WorldWideWeb, as it was.

[Dartz]

No scripts. No ads. No tracking. No colour.

CERN has recreated the world's first web browser as a browser app.

.... there's no way this thing will ever take off.

[classicdrogn]

I'unno. I squeed and hit the link immediately, myself. Then again, I have 'fox set to only use the fonts and colors I specify, and tend to hit CMD-v-y-n to turn CSS off a lot even so, to further simplify web pages. I'm probably an edge case.

[Black Aeronaut]

In my experience, "simplifying" webpages tends to break them because they're not really designed to operate without things like cascading style sheets. I'll either get an eye-straining wall of text or nothing at all. I mean, look at the image Dartz posted. The window on the right? That's from the Fenspace forum.

The original text editors were limited to 80 columns for a reason; that being that it's far easier on the eyes than the alternative.

[classicdrogn]

The original text editors were limited to 80 columns because that was how many would fit on a 640 pixel wide display with letters seven pixels wide plus one more for a space between them, not any ideals of human interface design. I won't dispute that some pages are so poorly designed they're better with CSS than without (and it is a case of poor design, how do you think visually impaired people using text-to-speech to navigate experience it?) but if the reason is that the lines are uncomfortably long for the width all you have to do is make the window narrower or turn up the zoom/font size.

The rightmost window in Dartz's image has some bits running together in the longer posts, but from what I can see of it that's probably due to some kind of wonky conversion in the retro-rendering engine not recognizing line breaks properly, since gaps in text without a specific tag are ignored in the basic HTML it's meant to showcase. I still have <p> and <br> as ingrained reflexive keyboard combinations from manually inserting them in prose text files back in the day...

[Dartz]

I've done the handcode HTML thing. I'd actually gotten fairly decent at it for a while.

Still, it was an amusing throwback to try. I didn't even have diallup until 2005 so the early internet isn't something I remember.

[Bob Schroeck]

I remember trying to access the web in the late 90s using a text-only browser on a dial-up command line account on a very early IPS in my area, and trying again a few years later with a Windows app called "Slipknot" that I never did get working right.

[Epsilon]

The original text editors were limited to 80 columns because that was how many would fit on a 640 pixel wide display with letters seven pixels wide plus one more for a space between them, not any ideals of human interface design. 

...and this is also why my early fanfics look terrible in modern browsers because I had to put hard returns at the end of every line so they would be readable and these days they either end up with bizarre spaces or text scrolling to infinity.

For most of my work, I can't be bothered to reformat it.

[Bob Schroeck]

In a related story, Man discovers 30 year old Apple computer still in working order.

[Black Aeronaut]

In a related story, Man discovers 30 year old Apple computer still in working order.

Hah!  Someday, hopefully, I'll get to have kids.  And then, once they're old enough to understand the technology of the present day, I'll fucking mess with their heads by whipping out an Apple IIe.

"This is what *I* played games on when I was your age...."

"Dad.... You're ANCIENT!"

"HAH!  Are you kidding me?  I'm not one of the Great Old Ones.  You want that, go knock on Linus Torvald's door, or Steve Wozniak's.  In their early days, the IBM 1401 was all the rage and computers still used punch cards to load programs.  Back then, if you were REALLY rolling in it, then MAYBE you could afford a magnetic tape drive..."

[Bob Schroeck]

Heh. Some of my assignments in my first programming class at college were for punch cards. Not all, but yeah.

[Dartz]

'Oldest' program I ever used in work was a mid-80's fork of an program that had been 'open source' before that was a term, had a working group instead and ran faster on an old Pentium four than a Core2Duo so it was highly single-threaded.

It took punch-cards as an input too. In the mid-2000's. Which translated to a meticulously organised and spaced notepad file instead,

The Alternate Transients Program was a mighty thing.,

[robkelk]

Ever watch The Starlost? (If so, sorry...) Remember the text-only computers that had the characters appear so slowy that you could see them appear?

Those were real terminals, and that was the actual speed they worked at - 110 baud. (Not 110k - 110,000, twice as fast as the fastest dialup before people started using broadband everywhere - 110.) They were nowhere near powerful enough to run the CERN browser, which didn't exist at the time anyway.

And I know this because I had the opportunity to use a terminal exactly like them, on the fastest dialup available at the time. (That network no longer exists.) Granted, the terminal that I got to use had a switch that would allow use at 300 baud - so fast that the words popped up as words, not one letter after the other.

Later, I got to use paper tape...

[Star Ranger4]

Oh, I can top that. ... a TELETYPE terminal that used 110/300. And could read and punch paper tape