Before Netscape: The forgotten Web browsers of the early 1990s

Browsers of the world, unite! (credit: Photograph by Computer History Museum)

Update: It’s Memorial Day weekend here in the US, and the Ars staff has a long weekend accordingly. 2019 marks 30 years since Tim Berners-Lee worked at CERN and came up with a little idea known as the World Wide Web. As all of us do a little Web browsing this weekend, we thought resurfacing this piece outlining those early browsers might make all of us even appreciate Internet Explorer today. This story originally ran on Oct 11, 2011, and it appears unchanged below.

When Tim Berners-Lee arrived at CERN, Geneva’s celebrated European Particle Physics Laboratory in 1980, the enterprise had hired him to upgrade the control systems for several of the lab’s particle accelerators. But almost immediately, the inventor of the modern webpage noticed a problem: thousands of people were floating in and out of the famous research institute, many of them temporary hires.

“The big challenge for contract programmers was to try to understand the systems, both human and computer, that ran this fantastic playground,” Berners-Lee later wrote. “Much of the crucial information existed only in people’s heads.”