The First Browser – WorldWideWeb (Nexus)

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web or WWW as we know it today in 1989, deploying a working system by 1990. Berners-Lee was the first to invent the browser, and it was simplycalled WorldWideWeb since it was the only way to see the Web. Tim later rechristened this browser ‘Nexus’, to distinguish between the program and the abstract information space “www”which was typed in the Uniform Resource Locator (URL).

WorldWideWeb was written in Objective-C and it would let usersbrowse “http:”, “news:”, “ftp:” and local “file:” spaces.Tim wrote the program for this browser on a NeXT computer.The browser was the best at the time, since it was the only one. If you look at the browser closely, you will see that buttons and features in the browser look similar in Internet Explorer. Here’s a
brief low- down on the functionality of the browser.


The WorldWideWeb (Nexus) BrowserThe menu bar looked like a primitive version of the WindowS Desktop, and clicking on it would provide a list of options similar to the Windows of today. The Navigate menu had things such as “Back”, “Next” and “Previous”, and the last two were useful when you followed a link from a list of links—they meant “go back a step and then take the next link from the same page.”

The “Link” menu had options such as “Mark all” which would remember the URL of the current page where you were. “Markselection” would make a link target for the selected text, give it an ID, and remember the URL of that fragment. “Link to Marked”would make a link from the current selection to whatever URL you had last marked. So making a link involved browsing to somewhere interesting, hitting [Command] + [M], going to the document you were writing and selecting some text, and then hitting[Command] + [L]. “Link to new” would create a new window and prompt for a URL, and then make a link from the selection to thenew document.You never saw the URLs—you could of coursealways find documents by following the link to them.

Using the “Style” menu, you could load a style sheet to definehow you wanted your documents (Web pages) rendered. You could also set the paragraph style to an HTML element’s style such as heading1, heading 2, list element, etc., and then this implied anHTML structure in which the document was written back.

At that time, the “X” close box was unique to NeXT, and according to Tim, Windows copied it. The broken X in the “Tim’s homepage” window means that the document was in the process of being edited and was unsaved.