What was your first web browser?

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Mosaic on X11

― Jonathan Williams (ex machina), Wednesday, 13 November 2002 16:33 (twenty-three years ago)

netscape 2/ ie 3 i think (this was 1993)

― stevem (blueski), Wednesday, 13 November 2002 16:36 (twenty-three years ago)

Whatever came bundled into the first edition Netcom software. Cripes.

― J (Jay), Wednesday, 13 November 2002 16:37 (twenty-three years ago)

CAB 1.5 on a 4MB Atari STe.

(I'd already used AOL at school a bit by then though)

― Graham (graham), Wednesday, 13 November 2002 16:38 (twenty-three years ago)

Mosaic on Macintosh.

Then lynx.

― Sterling Clover (s_clover), Wednesday, 13 November 2002 16:38 (twenty-three years ago)

Netscape 1 on a Powerbook 520 (with a black & white screen!)

― lyra (lyra), Wednesday, 13 November 2002 16:40 (twenty-three years ago)

mosaic on macintosh, but before the web i used gopher, archie and veronica. now where did i leave my zimmer frame.

― angela (angela), Wednesday, 13 November 2002 16:49 (twenty-three years ago)

That's a lie lyra, I bet you had shades of grey too, you spoilt brat.

― Graham (graham), Wednesday, 13 November 2002 16:52 (twenty-three years ago)

haha my current version of netscape (4.79?) on a mac bought just last year

― jones (actual), Wednesday, 13 November 2002 16:53 (twenty-three years ago)

Mosaic, I'm pretty sure. Oh man, the weird memories I'm getting now. And that was almost ten years ago!

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Wednesday, 13 November 2002 17:12 (twenty-three years ago)

mosaic... but ftp and gopher were in effect as well...

― gygax!, Wednesday, 13 November 2002 17:32 (twenty-three years ago)

Mosaic, but it didnt really work.

― Mr Noodles (Mr Noodles), Wednesday, 13 November 2002 18:08 (twenty-three years ago)

xcrasticus

― mark s (mark s), Wednesday, 13 November 2002 18:09 (twenty-three years ago)

Explorer 3? I dunno

― jel -- (jel), Wednesday, 13 November 2002 18:27 (twenty-three years ago)

Either Mosaic or a really early version of Netscape, I believe. At the time all I really thought about was "wow, I suddenly have access to boatloads of info!" - I didn't care what program I was using to get it!

― Vinnie (vprabhu), Wednesday, 13 November 2002 18:41 (twenty-three years ago)

Netscape something, I think.

does Netscape still exist?

― DV (dirtyvicar), Wednesday, 13 November 2002 18:52 (twenty-three years ago)

i used Mosaic on a mac but i switched to Netscape 1 pretty quickly; i had heard through the grapevine that Netscape allowed you to make the background something other than gray

― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Wednesday, 13 November 2002 18:58 (twenty-three years ago)

Netscape is fighting back thanks to incorporating the Gecko/Mozilla system which sets a more disciplined standard for web browsing in relation to the more lenient Internet Explorer...as i understand it.

― stevem (blueski), Wednesday, 13 November 2002 20:49 (twenty-three years ago)

mosaic on a mac, wais, gopher, ftp, the usual suspects.

And that was almost ten years ago!

No, it...

yeah it was.

shit shit shit.

― teeny (teeny), Wednesday, 13 November 2002 21:01 (twenty-three years ago)

A version of Mosaic rebadged for Compuserve.

― Chriddof (Chriddof), Wednesday, 13 November 2002 22:11 (twenty-three years ago)

was that "Quarterdeck" MosaiX0r@@??

― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Wednesday, 13 November 2002 22:21 (twenty-three years ago)

explorer er...

― Julio Desouza (jdesouza), Wednesday, 13 November 2002 23:15 (twenty-three years ago)

Mosaic and I also used gopher before that to get lots of shareware games. My families Commadore 64 had a modem that my father used for something, but I don't know what.

― A Nairn (moretap), Wednesday, 13 November 2002 23:35 (twenty-three years ago)

Netscape.

For a look at the web when I were a lad, check here.

― bert, Wednesday, 13 November 2002 23:43 (twenty-three years ago)

Netscape 2 I think - 'cause I remember downloading Netscape 3. No wait.... I think it's actually the same as what J said. I remember trying to get replace the Netcom thing asap.

― Kim (Kim), Thursday, 14 November 2002 00:13 (twenty-three years ago)

IE 3

― electric sound of jim (electricsound), Thursday, 14 November 2002 00:36 (twenty-three years ago)

I remember doing my 5th grade project on South Korea using Mosaic to get a picture. that was in 92-93.

― A Nairn (moretap), Thursday, 14 November 2002 03:30 (twenty-three years ago)

Whatever the latest version of Netscape was in '94, I don't remember.

― Nicole (Nicole), Thursday, 14 November 2002 03:39 (twenty-three years ago)

Mosaic. I started using it when Compuserve opened a gateway between their service and the Internet. A little while later I switched to Netscape Navigator 1.0. I still have the box (!!) and original disks.

― Andrew (enneff), Thursday, 14 November 2002 03:39 (twenty-three years ago)

get replace? I must be on cat acid.

― Kim (Kim), Thursday, 14 November 2002 03:40 (twenty-three years ago)

i guess MY first was IE6 *gasp* MY= because i have only owned my computer for less than a year. i had used others prior, but i suspect nothing earlier than ie5

― ron (ron), Thursday, 14 November 2002 04:37 (twenty-three years ago)

whatever netscape was out in 1993, or similar browser. i forget. i didn't even know i had been using the internet until like 1996, but what else do you call downloading nude pictures of supermodels from university ftps

― boxcubed (boxcubed), Thursday, 14 November 2002 05:01 (twenty-three years ago)

Mosaic for Windows 3-point-something. Ditched it as soon as the Netscape beta became available, the one with the pulsating blue "N" in the upper-right corner.

― Jen (nstop), Thursday, 14 November 2002 07:17 (twenty-three years ago)

Hah, seems like a bit of a pissing contest here, Jonathon! Netscape for Macintosh 1.1N.

― OCP (OCP), Thursday, 14 November 2002 14:06 (twenty-three years ago)

Netscape late-1994 stylee.

― Mark C (Mark C), Thursday, 14 November 2002 14:55 (twenty-three years ago)

Lynx.

― Colin Meeder (Mert), Thursday, 14 November 2002 15:35 (twenty-three years ago)

whichever version of IE was current in September 1997...umm...

― DG (D_To_The_G), Thursday, 14 November 2002 15:47 (twenty-three years ago)

wow that browser emulator is great! pitchfork looks so much better with netscape 1.0. i might almost want to read their reviews again.

― fields of salmon (fieldsofsalmon), Thursday, 14 November 2002 16:52 (twenty-three years ago)

I'm glad somebody finally mentioned lynx. sure it was ftp, gopher, archie, etc. for a while (high school, some college), then I moved onto lynx which I used until 96, I think, maybe 97 when I finally bought a used pentium 100. I used lynx usually on the 486 laptop I bought in fall of 93 ('round when I signed onto droneon...) and constantly had to refresh my screen because the links would get all cluttered on my screen.

― nick ring, Friday, 15 November 2002 05:59 (twenty-three years ago)

Netscape 1.1 I believe. It was years before I gave in and started using IE. I love the emulator! The big N looks stupid.

― Elisabeth (Elisabeth), Friday, 15 November 2002 10:16 (twenty-three years ago)

lynx, but was that the web proper back then?

― felicity (felicity), Friday, 15 November 2002 11:24 (twenty-three years ago)

NCSA Mosaic for mac OS 7

― Ed (dali), Friday, 15 November 2002 11:59 (twenty-three years ago)

The big Netscape N pulses sexily/yuckily when it's loading a page! I think I was just on whatever browser came w/W95. Woo.

― Andrew Thames (Andrew Thames), Friday, 15 November 2002 12:01 (twenty-three years ago)

sorry Macintosh System 7

― Ed (dali), Friday, 15 November 2002 12:02 (twenty-three years ago)

three years pass...

There's going to be kids applying to college soon who can't remember a time before the internet.

― roc u like a § (ex machina), Wednesday, 27 September 2006 15:57 (nineteen years ago)

Could those kids be here already? hmm.

It makes me feel sad that there are kids in college now who don't remember the world before rap music.

― Sam: Screwed and Chopped (Molly Jones), Wednesday, 27 September 2006 16:01 (nineteen years ago)

Today's college freshmen were born in 1988. Even if they remember their family getting the Internet in the mid-to-late 90s, they might not remember what it was like without it.

Same goes for those of us born 10 years earlier re personal computers. A few years ago, I was talking with a co-worker born in 1960 who remembers the advent of the PC and friends of his in college being exicted about it, while he was like "whatever, nerds." I mentioned that I'd been taught BASIC in third grade.

― jaymc (jaymc), Wednesday, 27 September 2006 16:11 (nineteen years ago)

I was taught logos in third grade then basic. yay computers!

― Sam: Screwed and Chopped (Molly Jones), Wednesday, 27 September 2006 16:12 (nineteen years ago)

Oh I forgot about Logo! Yeah, we did that first, too.

― jaymc (jaymc), Wednesday, 27 September 2006 16:13 (nineteen years ago)

I can't believe people used basic for "real programs"

― roc u like a § (ex machina), Wednesday, 27 September 2006 16:15 (nineteen years ago)

we had a mac w/prodigy when i was in third grade. that was...1989?

― gbx (skowly), Wednesday, 27 September 2006 16:18 (nineteen years ago)

Yeah, true, I had friends with Prodigy as well. I forget that the Internet and the WWW are separate things, since they've always been basically the same for me. We got AOL in 1995.

― jaymc (jaymc), Wednesday, 27 September 2006 16:21 (nineteen years ago)

There's going to be kids applying to college soon who can't remember a time before the internet.

If only there were some sort of e-mail chain missive to alert me to that fact.

― Pleasant Plains /// (Pleasant Plains ///), Wednesday, 27 September 2006 16:23 (nineteen years ago)

What did teenage boys without older brothers do for porn pre-Internet?

― milo z (mlp), Wednesday, 27 September 2006 16:24 (nineteen years ago)

I had a dog-eared copy of Penthouse Letters that I fished out of the ditch behind my house.

― jaymc (jaymc), Wednesday, 27 September 2006 16:26 (nineteen years ago)

In college I started working on my senior thesis using Veronica and Gopher for research. Shortly after that Mosiac came along although at that point the WWW was not very useful.

― Sam: Screwed and Chopped (Molly Jones), Wednesday, 27 September 2006 16:27 (nineteen years ago)

I still have a jotter somewhere with hand-written bookmarks in it, cos my violaWWW didn't work right.

― stet (stet), Wednesday, 27 September 2006 16:38 (nineteen years ago)

Today's college freshmen don't get Oregon Trail joeks. :(

― Jordan (Jordan), Wednesday, 27 September 2006 16:43 (nineteen years ago)

ibrowse or voyager maybe? 1994? something on the amiga anyway.

― sleep (sleep), Wednesday, 27 September 2006 16:49 (nineteen years ago)

ibrowse or voyager maybe? 1994? something on the amiga anyway.

I just looked at Aminet for the first time in about five years - it's still going.

― James Mitchell (James Mitchell), Wednesday, 27 September 2006 17:03 (nineteen years ago)

lynx

― s1ocki (slutsky), Wednesday, 27 September 2006 17:04 (nineteen years ago)

I mentioned that I'd been taught BASIC in third grade.

I took a BASIC class at the boy's club cos my mom wanted me to "learn computer", put me off computers for years and years. Anyone remember that early 80's saturday morning PSA(might have been an O.G. Readmore) that shows the 'marvels' of computers? Like you could type a grocery list and uh, play hangman or something, and then the character typed the word 'cat' and a cat appeared on the screen and started doing shit, which seemed cool except you probably needed a computer science degree to perform such a task at the time. huh huh?

― tremendoid (tremendoid), Wednesday, 27 September 2006 17:19 (nineteen years ago)

netscape 3 or so. it must have been 96 or 97

― tremendoid (tremendoid), Wednesday, 27 September 2006 17:20 (nineteen years ago)

My First Broswer by Fisher-Price

― how much, latebloomer? (latebloomer), Wednesday, 27 September 2006 17:21 (nineteen years ago)

mosaic on edinburgh university mac classics/LCIIIs running ... hmm, probably system 7 or MacOS8. but it was s l o o o w and shitty, especially on the classics, so i used to use lynx all the time. and save out any images i thought i might like to see :)

― grimly fiendish (grimlord), Wednesday, 27 September 2006 19:24 (nineteen years ago)

I would guess System 7 since Netscape was well established by the time System 8 was released.

― roc u like a § (ex machina), Wednesday, 27 September 2006 19:28 (nineteen years ago)

I just looked at Aminet for the first time in about five years - it's still going.

haha wow

before we had the internets we used to get CDs of aminet content.

― sleep (sleep), Wednesday, 27 September 2006 19:59 (nineteen years ago)

thinking about it, it was system 7; i remember we still had system 6 at the student newspaper, with multifinder :o

― grimly fiendish (grimlord), Wednesday, 27 September 2006 20:58 (nineteen years ago)

heh, thanks, jon: you've set off a big nostalgia trip now. where's me vMac?

― grimly fiendish (grimlord), Wednesday, 27 September 2006 20:59 (nineteen years ago)

Mosaic. Think it was 93. psychology dept. labs, edinburgh university.

― treefell (treefell), Wednesday, 27 September 2006 21:22 (nineteen years ago)

which building was that, treefell? was that the thing on the edge of george square, kinda opposite the wee french department and the gardens?

appleton tower fourth floor ... *brr*.

― grimly fiendish (grimlord), Wednesday, 27 September 2006 21:36 (nineteen years ago)

lynx! yeah baby! i was actually the first person in my family to discover the web. my dad said "it's okay, but i like gopher better."
ha!

― Squirrel_Police (Squirrel_Police), Wednesday, 27 September 2006 21:48 (nineteen years ago)

gopher! i'd forgotten about that. it was also hella slow on ye olde edinburgh classics. so i used NCSA telnet's FTP thingy instead. holy shit, that was time-consuming too.

― grimly fiendish (grimlord), Wednesday, 27 September 2006 21:55 (nineteen years ago)

i was a freshman in fall '94 when the dorm computing site had all these posters about "the world-wide web! now with the NCSA Mosaic!"

we had access to Michigan State's free gopher server when i was a senior in high school. one of the sites had Elf journal entries and other random erotica, i think.

― kingfish prætor (kingfish 2.0), Wednesday, 27 September 2006 22:02 (nineteen years ago)

For a long time I only had email/usenet access to the net, via uucp. There
were email-web gateway sites that would fetch a web page for you via an
email request.
So... I modified lynx to use that. Imagine browsing the net with a one
hour wait for any page fetch. Awesome.
When I finally get actual IP access, I think the only browser I could find
to run on my (esoteric) setup was... "chimera"? Some early, long-abandoned
experiment. That sucked.
I still do 95% of my browsing in lynx.

― shieldforyoureyes (shieldforyoureyes), Wednesday, 27 September 2006 22:12 (nineteen years ago)

aminet, god aye. I used to pore over these tiny printouts on 132-column line printer paper, marking off files I wanted downloaded during precious online time.

What else did people do on their first browsers? I remember just downloading tons of shit files. Wasting hours copying junk to my offline computers. There was no webmail, no blogs, no news and no forums. What did we do?

― stet (stet), Wednesday, 27 September 2006 22:23 (nineteen years ago)

netscape 2.0
14.4 modem, sucky connection, many, many lost dowloads....of text files...
Half-loaded early flash pages...crashed computer with 8 megs of ram...

― The GZeus (The GZeus), Thursday, 28 September 2006 00:25 (nineteen years ago)

I built my first web-page on Mosiac, to go along with my senior thesis. But then when I graduated and got a job doing, wait for it, web design, I started building my first personal site. Since we only had a Mac Classic at home I built this site unseen. I would do the HTML markup at home via a UNIX shell and then look at the page on my work computer that could actually handle a browser the next morning. sweet.

― Sam: Screwed and Chopped (Molly Jones), Thursday, 28 September 2006 00:38 (nineteen years ago)

A few years ago, I was talking with a co-worker born in 1960 who remembers the advent of the PC and friends of his in college being exicted about it, while he was like "whatever, nerds."

Haha, kids at school still had that attitude in the mid-80s, at least where I grew up - only the nerdy maths kids used the few XTs we had, doing some kind of BASIC crap (I guess).

First browser I used was Netscape Mosaic I think - that and Lynx at the same time, as that's what the crappy RMIT labs had. The MACs had Mosaic and the PCs you had to use commandline Solaris and Lynx (and PINE, and ... what was the newsreader? OMG, I cant remember).

― Trayce (trayce), Thursday, 28 September 2006 03:24 (nineteen years ago)

Ah, gopher. I actually created the gopherspace for the UCI English Dept. back in 93/94. Aside from two of the professors nobody knew what it was all about.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Thursday, 28 September 2006 04:05 (nineteen years ago)

Like tremendoid (I think), I started on a Netscape 2 or 3 browser back in '97, when my high school became connected to the Internet. Before, I'd heard of this thing called the Internet but didn't know exactly what it was. It was only in the spring of 1998 that I was able to get onto the Internet at home, which is when I started using IE. And I had no clue this whole online thing had been going for many years prior until I read an article about it sometime in 1999. I just thought it was something that came out when I first heard about it, i.e. circa 1996.

― Phoenix Dancing (krushsister), Thursday, 28 September 2006 04:31 (nineteen years ago)

mosaic on edinburgh university mac classics/LCIIIs running ... hmm, probably system 7 or MacOS8. but it was s l o o o w and shitty, especially on the classics

Ditto here! I preferred Library Fourth Floor to Appleton Tower, though. The classics were black and white, weren't they? It was System 7.5 when I started in '96, I think.

Bloody hell, ten years ago.

I can't believe people used basic for "real programs"

The biggest computer language for commercial software, now, is probably still Basic (well, Visual Basic).

― Forest Pines (ForestPines), Thursday, 28 September 2006 06:23 (nineteen years ago)

To Grimly. The psychology building at edinburgh is the big sandstone building on the north side of George sq that used to heriot's school for girls.
The experimental labs in the basement used by undergraduates all had macs in them. They all had mosaic, gopher, ftp software on them.

Rest of the time I used the big mac lab in the library, but it took a while before mosaic appeared on them.

― treefell (treefell), Thursday, 28 September 2006 08:09 (nineteen years ago)

I remember thinking "Bah, things are going downhill" when half the macs on Appleton Tower Fourth Floor were replaced with PCs. That would have been when the OS 8 macs were installed there, in about 97-98.

― Forest Pines (ForestPines), Thursday, 28 September 2006 08:17 (nineteen years ago)

Streching the definition slightly, I remember using Mode 7 on the BBC 'A' (or it might have been a 'B') to access and write to CEEFAX and ORACLE and download files from PRESTEL.

That seems an awful long time ago, probably because it was.

― aldo_cowpat (aldo_cowpat), Thursday, 28 September 2006 08:34 (nineteen years ago)

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