The Web Era arrives, the browser wars flare, and a bubble bursts — with deeper technical analysis and expert context.

Refresher: From ARPANET to NSFNET

By 1989, the Defense Department’s ARPANET had evolved into a global network of heterogeneous computers using the TCP/IP suite. The National Science Foundation funded a high-speed backbone—NSFNET—operating at 56 Kbps then upgraded to T1 (1.5 Mbps) and later T3 (45 Mbps). Users were largely academics and researchers, but the stage was set for commercial innovation.

From Archie to Gopher: Indexing the Early Internet

As the number of public FTP sites grew, search became critical:

• Archie (1990): Scanned anonymous FTP directories and built an index. Written in C on VAX/VMS, it responded to simple queries over Telnet.
• Veronica and Jughead: Complemented Archie by indexing Gopher menus, enabling hierarchical searches across thousands of nodes.
• Gopher (1991): Developed in C on Unix at the University of Minnesota, Gopher used a text-menu protocol (RFC 1436) over TCP port 70. It abstracted files, menus, and search clients into a uniform interface, making remote resources navigable without memorizing hostnames or paths.

The Birth of the World Wide Web at CERN (1989–1991)

Tim Berners-Lee’s “Mesh” proposal aimed to build a distributed, hypertext system across DEC VMS, NeXT, and Unix machines. Key elements:

• URIs (Unified Resource Identifiers) to locate resources via syntax later formalized in RFC 1738.
• HTTP/0.9 – a simple protocol supporting only GET requests and raw HTML payloads.
• HTML tags for structure:
  ,
  , and .

On December 20, 1990, the first website—served by CERN httpd on a NeXTcube—went live. The original WorldWideWeb browser/editor ran on NeXTstep, leveraging Objective C and the Display PostScript engine for rendering. Inline images weren’t supported until later; images had to be TIFFs opened in separate windows.

Mosaic Ignites Mass Adoption (1993–1994)

NCSA’s Mosaic, written in C and X/Motif for Unix and later ported to Windows and Mac, introduced:

• Inline GIFs via the tag, speeding up page load with progressive render algorithms.
• Support for forms (RFC 1866) enabling early CGI-based web applications.
• Cross-platform packaging that bundled a TCP/IP stack (e.g., Trumpet Winsock on Windows) and HTTP client in one installer.

By mid-1994, over 2 million copies of Mosaic were downloaded. The browser’s ease-of-use drove exponential Web growth, democratizing HTML authoring and consumption.

Netscape and the Commercialization of Browsers (1994–1996)

Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina left NCSA to form Mosaic Communications with Jim Clark. Their goals:

1. Reimplement Mosaic functionality in C++ with improved modularity.
2. Introduce JavaScript (LiveScript), a lightweight ECMAScript language embedding LISP-style closures into HTML pages for client-side logic.
3. Implement Secure Sockets Layer (SSL v2→v3) for encrypted transactions.

Netscape Navigator 1.0 (1994) ran on Windows, Mac, and Unix/X11, and featured progressive JPEG and GIF rendering plus support for POST and PUT. Navigator’s IPO in 1995 rocketed from $28 to $75, signaling the start of the dot-com boom.

The Rise of Online Services: AOL, CompuServe, and MSN

Consumer dial-up services adapted by integrating Web gateways:

• CompuServe Information Manager: Added a Mosaic-based browser and GUI front-end to cut hourly connect costs.
• AOL: Deployed a proprietary GUI shell on top of TCP/IP, offering email, chat, and early Web access; peaked at 25 million subscribers by 2001.
• MSN: Originally a walled-garden service, rearchitected as an ISP and bundled with Windows 95 OSR2 and Internet Explorer 1.0.

The Dot-com Gold Rush and Its Aftermath

With NSF restrictions lifted by 1991, entrepreneurs built “everything stores” and search portals:

• Yahoo! (1994): A hierarchical directory running on Solaris/SPARC, monetized via banner ads embedded with 468×60 and 728×90 pixels.
• eBay (1995): AuctionWeb on Linux, using PostgreSQL for listings, later moving to Oracle to scale millions of concurrent bids.
• Amazon (1995): A Java and Perl-based storefront on Sun servers, integrating real-time inventory APIs from Ingram and Baker & Taylor.

Venture capital flowed into server vendors (Sun Microsystems, Cisco), ISPs, and hosting providers. The NASDAQ composite soared from 1,000 in 1995 to 5,000 in 1998.

Deep Dive: Evolution of HTTP and HTML Standards

Standards bodies accelerated reuse and interoperability:

• W3C formation (1994): Oversaw HTML 2.0 (RFC 1866) and HTTP/1.0 (RFC 1945) standardization.
• HTML 3.2 & 4.0: Introduced tables, style attributes, frames, and external CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) in 1997 (W3C Recommendation).
• HTTP/1.1 (RFC 2068, 1997): Added persistent connections, chunked transfer encoding, and host header for virtual hosting.

By 2025, HTTP/3 (RFC 9114) over QUIC accounts for 60% of global Web traffic, reducing page-load latency by an average of 20% and improving TLS 1.3 handshake times.

Expert Perspectives: Scaling, Security, and Emerging Protocols

“Without persistent connections in HTTP/1.1, we’d still pay a TCP handshake per image,” notes Dr. Ilya Grigorik, author of “High Performance Browser Networking.”

• Edge caching and CDNs (e.g., Akamai, Cloudflare) emerged in the late 1990s to offload origin servers and reduce latency.
• Content Security Policy (CSP) and Subresource Integrity (SRI) standards in the 2010s hardened browsers against XSS and supply-chain attacks.
• Looking forward, WebAssembly (Wasm) and Service Workers enable offline-first PWAs, a cornerstone of modern Web development.

Economic and Regulatory Impact of the Browser Wars and Dot-com Crash

Microsoft’s bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows led to the U.S. v. Microsoft antitrust case (1998–2001), culminating in a landmark ruling on tying practices. The dot-com bubble peaked in March 2000 (NASDAQ 8,843.87) before collapsing 63% by August 2001. Companies like Webvan folded, while survivors—Amazon, Google (founded 1998)—emerged leaner and more focused on unit economics.

Looking Ahead: Legacy and 2025 Updates

Gopher still operates on port 70, maintained by volunteers in an open-source community. Meanwhile, the W3C released a new WebTransport API in 2024 to support low-latency, bidirectional streaming over QUIC. AI-driven search engines now parse HTML5 structure and metadata to deliver semantic results, fulfilling Ted Nelson’s hypertext vision at scale.

Next up: In part 3, we’ll explore Web 2.0, social platforms, cloud computing, and the shift toward mobile and API-driven architectures.