I remember being underwhelmed by the www before the graphical browser. Gopher I felt was superior. I would read about the graphical web browser in magazines but it required a slip
Connection which may not have existed at this point.
One day I read about a guy in brooklyn who had a website at www.soundtube.com and was selling music on the internet
. I got in touch and went to his office in brooklyn to look at his website in a graphical browser.
I than followed his lead in getting setup.
The logo for the site was a half squeezed tube of toothpaste with the word sound tube on it.
I don’t remember his delivery mechanism. The last time I visited the site it was the same logo but with the subtext that “what could have been”.
I occasionally look for more information about sound tube.
Pretty sure that was my friend Joe. A passionate music fan and early tech adopter who ran one of the first online record stores out of his apartment in Brooklyn. I visited that apartment too! Inviting you over to show you a graphical web browser is exactly the sort of thing he would do.
It was called Sound Wire, not Sound Tube - which is probably why you couldn't find anything... perhaps the name got mixed up with the toothpaste logo in your memory. Memory does that!
Oh wow, I had completely forgotten about slip connections, what a nightmare to try and figure out during the time period. Loved gopher, used it all the time.
Remembering other pseudo packet data connections that could interleave various data streams all at once, I wanted SLIP so bad, but could never figure it out. The paradox of the early internet is that we didn't have the internet at that time to help us out.
Heh, well yes since I was using these products at the time and haven't quite gone senile yet :) Almost nobody seems to remember Cello which was browser du jour for me, for about a jour.
lynx's goal was running in-terminal/cli, not "full web, because web has no images". HTML was also designed to allow unknown tags to be ignored. back in those days I ran mosaic and netscape with image download off by default to speed navigation up.
- Lynx is far older than I thought.
- WorldWideWeb 1.0 understood images, but didn't inline them, which is really what my creaky memory meant when it thought images were there from the beginning.
The second web browser came in 1992. Unlike the first one from 1990 that was written in "Objective C" for _only_ NeXT computers (thanks to Steve Jobs BS), this one was written in C and thus portable to multiple operating systems and multiple architectures. It was distributed with a library, libwww, and at least thirty(!) simple, example programs illustrating how to use the library to write programs to access websites.
IMHO, it puts to shame the bloated, non-portable, overly-complicated, advertising-sponsored crap that is distrubuted today.
One day I read about a guy in brooklyn who had a website at www.soundtube.com and was selling music on the internet . I got in touch and went to his office in brooklyn to look at his website in a graphical browser. I than followed his lead in getting setup.
The logo for the site was a half squeezed tube of toothpaste with the word sound tube on it.
I don’t remember his delivery mechanism. The last time I visited the site it was the same logo but with the subtext that “what could have been”.
I occasionally look for more information about sound tube.
Seems to be lost but I hope it is only missing.