Line Mode Browser
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Line Mode Browser displaying the
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| Original author(s) | |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | W3C / CERN |
| Initial release | 0.7, 14 May 1991 |
| Stable release |
5.4.1 / 4 December 2006
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| Development status | active |
| Written in | C |
| Operating system | cross-platform, same as Libwww |
| Type | web browser |
| License | W3C Software Notice and License |
| Website | www |
The Line Mode Browser (also known as LMB, or just www) is the second web browser ever created. The browser was the first demonstrated to be portable to several different operating systems. Operated from a simple command-line interface, it could be widely used on many computers and computer terminals throughout the Internet. The browser was developed starting in 1990, and then supported by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as an example and test application for the libwww library.
One of the fundamental concepts of the "World Wide Web" projects at CERN was "universal readership". In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee had already written the first browser, WorldWideWeb (later renamed to Nexus), but that program only worked on the proprietary software of NeXT computers, which were in limited use. Berners-Lee and his team could not port the WorldWideWeb application with its features—including the graphical WYSIWYG editor— to the more widely deployed X Window System, since they had no experience in programming it. The team recruited Nicola Pellow, a math student intern working at CERN, to write a "passive browser" so basic that it could run on most computers of that time. The name "Line Mode Browser" refers to the fact that, to ensure compatibility with the earliest computer terminals such as Teletype machines, the program only displayed text, (no images) and had only line-by-line text input (no cursor positioning).
Development started in November 1990 and the browser was demonstrated in December 1990. The development environment used resources from the PRIAM project, a French language acronym for "PRojet Interdivisionnaire d'Assistance aux Microprocesseurs", a project to standardise microprocessor development across CERN. The short development time produced software in a simplified dialect of the C programming language. The official standard ANSI C was not yet available on all platforms. The Line Mode Browser was released to a limited audience on VAX, RS/6000 and Sun-4 computers in March 1991. Before the release of the first publicly available version, it was integrated into the CERN Program Library (CERNLIB), used mostly by the High-Energy Physics-community. The first beta of the browser was released on 8 April 1991. Berners-Lee announced the browser's availability in June 1991 in the alt.hypertext newsgroup of Usenet. Users could use the browser from anywhere in the Internet through the telnet protocol to the info.cern.ch machine (which was also the first web server). The spreading news of the World Wide Web in 1991 increased interest in the project at CERN and other laboratories such as DESY in Germany, and elsewhere throughout the world.
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