Recreating the First Web Browser at CERN | U.S. Mission to International Organizations in Geneva

The US Mission to the UN in Geneva came by to visit us during our hackweek at CERN.

“Our hope is that over the next few days we are going to recreate the experience of what it would be like using that browser, but doing it in a way that anyone using a modern web browser can experience,” explains team member Jeremy Keith. The aim is to “give people the feeling of what it would have been like, in terms of how it looked, how it felt, the fonts, the rendering, the windows, how you navigated from link to link.”

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Paul

This is an awesome project:

In December 1990, an application called WorldWideWeb was developed on a NeXT machine at The European Organization for Nuclear Research (known as CERN) just outside of Geneva. This program – WorldWideWeb — is the antecedent of most of what we consider or know of as “the web” today.

In February 2019, in celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the development of WorldWideWeb, a group of developers and designers convened at CERN to rebuild the original browser within a contemporary browser, allowing users around the world to experience the origins of this transformative technology.

CERN 2019 WorldWideWeb Rebuild

My first browser was probably one of the early Netscape browsers (I loved those browsers), although it’s possible I may have started off with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer given how prevalent it was in those early days.

You can read more about the project that led to this browser’s recreation, here: Developers revive first Web browser at week-long hackathon | CERN

The WorldWideWeb browser has a certain appeal to it, although I’m not rushing to replace Firefox with this browser just yet. 😜

Via Jeremy Keith over at Adactio

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# Posted by Paul on Sunday, February 17th, 2019 at 6:24am