Editors Note: This article originally appeared on Gizmodo. Read full article on Gizmodo
Travel Back to 1990 With the Original World Wide Web Browser
Screenshot: CERN / Gizmodo
The World Wide Web turns 30 this year, and to celebrate three decades of utter chaos and brilliance, CERN developers and designers have created a version of the original WorldWideWeb browser that can run inside a modern browser. What, you wonder, is it like to surf the original web? Well, give it a try here. It’s kind of a pain!
Honestly, surfing the web with yesteryear’s technology sorta sucks compared to using the fancy browser you probably have open right now. The software that powers this great communication tool is constantly evolving and improving, making it easy to forget that the earliest versions of online were dull grey boxes of text. The original proposal for the World Wide Web, published by CERN scientist Tim Berners-Lee in March 1989, would lay the groundwork for a rudimentary “web” of hypertext documents that could be viewed through a “browser.” The very first browser application, “WorldWideWeb,” was developed on a NeXT machine and launched in December 1990, a few months before the project went public. This is the browser you can test out for yourself, again, right here.