The first graphical web browser was written by a bunch of students at Helsinki University of Technology. How did it emerge and why was it forgotten?

The most noteworthy first-generation web browser was NCSA Mosaic. It skyrocketed the early web and was the grandfather of Netscape, a browser that came to dominated the market in the 90’s. Both Mosaic and Netscape helped popularize the web, but they weren’t first. They have a curious precursor called Erwise.

Erwise was the first graphical web browser1. It was released in April 1992, a whole 9 months before the first public version of Mosaic.

Nordic internet Growth

The Nordic countries were early in building networking systems. Around 1985 a joint program between Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden set out to build a joint data communications network for research and education2.

The project was successful. The Finnish University and Research Network (FUNET) was connected to the Internet in 1988 and usage was growing rapidly3. Tim Berners-Lee had made his proposal for the World Wide Web a year later4.

Back in early 1991 Ari Lemmke, an early Web enthusiast, was researching hypermedia software. He was tutoring thesis work at Helsinki University of Technology, and decided to submit a project for “developing a graphical web browser” as one of possible topics for a thesis project5.

He also organized for a visit for Robert Cailliau and Tim Berners-Lee to the university in conjunction with the NORDUnet Engineering Task Force meeting2 in 1992. Hypermedia, however, was still in its early stages. According to Lemmke, only 21 people attended the lecture by Berners-Lee 5.

During that time, Tim Berners-Lee was developing the underlying protocols, but an easy-to-use web browser was still missing. In his book6 he writes:

“We were so busy trying to keep the Web going that there was no way we could develop browsers ourselves, so we energetically suggested to everyone everywhere that the creation of browsers would make useful projects for software students at universities.”

His suggestions did bear fruit. Four students formed a group and Lemmke named the project “OTH-Erwise” as a play on the word otherwise. OTH is short for Finnish “ohjelmatyöryhmä”, roughly “programming assignment group” 7,8,5.

The students developed the browser during late 1991 and early 19929,10. It was written in C, targeting UNIX and the X Window system. The project used Motif as the underlying GUI toolkit; a common choice at the time, since it offered some portability.

Erwise bore some resemblance to the browsers of today, although there was no URL bar. It rendered brutally simple HTML, and did not support images (as the IMG tag had not yet been proposed). Although not complete, it offered a mouse-driven interface for the Web; a respectable upgrade in terms of usability for the general public.

Screenshot of Erwise
Screenshot of Erwise, courtesy of Storkamp.

Lack of commercial financing

Unfortunately the timing was rough. The Finnish economy was not suitable for funding the development. The group knew that the world wide web had lots of opportunities, but ultimately Lemmke thought that “Erwise could not have achieved commercialization”. According to him, “Nobody could afford to work for free”5. Soon after graduating, the developers parted their ways and development halted11,12. Erwise never saw widespread use.

Mosaic on the other hand was received with great enthusiasm and saw rapid adoption. Its co-author, Marc Andresseen, left NCSA in 1993 to found Mosaic Communications Corporation which would set to develop the Netscape web browser.

It’s safe to say that the World Wide Web resonated with the wider public. According to networking pioneer Peter Villemoes, networking did not attract media in the same way WWW did2:

“until the World Wide Web came with the real browser. Then we could read in the newspapers about what we had been doing for years!”

The media attention certainly had an effect on the growth. To give some perspective, the WWW had tens of pages in 1992. From 1993 to 1997, the Web had a doubling period of under 6 months13,2.

But what happened to Erwise? Although the source code was released in July 199214, the browser was not developed further. Some of its innovations were forgotten, only to be reimplemented in Mosaic or Netscape later15,12.

In hindsight, it is easy to imagine an alternative timeline where an European web browser would have grown along Mosaic and Netscape. Perhaps Erwise was too early, as the Web had not yet taken off. It was also released in a modest way without fanfare. If the initial release had gotten more attention, perhaps development would not have halted.

Despite Erwise fading to obscurity, the word was out. Tim Berners-Lee actually visited Helsinki University of Technology a second time during the NORDUnet conference in early 1993. This time his lecture was so packed that the attendees couldn’t fit in the lecture hall5.

  1. More precisely, Erwise was the first graphical third-party browser. The first was written by Tim Berners-Lee, but it only ran on the NeXTSTEP operating system. Erwise was the first to offer some portability across UNIX platforms. ↩

  2. The history of NORDUnet, Kaarina Lehtisalo, 2004. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  3. Funet history of internet, Finnish University and Research Network, 1998. ↩

  4. A short history of the Web, CERN. ↩

  5. Finnish article on Erwise, Helsingin Sanomat, 2000. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  6. Weaving the web, Tim Berners-Lee, 1999, ISBN 0-06-251586-1. ↩

  7. The developers were Kim Nyberg, Teemu Rantanen, Kari Sydänmaanlakka and Kati Suominen. ↩

  8. People involed in WWW project, Tim Berners-Lee. ↩

  9. The WWW project pages on Erwise, Tim Berners-Lee, 1992. ↩

  10. The development was likely accelerated by Tim’s visit in February 1992, as he states in 9 that “Serious coding started around 1-March 1992”. ↩

  11. The Greatest Internet Pioneers You Never Heard Of: The Story of Erwise and Four Finns Who Showed the Way to the Web Browser, Xconomy, 2009. ↩

  12. Excerpt from the book Nördar. En österbottnisk specialitet by Svenolof Karlsson, Storkamp Media, 2013. ↩ ↩2

  13. Web Growth Summary, 1996. ↩

  14. Erwise 0.1 release, the WWW-talk email list, 1992 (mirror). ↩

  15. Advice to Marc Andreessen from Kim Nyberg, the WWW-talk email list, 1993. ↩