inessential by Brent Simmons

Big list o’ browsers

Noticed in my referers: Darrel E. Knutson’s list of Macintosh Web Browsers.

Lots of them I’d never heard of, but some of them—NCSA Mosaic, MacWeb, CyberDog, Spyglass—I remember using.

NCSA Mosaic, even though it lacked the features of Netscape 1.0, was probably my favorite.

I was never that big a fan of OpenDoc, or else I might have liked CyberDog more.

But the first web browser I ever used was Lynx. My Internet connection was by dialing into Eskimo, a local ISP. (I used ZTerm to dial in. I think.) You got a UNIX shell account, so you could run lynx and pine and whatever.

I remember, at the time (1994), debating with people which would be bigger: Gopher or the World Wide Web. I thought it would be the web. But I did like Gopher quite a bit.

And I still like Lynx. I even use it sometimes.