zlacker

I remember being underwhelmed by the www before the graphical browser. Gopher I felt was superior. I would read about the graphical web browser in magazines but it required a slip Connection which may not have existed at this point.

One day I read about a guy in brooklyn who had a website at www.soundtube.com and was selling music on the internet . I got in touch and went to his office in brooklyn to look at his website in a graphical browser. I than followed his lead in getting setup.

The logo for the site was a half squeezed tube of toothpaste with the word sound tube on it.

I don’t remember his delivery mechanism. The last time I visited the site it was the same logo but with the subtext that “what could have been”.

I occasionally look for more information about sound tube.

Seems to be lost but I hope it is only missing.

>>detour+(OP)
Every once in a while I fire up Lynx for various reasons.

I’ll try to go to news.ycombinator.com and Lynx tries to make an NNTP connection and I don’t blame it.

>>detour+(OP)
Someone else told me they thought lynx came first. Is that really true? I thought images were there from the beginning.

>>detour+(OP)
Oh wow, I had completely forgotten about slip connections, what a nightmare to try and figure out during the time period. Loved gopher, used it all the time.

>>jbaber+te
Lynx wasn't first:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb

>>detour+(OP)
Pretty sure that was my friend Joe. A passionate music fan and early tech adopter who ran one of the first online record stores out of his apartment in Brooklyn. I visited that apartment too! Inviting you over to show you a graphical web browser is exactly the sort of thing he would do.

It was called Sound Wire, not Sound Tube - which is probably why you couldn't find anything... perhaps the name got mixed up with the toothpaste logo in your memory. Memory does that!

https://web.archive.org/web/19961122055147/http://soundwire....

https://www.wired.com/1995/05/net-surf-44/

p.s. I messaged him - maybe he'll show up in the thread

>>jbaber+te
Lynx wasn't first, but images weren't there from the beginning either. At least, not inline images.

>>robter+Df
Not first but the initial release was 2 years before Netscape was founded, and 1 year before Mosaic. It was definitely an early browser.

I first used lynx years later when I was getting into Linux in the late 90s, and I found that part surprising at the time.

>>dang+4k
animated toothpasted logo

http://web.archive.org/web/19980116081704/http://soundwire.c...

>>fellow+vf
Remembering other pseudo packet data connections that could interleave various data streams all at once, I wanted SLIP so bad, but could never figure it out. The paradox of the early internet is that we didn't have the internet at that time to help us out.

>>detour+(OP)
gopher client ux was really nice, but building the "gopherapps" was not fun at all.

>>jbaber+te
lynx's goal was running in-terminal/cli, not "full web, because web has no images". HTML was also designed to allow unknown tags to be ignored. back in those days I ran mosaic and netscape with image download off by default to speed navigation up.

>>jbaber+te
The second web browser came in 1992. Unlike the first one from 1990 that was written in "Objective C" for _only_ NeXT computers (thanks to Steve Jobs BS), this one was written in C and thus portable to multiple operating systems and multiple architectures. It was distributed with a library, libwww, and at least thirty(!) simple, example programs illustrating how to use the library to write programs to access websites.

IMHO, it puts to shame the bloated, non-portable, overly-complicated, advertising-sponsored crap that is distrubuted today.

https://www.w3.org/Library/Distribution/w3c-libwww-5.4.2.tgz

30 small example programs written in C plus documentation for every one. Good luck finding something like that today.

>>dang+4k
Awesome, missing not lost yes it was soundwire. Joe must have been the one that told how to register a domain name.

>>latchk+ot
Can you expand what you mean by gopherapps?

>>1vuio0+Hv
https://www.w3.org/History.html

Line mode still works great. Text-only.

>>dboreh+Wo
That’s right. Tim Berbers-Lee mentions that here https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb.html

>>warpec+SM1
The content served up from the server. I ran a site for a bit there for my college, in the early 90’s on my a/ux server.

>>banana+j82
Heh, well yes since I was using these products at the time and haven't quite gone senile yet :) Almost nobody seems to remember Cello which was browser du jour for me, for about a jour.

>>bane+3t
At least most computers had a coffee cup holder built in to get through figuring it out.

>>jbaber+te
Okay:

- Lynx is far older than I thought. - WorldWideWeb 1.0 understood images, but didn't inline them, which is really what my creaky memory meant when it thought images were there from the beginning.