Mac OS X: Home of the Web
Tuesday, February 12th, 2008Lost in the mists of time and in the obscurity of a niche platform, many do not realise that the Web was invented on a NeXT machine running NEXTSTEP (whichever form of capitalisation was prevalent at the time). And that NEXTSTEP is the precursor to Mac OS X. The MAKE blog has some photos of the NeXT machine that hosted the world’s first website.
The first browser, WorldWideWeb, was written in the precursor to Cocoa, the tools used to create most of the great, new, software on the Mac, including Differencia.
As I mentioned in “Web 0.9 beta“, Tim Berners-Lee always envisaged the web to be read/write, presaging Web 2.0, as can be seen in this screen-shot.
What is fascinating is that if you read the text in the about box, you can see that Berners-Lee already had the concept of helper applications. In this case, specifically for a NNTP news-reader, presaging RSS links on pages being opened by a third party news reader application such as NetNewsWire or NewsFire.
I used to be surprised that Apple did not make more of its Web heritage, but I guess you cannot really say much about how great your current products are, based on a third party product developed 17 years ago for a platform created by a company that you paid $400m to do a reverse take over of yourself.
