History
In 1994 and 1995, the majority of home PC users who were interested in accessing the World Wide Web had to do so using terminal-based software. These users usually had dial-up shell accounts with their employers' Unix machines or with commercial UNIX ISPs (e.g. Netcom). They would run a terminal emulator program on their PCs, temporarily turning the machines into black screen terminals, dial into the Unix server, and then run text-based internet software such as pine and elm for e-mail, gopher for file retrieval, and lynx or www for a text-based browsing experience of the new World Wide Web. While this text-based browsing was fine while web pages were text-only, Mosaic changed the browser and web-page landscape in 1993 by displaying and therefore encouraging graphical, multimedia and multifont web pages. It also pioneered the point-and-click navigation for web browsing that had been a standard for prior hypertext applications, like Windows Help.
Mosaic had been developed by university programmers who had access to full TCP/IP connections and high-speed transmissions. This was evident in the design of the program—for instance, after clicking on a hypertext link, the user had to wait until all parts of the page had been retrieved by the browser before anything showed on the screen. High-speed connections allowed TCP/IP's ability to do multiple retrievals at once, and for the delay between the user's request for a page and its appearance to be short. Therefore, not only could Mosaic not be used by most home users because of their lack of TCP/IP connections, but even if they had TCP/IP, the low speed of home modems would bring out the problems in the Mosaic design for slower speed connections (typically 9600 and 14.4k baud).
In 1994, some ISPs started to offer TCP/IP connections via dial-in modems, with protocols like SLIP and PPP. But this was leading-edge technology, and so it was extraordinarily difficult to set up and maintain a home TCP/IP connection. Therefore, a large fraction of home users were stuck with dial-up Unix shell connections, and could not use Mosaic, or Netscape, or any of the other TCP/IP-based browsers that business- and academia-based users enjoyed.
Having seen Mosaic late in 1993 and been captivated by its potential, Peter Brooks set out in April 1994 to create a fully graphic, multifont web browser for home PC users.
Read more about this topic: SlipKnot (web Browser)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)
“It may be well to remember that the highest level of moral aspiration recorded in history was reached by a few ancient Jews—Micah, Isaiah, and the rest—who took no count whatever of what might not happen to them after death. It is not obvious to me why the same point should not by and by be reached by the Gentiles.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)