When The Web Was Command Line

When The Web Was Command Line

Well, we live in a world of GUIs (Graphical User Interfaces), but underneath you are likely to find that it's basically just using a command line interface. For example, when a browser wants a page, it just sends a “GET /mypage.html” command and gets the page back as a response. This response contains lots of headers that contain extra information, but which are often stripped off, and then the main content is rendered in the browser. At the core of this, is the usage of RFCs (Request for Comment), and which defines the basic underlying messages that are exchanged.

As you should all know it was Sir Tim Berners-Lee who created the first browser ( WorldWideWeb, aka NEXUS) and Web server (CERN httpd). This was created on NeXTcube computers, and supported the very first Web page:

But, the second browser was the Line Mode Browser [here]. It was created by Tim Berners-Lee, Henrik Frystyk Nielsen and Nicola Pellow on 14 May, 1991:

And, so, while NEXUS could display text and images, the Line Mode Browser could only display text. But, its great advantage was that it was compatible with many systems (while NEXUS could only run on NeXTcube computers. It was truly the start of the WWW, as it opened the Web up to the world. At its core was the usage of the TCP/IP protocol, and its integration with Unix systems. Windows, at the time, was just Windows 3.0, and had just managed to connect to networks, so it was up to Unix machines to showcase the potential of the Web.

And, the rest of history …