My introduction to the World Wide Web was also the beginning of my relationship with the browser. The first browser I used was Mosaic, pioneered by Eric Bina and Marc Andreessen. Andreessen later co-founded Netscape and Loudcloud.
Shortly after I discovered the World Wide Web in 1995, I began to associate the wonders of the Internet with the simplicity of the browser. The browser was more than a software application that facilitated use of the World Wide Web: it was the World Wide Web. It was the new television! And just as television tamed distant video signals with simple channel and volume knobs, browsers demystified the complexities of the Internet with hyperlinks, bookmarks, and back buttons.
My big moment of discovery came when I learned that I didn’t need a browser to view web pages. I realized that Telnet, a program used since the early ’80s to communicate with networked computers, could also download web pages. I discovered there was no magic behind the web browser. Downloading web pages was really no different from the existing methods for requesting information from networked computers.
Suddenly, the World Wide Web was something I could understand without a browser. It was a familiar client-server architecture where simple clients worked on files found on remote servers. The difference here was that the clients were browsers and the servers sent web pages for the browsers to render.
The only revolutionary thing about browsers was that, unlike Telnet, they were easy for anyone to use. Ease of use and overexpanding content meant that browsers soon gained mass acceptance. The browser caused the Internet’s audience to shift from physicists and computer programmers to the general public, who were unaware of how computer networks worked. Unfortunately, the average Joe didn’t understand the simplicity of client-server protocols, so the dependency on browsers spread further. They didn’t understand that there were other—and potentially more interesting—ways to use the World Wide Web.
As a programmer, I realized that if I could use Telnet to download web pages, I could also write programs that did the same. I could write my own browser if I wanted to! Or, I could write automated agents (webbots, spiders, and screen scrapers) to solve problems that browsers couldn’t.