OPINION
The browser turns ten
22-04-2003
by Bernie Goldbach
Ten years after its first appearance, the Internet browser has influenced the way we interact with computers, friends and associates.
In early 1993, anyone exploring leading Irish newsagents would have seen a new magazine published in the UK called Wired. Most newsagents didn't know where to place the magazine, since it talked about both technology and culture.
In its earliest editions, Wired didn't mention the Internet. Yet some big technological breakthroughs on the Internet were happening that affected mankind and culture. Those developments were the handiwork of Mark Andreessen, who would often finish work late at night on campus at Champaign, Illinois.
Andreessen sat down at the White Hen Pantry one of those evenings with a cup of coffee and one of the first Wired magazines. He was working at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications on Mosaic, a project that was the forerunner of today's Web browsers, and he had just posted it for free on the Internet.
Andreessen wouldn't have seen any mention of his own application in the magazine, of course, because there was no World Wide Web, just a collection of "must-visit" Internet locations. A handful of Irish post-graduate students knew some of these locations as clusters of numbers, often pointing to the powerful IBM-AT computers on desks of government-funded researchers. Some of these researchers followed a set of technical standards set down by Tim Berners-Lee, a British researcher at the CERN physics lab in Geneva, Switzerland. He published a paper on how researchers could create a universal Internet document centre called the World Wide Web. Once you got the hang of it, you could digitally distribute research notes with up to 256 colours.
These first Web pages would look remarkably primitive to our eyes now, but they were the beginning of the Web as most people know it. And we shouldn't underestimate what the early browsers accomplished -- they made the Internet into a communications medium, and learning how to write content to display on a browser meant you could publish to masses of people. Knowing how to use a browser to find information meant you were inside the biggest library known to man.
Within six months of a graphics-based browser, commercialism appeared on the Internet, and by the time Microsoft got on board with the Internet in its Windows 95 operating system, the revolution (and the browser wars) had officially begun.
By early 1996, browsers started showing people parts of shopping catalogues and business listings. Today, browsers take people to their first ports of call when searching for information, buying books, and reserving travel tickets. This is real commerce as consumers spent nearly USD13.7 billion on-line in the last holiday shopping season, according to a report by the Goldman Sachs Group.
It's all a long way from the first days of Mosaic, a simple computer application that helped transform remote clusters of computer files into an ocean of connected information islands. Our concept of Internet connectivity would not exist if the browser had remained inside the walls of academia. Before browsers, machines talked to machines. Today, browsers like Netscape Navigator, Explorer, Opera, Spyglass and Safari help non-technical people surf a sea of information, and a multibillion-euro industry has been born.
According to Jupiter Research, nearly 553 million ordinary people use their browsers regularly. Business partners have emerged through Web site contacts, romance has blossomed through on-line chat zones and families have trawled for genealogical information. And students, of course, now think of the Internet as their first point of research.
Ten years since its introduction, the simple Internet browser has affected nearly every facet of life by bringing the Internet into contact with mainstream society.
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