Indeed the first of them, the They were human-assembled catalogs of useful web links. Now, only bits and pieces of them remain (such as CompuServe forums), and for the most part, they're really only interesting to digital archaeologists.įortunately for early users, the first web designers set to work creating search engines. The Web quickly knocked out those earlier Internet search programs as well as online services like Prodigy, CompuServe, and GEnie. After all, we say, "We Google for information," not "We webbed for the answer."
Yes, we use the Web for everything, but it's the search engines that make it useful. WAIS, like Archie, Veronica, and Gopher, exist now only as Internet historical trivia. By 1993, just as Gopher reached its maturity, I thought the first real Internet search engine, WAIS (Wide Area Information System), was going to be more important than the Web! I was putting the cart before the horse. While Gopher was being built in 1991, the Web was also being created. With Gopher, you could simply search and let the server worry about finding which site had the information you wanted. With Archie, you really had to have a clue that a file was somewhere on a given site. Archie was quickly followed by Veronica, a service from the University of Nevada System Computing Services that tried to provide Archie-style searches for plain text files.Īn even bigger advance was Gopher, which made it possible to search through online databases and text files. Archie was painful to use, but compared with what we had been dealing with, it was wonderful. The first major search advance was Archie, which beginning in 1990 made it possible to search through a site's file directories. Archie, Veronica, and other early search engines When I started using it, we had to go through FTP file directories screen by screen and hope that the file we wanted was in there somewhere. It wasn't until the late 1980s that the Internet became searchable. Today, you can get to ProQuest and OCLC over the Internet, but you'll find yourself blocked from getting very deep into them without permission.Īs for the pre-Web Internet itself, at first it didn't have search tools. The Matrix, as defined by Carl Malamud, is the superset of all interconnected networks. These systems, which are still around, are part of what's called the Matrix-and, no, I don't mean the movies. But when all you have is stone knives and bear skins, you make do.īefore I ever turned my hand to writing for a living, I put myself through graduate school by doing research on the very first online database systems: NASA RECON Dialog, now ProQuest, and OCLC.
Note: Xencode provides a slightly older version of Chrome but you download Chrome 2 (portable) here.When I started using the Internet in the 1970s, it didn't look anything like it does today, and our search tools were primitive.
If you were using virtual machines with VMWare or Microsoft Virtual PC just for testing browser compatibility, it may be a good idea to switch to Xenocode browser as they are fast and you don’t have to wait for the virtual machine to boot up. Xenocode WebApps also let you run multiple application versions side-by-side on any version of Windows. Xenocode provides ready-to-use packages for Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Opera, Internet Explorer 6-8 and Firefox 2-3. Simply download an executable from the Xenocode website and double-click to run that web browser. Now if you said yes to any of the above questions, all you need is Xenocode - it’s an awesome platform that helps you run any web browser on your computer without installation. How can you access these websites without installing B? You love Browser A but some of your favorite websites only open in Browser B.
How do you then try IE 8 without uninstalling IE 7?į. You have heard lot of good things about Internet Explorer 8 but since that browser is still in beta, you don’t want to override your existing installation of IE 7.
You don’t have permissions to install new software on the office computer? How do you then use Safari or Google Chrome instead of Internet Explorer?Į. Test the new design of your website in all popular browsers without having to rely on an online service like Browser Shots?ĭ. Simultaneously run multiple versions of Internet Explorer or Firefox on the same computer side-by-side without any hacks.Ĭ.
Carry a portable version of your favorite web browser on the USB drive? It could be Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, Apple Safari or even Opera.ī.