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Comment by jbaber | Hacker News Reader

Someone else told me they thought lynx came first. Is that really true? I thought images were there from the beginning.

Lynx wasn't first, but images weren't there from the beginning either. At least, not inline images.

That’s right. Tim Berbers-Lee mentions that here https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb.html

Heh, well yes since I was using these products at the time and haven't quite gone senile yet :) Almost nobody seems to remember Cello which was browser du jour for me, for about a jour.

lynx's goal was running in-terminal/cli, not "full web, because web has no images". HTML was also designed to allow unknown tags to be ignored. back in those days I ran mosaic and netscape with image download off by default to speed navigation up.

Lynx wasn't first:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb

Not first but the initial release was 2 years before Netscape was founded, and 1 year before Mosaic. It was definitely an early browser.

I first used lynx years later when I was getting into Linux in the late 90s, and I found that part surprising at the time.

Okay:

- Lynx is far older than I thought. - WorldWideWeb 1.0 understood images, but didn't inline them, which is really what my creaky memory meant when it thought images were there from the beginning.

The second web browser came in 1992. Unlike the first one from 1990 that was written in "Objective C" for _only_ NeXT computers (thanks to Steve Jobs BS), this one was written in C and thus portable to multiple operating systems and multiple architectures. It was distributed with a library, libwww, and at least thirty(!) simple, example programs illustrating how to use the library to write programs to access websites.

IMHO, it puts to shame the bloated, non-portable, overly-complicated, advertising-sponsored crap that is distrubuted today.

https://www.w3.org/Library/Distribution/w3c-libwww-5.4.2.tgz

30 small example programs written in C plus documentation for every one. Good luck finding something like that today.

https://www.w3.org/History.html

Line mode still works great. Text-only.

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