Line Mode Browser

The Line Mode Browser (also known as LMB, WWWLib, 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.

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Libwww

Libwww is an early World Wide Web software library providing core functions for web browsers, implementing HTML, HTTP, and other technologies. Tim Berners-Lee, at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), released libwww (then also called the Common Library) in late 1992, comprising reusable code from the first browsers (WorldWideWeb and Line Mode Browser). Libwww was relied upon by the then popular browser Mosaic. By 1997, interest in libwww declined, and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which took over from CERN, reduced its commitment to the project.

Line Mode Browser

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The World Wide Web ("WWW", "W3" or simply "the Web") is a global information medium which users can access via computers connected to the Internet. The term is often mistakenly used as a synonym for the Internet, but the Web is a service that operates over the Internet, just as email and Usenet do. The history of the Internet and the history of hypertext date back significantly further than that of the World Wide Web. Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web while working at CERN in 1989.

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