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.
Shortly after I discovered the World Wide Web, I began to associate the wonders of the Internet with the simplicity of the browser. By just clicking a hyperlink, I could enjoy the art treasures of the Louvre; if I followed another link, I could peruse a fan site for The Brady Bunch.[1] 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, as shown in Figure 2.
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 tasks found on remote servers. The difference here was that the clients were browsers and the servers dished up web pages.
The only revolutionary thing was that, unlike previous client-server client applications, browsers were easy for anyone to use and soon gained mass acceptance. The Internet's audience shifted from physicists and computer programmers to the public. Unfortunately, the general public didn't understand client-server technology, so the dependency on browsers spread further. They didn't understand that there were other 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 to do the same. I could write my own browser if I desired, or I could write automated agents (webbots, spiders, and screen scrapers) to solve problems that browsers couldn't.