MacWWW, also known as Samba, is an early minimalist web browser

Web browser

A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...

 from 1992 meant to run on Macintosh

Macintosh

The Macintosh , or Mac, is a series of several lines of personal computers designed, developed, and marketed by Apple Inc. The first Macintosh was introduced by Apple's then-chairman Steve Jobs on January 24, 1984; it was the first commercially successful personal computer to feature a mouse and a...

 computers. It was the first web browser for the Mac OS

Mac OS

Mac OS is a series of graphical user interface-based operating systems developed by Apple Inc. for their Macintosh line of computer systems. The Macintosh user experience is credited with popularizing the graphical user interface...

 platform, and the first for any non-Unix

Unix

Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...

 operating system

Operating system

An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...

. MacWWW tries to emulate the design of WorldWideWeb

WorldWideWeb

WorldWideWeb, later renamed to Nexus to avoid confusion between the software and the World Wide Web, was the first web browser and editor. When it was written, WorldWideWeb was the only way to view the Web....

. Unlike modern browsers it opens each link in a new window only after a double-click. It was a commercial product from CERN

CERN

The European Organization for Nuclear Research , known as CERN , is an international organization whose purpose is to operate the world's largest particle physics laboratory, which is situated in the northwest suburbs of Geneva on the Franco–Swiss border...

 and cost 50 European Currency Unit

European Currency Unit

The European Currency Unit was a basket of the currencies of the European Community member states, used as the unit of account of the European Community before being replaced by the euro on 1 January 1999, at parity. The ECU itself replaced the European Unit of Account, also at parity, on 13...

s

The browser is no longer available from its original ftp location, but can still be downloaded from mirrors.The original ftp location at ftp://info.cern.ch/pub/www/bin/mac/ is no longer available.

History

It was written at CERN

CERN

The European Organization for Nuclear Research , known as CERN , is an international organization whose purpose is to operate the world's largest particle physics laboratory, which is situated in the northwest suburbs of Geneva on the Franco–Swiss border...

 by Robert Cailliau

Robert Cailliau

Robert Cailliau , born 26 January 1947, is a Belgian informatics engineer and computer scientist who, together with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, developed the World Wide Web.-Biography:...

 and later Nicola Pellow

Nicola Pellow

Nicola Pellow was a member of the WWW Project at CERN, working with Tim Berners-Lee. She joined the project in November 1990, while an undergraduate maths student at Leicester Polytechnic ....

 helped with the development. Pellow worked original on the Line Mode Browser and both browsers shared some parts of the source code

Source code

In computer science, source code is text written using the format and syntax of the programming language that it is being written in. Such a language is specially designed to facilitate the work of computer programmers, who specify the actions to be performed by a computer mostly by writing source...

 after her switching.
Pre-alpha version were available, but this version worked only on "coliur mac but not on big black and white ones it seems."

Version 1.00 was released on 12 May 1993 with the commentary: "We know there is much to be improved, but it works well on system 7 and system 6.0.5".

Features

The MacWWW which was a minimalist browser displayed only text, no images nor lists.

• Implemented in THINK C
  THINK C
  THINK C was an extension of ANSI C for Mac OS developed by THINK Technologies; although named Lightspeed C in the original mid-1986 release, it was later renamed THINK C. THINK Technologies was later acquired by Symantec Corporation and the product continued to be developed by the original author,...
  
   using its human interface objects.
• Uses much code in common with the Line Mode browser. This code later became libwww
  Libwww
  libwww is a highly-modular client-side web API for Unix and Windows, and is also the name of the reference implementation of this API....
  
  .
• bookmarks
• For the hypertext object, the THINK C text object was modified to allow multifont capability, and to allow anchors to be encoded in the styles.

It was criticized that within a year the browser became obsolete because Mosaic

Mosaic (web browser)

Mosaic is the web browser credited with popularizing the World Wide Web. It was also a client for earlier protocols such as FTP, NNTP, and gopher. Its clean, easily understood user interface, reliability, Windows port and simple installation all contributed to making it the application that opened...

 and MacWeb

MacWeb

MacWeb was an early Mac OS-only web browser for 68k and PowerPC Apple Macintosh computers, developed by TradeWave between 1994 and 1996....

 were much more feature richness., for example that there is no loading status. Without the mouse and MacOS support MacWWW would be a text-mode browser.

External links

• MacWWW description and screenshot
• evolt.org - This browser archive has version 1.03 for download