MacWWW, also known as Samba, is an early minimalist

web browser A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used on ...

from 1992 meant to run on

Macintosh The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and ...

computers. It was the first web browser for the

classic Mac OS Mac OS (originally System Software; retronym: Classic Mac OS) is the series of operating systems developed for the Macintosh family of personal computers by Apple Computer from 1984 to 2001, starting with System 1 and ending with Mac OS 9. The ...

platform, and the first for any non-

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ot ...

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...

. MacWWW tries to emulate the design of

WorldWideWeb WorldWideWeb (later renamed Nexus to avoid confusion between the software and the World Wide Web) is the first web browser and web page editor. It was discontinued in 1994. It was the first WYSIWYG HTML editor. The source code was released in ...

. Unlike modern browsers it opens each link in a new window only after a double-click. It was a commercial product from

CERN The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN (; ; ), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in a northwestern suburb of Gene ...

and cost 50

European Currency Unit The European Currency Unit (, ; , ECU, or XEU) was a unit of account used by the European Economic Community and composed of a basket of member country currencies. The ECU came in to operation on 13 March 1979 and was assigned the ISO 421 ...

s The browser is no longer available from its original ftp location, but can still be downloaded from mirrors.The original ftp location at ftp://info.cern.ch/pub/www/bin/mac/ is no longer available.

History

It was written at

Robert Cailliau Robert Cailliau (, born 26 January 1947) is a Belgian informatics engineer, computer scientist and author who proposed the first (pre-www) hypertext system for CERN in 1987 and collaborated with Tim Berners-Lee on the World Wide Web (jointly wi ...

and later

Nicola Pellow Nicola Pellow is an English mathematician and information scientist who was one of the nineteen members of the ''WWW Project'' at CERN working with Tim Berners-Lee. She joined the project in November 1990, while an undergraduate maths student en ...

helped with the development. Pellow worked originally on the Line Mode Browser and both browsers shared some parts of the

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the wo ...

after her switching. Pre-alpha version were available, but this version worked only on "coliur icmac but not on big black and white ones it seems." Version 1.00 was released on 12 May 1993 with the commentary: "We know there is much to be improved, but it works well on system 7 and system 6.0.5".

Features

The MacWWW which was a minimalist browser displayed only text, no images nor lists. *Implemented in

THINK C Think C (stylized as THINK C; formerly Lightspeed C) is an extension of the C programming language for the classic Mac OS developed by Think Technologies, released first in mid-1986. THINK was founded by Andrew Singer, Frank Sinton & Mel Conway. ...

using its human interface objects. *Uses much code in common with the Line Mode browser. This code later became

libwww Libwww was an early World Wide Web software library providing core functions for browsers, implementing HTML, HTTP, and other technologies. Tim Berners-Lee, at CERN, released libwww (then also called the "Common Library") in late 1992, comprising ...

. * bookmarks *For the hypertext object, the THINK C text object was modified to allow multifont capability, and to allow anchors to be encoded in the styles. According to critics, within a year the browser became obsolete because

Mosaic A mosaic is a pattern or image made of small regular or irregular pieces of colored stone, glass or ceramic, held in place by plaster/mortar, and covering a surface. Mosaics are often used as floor and wall decoration, and were particularly pop ...

and

MacWeb MacWeb is an early, now discontinued classic Mac OS-only web browser for 68k and PowerPC Apple Macintosh computers, developed by TradeWave (formerly EINet) between 1994 and 1996. MacWeb's major attraction was its ability to run well on low-end ...

had much more features, for example MacWWW showed no loading status. Without the mouse and MacOS support MacWWW would be a

text-mode browser A text-based web browser is a web browser that renders only the text of web pages, and ignores most graphic content. Under small bandwidth connections, usually, they render pages faster than graphical web browsers due to lowered bandwidth demands ...

Annotations

References

External links

MacWWW description and screenshot

evolt.org
– This browser archive has version 1.03 for download {{DEFAULTSORT:Macwww Classic Mac OS-only web browsers 1992 software Discontinued web browsers

History

Features

See also

Annotations

References

External links