The first three browsers here are the ones I know the best. There are emulators of both WorldWideWeb and LineMode (though the latter seems to be broken). I mention these two regularly in my talks, because they represent an important philosophy of the web itself: progressive enhancement.

CERN first developed WWW with a graphic user interface for NeXT computers. But the web itself is intended to work for everyone, on everything. So they hired Nicola Pellow to develop a second text only LineMode browser.

Pei Wei’s ViolaWWW also represents an important milestone in the history of web design, as the first browser to support external stylesheets (more than just browser ‘user agent’ styles). It even looks pretty similar to the eventual CSS syntax:

(BODY,INPUT,P   FGColor=black
                BGColor=grey70
                BDColor=grey70
                align=left

(H1             FGColor=white
                BGColor=red
                BDColor=black
                align=center

I didn’t realize that Lynx is also one of the early browsers. I installed it on my modern mac just last month.

Lynx now has the distinction of being the oldest continuously-maintained web browser.

That’s pretty cool. But I still haven’t figured out how to load https sites, which is pretty limiting.