Ask HN: Please help track down lost ancient web browsers

10 points

3 years ago

Over the past year, I've been tracking down and archiving the earliest versions of the earliest web browsers.[0] I've scoured the web, the Internet Archive, what FTP servers there still are, and been in touch with some of the original developers as well as the Web History group at W3C. I've archived many of the ancient browsers, but some important versions are still missing, and in some cases, so are entire browsers.

Now I've hit a wall, and I need help to find the missing browsers and missing versions before they're lost to the sands of time.

Do you have, or know of a source for, any of the following?

Missing entirely ------------------

* Tom Fine's Perl browser (known as FineWWW, distributed as w3browser-0.1.shar)

* Jim Whitescarver's curses browser

* Dan Connolly's Tcl browser

* David Rashty's VMS browser

Missing versions ------------------

* CERN's WWWLineMode 0.9/earlier and versions between 0.11a (Aug '91) and 2.11 (Sep '93)

* XMosaic earlier than 1.0, especially 0.5 the first public release

* MacWWW/Samba any version earlier than 1.03 (the Alpha, 1.00, and 1.02 were all circulated at some point)

* Lynx with WWW earlier than 2.1.1 (Lynx gained WWW capability in version 2.0 Alpha)

* ViolaWWW from before July 1992

* TkWWW earlier than version 0.8

3 comments