First browser?

You n00b. Those of us who were *really* in at the start used NCSA Mosaic. Before that, text terminals and BBSes. I still remember being disappointed when the Harry Fox agency took down all the MP3s off the FTP mirror servers, because those were giving us background music during our late-night software sessions. Back when online MP3 sharing truly was sharing amongst a tiny group of people who knew about it, not an opportunity for ripping off. Those were the days.

And dial-up rates of 4-5KB/s slow? We always knew when the US had woken up, because transfer rates suddenly dropped to about 10 bytes/s at around midday, and didn't recover until about midnight when most Americans had gone home. If you wanted a serious MUDding session, that pretty much fixed what your waking hours were going to be.

(Cue the inevitable Monty Python Yorkshiremen gags. "I used two tin cans, a bit of string and an acoustic coupler." "I used a telegraph, and I had to tap in serial transmissions with a hand key." Etc...)

A fitting addition to Mark Turd's group

At last someone who actually knows about software joining The PHUX producer.

Not to forget...

Marc Adreessen wrote Mosaic, before being lured away from NCSA to start Netscape.

IE was originally a Mosaic derivative and up to and including IE 6 still included some Mosaic code (look for the NCSA credits).

And that's why Microsoft lovers' anti open source attitude is so ridiculous!

Re: First browser?

Marc Andreessen was one of the authors of Mosaic, not just Netscape.

mosaic

Just for kicks and giggles, I tried to run Mosaic again, but of course it didn't work... would have been a laugh though... Ah "the good ole days" I remember how great gopher search was,...