the history of sculptural restoration!

Heh, you said dongle.

First Machine Sounds

The start of the rest of human history: the Manchester Mark 1, 1951 (digital60.org)

The digital computer is the most important human invention - forget about cities, the internal combustion engine, and the neolithic revolution. Music comes second, and no music is recorded or disseminated today without digital computers.

So the collision of the two marks a new age in human history, and every new age needs its founding moments. Behold, the earliest recording of computer music, from the Manchester Mark 1, Manchester, England, autumn 1951.



"God save the King", "Baa Baa Black Sheep", and "In the Mood". There's some chatting, laughter, and silence as knobs get fiddled, and performance starts at 1:12 or so. The music was programmed by Christopher Strachey. The recording was made by the BBC, on assignment in Manchester's pioneering computer labs.

You might think I'm being sarcastic here, but I mean it. (And not just because I like songs like this.) Archaeology has always been concerned with origin myths, with periodization, with the notion of 'new eras'. And like any historical narrative, this one is subject to all kinds of rewriting and restructuring to match the mores of the present. The 2008 BBC article covering the story, for instance, pretends that "God Save the King" is not on the recording, presumably for reasons of political correctness.

The stress on the first recorded music also hides the real innovator: even though the Mark 1 was the first computer to run stored programs, the CSIRAC computer in Melbourne was the first to play music in 1950, and performed the popular tune "Colonel Bogey" for the public in August 1951. It wasn't recorded, but here's a reconstruction:

Sounds like hell, but I'm sure the first Neanderthal flute sounded pretty shitty too. (More dubious Neanderthal tunes.) You can keep playing the "who was first" game for quite a while (see below), which is tiresome - every invention I can think of was the product of multiple minds, often working at cross-purposes. The obsession with "firsts" is a distraction from thinking about how awesome computers playing music is and all the awesome feelings it's made possible.

Parting shot: the first computer vox, performed by an IBM 7094 in 1961 (programming by John Kelly and Carol Lockbaum. It's like Lil Wayne's grandpa.