Pre-Mosaic Era

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Around 1991 something called gopher appeared. It was the first truly distributed information system on the Internet, and a forerunner to the web. If your browser supports the gopher protocol you can try it out for yourself. Just click the gopher icon to the right!

In the physics research lab called CERN on the border between France and Switzerland, an Englishman named Tim Berners-Lee wrote some software for information management using hypertext. Mr Berners-Lee is a man of vision, so he named his project the World-Wide Web.

Using the WWW at that time was not as straightforward as it is today. Actually I did give it a try, but I didn't get the idea. One had to connect to the server at CERN using telnet and all there was was a lot of text. To the right you can test drive the cutting edge browser of 1991: the linemode browser.

Next... the Mosaic Era