Note: This post is the second part in a two-part “com­pre­hen­sive his­tory of com­puting” series, begun here.

These folks offer us “the Vintage Web”, web­sites that look like they haven’t noticed the last ten years. That’s great.

But 1998 is late-on in internet World Wide Web his­tory. What if you wanted to re-experience the truly vin­tage www? Even if we’ve for­gotten it, a cen­tral tenet of HTML is that the dis­play of con­tent should be decided prin­ci­pally by the browser, not by the author. And there was a time, the truly vin­tage time, when that was still regarded as a fea­ture of the web and not a bug. To really see the vin­tage web, you would need a truly vin­tage web browser.

Like, say NCSA Mosaic. You’ll recall that NCSA was the first browser for the World Wide Web to fea­ture a Graphical User Interface (well, the first one not for lawyers). It opened the web to tens of thou­sands of new­comers in 1993, back before the browser wars had even begun. Netscape? Yet to be built on the bones of Mosaic. Internet Explorer? Isn’t “Explorer” the name Microsoft uses for both their file browser and their inter­face shell? Surely they aren’t using that name for a third appli­ca­tion? Using Mosaic was a learning process: you weren’t just learning the inter­face of another browser, you were learning that a pro­gram could fetch hyper­text markup language-encoded text pages from other com­puters on the Internet net­work, and dis­play them on your own com­puter screen.

Well hey, here it is to down­load and install.

A caveat: only a ver­sion updated some­what in 1997 is avail­able for down­load, you can’t get v2.0 from 1993. But there’s plenty of 1993 to be felt here. For instance, the down­load is avail­able as a 3MB file, or as smaller “DISKS”. It will install by default to C:\mosaic\; an entirely sen­sible place. When you try to con­nect to a site, it will first advise you that it is “looking up Domain Name Server” (true enough, so it is). The top item in the drop-down selec­tion box of rec­om­mended Web sites is “Gopher Servers”, fol­lowed by “Home Pages”. “World Wide Web Info” is 5^th down. And this line in the user’s manual I downloaded:

“For full func­tion­ality, you need access to the Internet. If you do not have access, see Appendix D, “Access Providers” for information.”

Sadly, the one thing it won’t do is load a remote web page for me. I’m not sure why not, and I couldn’t find an active Mosaic user’s forum to help me with my tech­nical issue.

It will load local web pages. Here’s what one of those looks like, albeit with with a mod­ern­ized “bgcolor” tag set:

But I remember the way the web first looked through that grey window. Square 16bit beveled icons, black serif text on a grey back­ground, and the promise of uni­versal access to the all the geo­graph­i­cally dis­persed infor­ma­tion in the world.

(Here’s a gen­uine Mosaic screen cap that has sur­vived from almost that far back. Novell’s ser­vice and sup­port web site, circa early 1995, held on to by Nathan Zeldes.)