SlipKnot was one of the earliest World Wide Web browsers, available to Microsoft Windows users between November 1994 and January 1998. It was created by Peter Brooks of MicroMind, Inc. to provide a fully graphical view of the web for users without a TCP/IP connection to the net. SlipKnot version 1.0 was released on November 22, 1994, approximately 3 weeks before Netscape's Netscape Navigator version 1.0 came out. It was designed to serve a significant fraction of PC/Windows-based Internet users who could not use Mosaic or Netscape (or eventually Internet Explorer) at that time. Graphic representation of the World Wide Web around Wikipedia The World Wide Web (WWW, W3, or simply Web) is an information space in which the items of interest, referred to as resources, are identified by global identifiers called Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs). ... A web browser is a software application that enables a user to display and interact with HTML documents hosted by web servers or held in a file system. ... Microsoft Windows is a range of operating environments for personal computers and servers. ... January * January 1998 - A massive ice storm, caused by El Niño, strikes New England, southern Ontario and Quebec, resulting in widespread power failures, severe damage to forests, and a number of deaths. ... The Internet protocol suite is the set of communications protocols that implement the protocol stack on which the Internet runs. ... November 22 is the 326th day (327th on leap years) of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... 1994 was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International year of the Family. ... Netscape Communications Corporation was the publisher of the Netscape Navigator web browser as well as many other internet and intranet client and server software products. ... Netscape Navigator, also known simply as Netscape, was a proprietary web browser that was widely used. ... One of the first PCs from IBM - the IBM PC model 5150. ... Mosaic is a web browser (client) for the World Wide Web written at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). ... Internet Explorer, abbreviated IE or MSIE is a proprietary web browser made by Microsoft and currently available as part of Microsoft Windows. ...

History

In 1994 and 1995, the majority of home PC users who were interested in accessing the World Wide Web had to do so using terminal-based software. These users usually had dial-up accounts with their employers' Unix machines or with commercial UNIX ISPs (e.g. Netcom). They would run a terminal emulator program on their PCs, temporarily turning the machines into black screen terminals, dial into the Unix server, and then run text-based internet software like pine and elm for email, gopher, and lynx and www for a text-based browsing experience of the WWW. While this text-based browsing was fine while web pages were text-only, Mosaic changed the browser and web-page landscape in 1993 by displaying and therefore encouraging graphical, multimedia and multifont web pages. It also pioneered the point-and-click navigation for web browsing that had been a standard for prior hypertext applications, like Windows Help. 1994 was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International year of the Family. ... 1995 was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... In telecommunication, the term dial-up has the following meanings: Dial-up access, typically to the Internet A service feature in which a user initiates service on a previously arranged trunk or transfers, without human intervention, from an active trunk to a standby trunk. ... Unix or UNIX is a computer operating system originally developed in the 1960s and 1970s by a group of AT&T Bell Labs employees including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Douglas McIlroy. ... An Internet service provider (ISP) is a business or organization that offers users access to the Internet and related services. ... NETCOM On-line Communication Services was an Internet Service Provider established in 1988 by Bob Reiger, an information systems engineer for Lockheed. ... A terminal emulator, terminal application, term, or tty for short, is a program that emulates a dumb video terminal within some other display architecture. ... Pine is an email client: the University of Washingtons Program for Internet News & Email. ... Elm is a text-based email client that is commonly found on Unix systems. ... E-mail, or email, is short for electronic mail and is a method of composing, sending, and receiving messages over electronic communication systems. ... Gopher is a distributed document search and retrieval network protocol designed for the Internet. ... Lynx being used on Mac OS X Lynx is a text-only web browser for use on cursor-addressable, character cell terminals. ... 1993 is a common year starting on Friday of the Gregorian calendar and marked the Beginning of the International Decade to Combat Racism and Racial Discrimination (1993-2003). ... In computing, hypertext is a user interface paradigm for displaying documents which, according to an early definition (Nelson 1970), branch or perform on request. ...

Mosaic had been developed by university programmers who had access to full TCP/IP connections and high-speed transmissions. This was evident in the design of the program -- for instance, after clicking on a hypertext link, the user had to wait until all parts of the page had been retrieved by the browser before anything showed on the screen. High-speed connections allowed TCP/IP's ability to do multiple retrievals at once, and for the delay between the user's request for a page and its appearance to be short. Therefore, not only could Mosaic not be used by most home users because of their lack of TCP/IP connections, but even if they had TCP/IP, the low speed of home modems would bring out the problems in the Mosaic design for slower speed connections (typically 9600 and 14.4k baud). A modem (a portmanteau word constructed from modulator and demodulator) is a device that modulates an analog carrier signal (sound), to encode digital information, and that also demodulates such a carrier signal to decode the transmitted information. ... In telecommunications and electronics, baud (pronounced ) is a measure of the signaling rate which is the number of changes to the transmission media per second in a modulated signal. ...

In 1994, some ISPs started to offer TCP/IP connections via dial-in modems, with protocols like SLIP and PPP. But this was leading-edge technology, and so it was extraordinarily difficult to set up and maintain a home TCP/IP connection. Therefore, a large fraction of home users were stuck with dial-up Unix connections, and could not use Mosaic, or Netscape, or any of the other TCP/IP-based browsers that business- and academia-based users enjoyed. In telecommunications, a slip is a positional displacement in a sequence of transmitted symbols that causes the loss or insertion of one or more symbols. ... In computing, the Point-to-Point Protocol, or PPP, is commonly used to establish a direct connection between two nodes. ...

Having seen Mosaic late in 1993 and been captivated by its potential, Peter Brooks set out in April 1994 to create a fully graphic, multifont web browser for home PC users.

Browser

SlipKnot version 1.0 was completed and released as shareware in November 1994, thus making it the first purchasable browser on the market. Its name is a pun on SLIP (Serial Line Internet Protocol) -- an early version of TCP/IP over modem lines -- and the fact that it was not necessary (although it, or its equivalent was required for Mosaic and Netscape). Shareware is a marketing method for software, whereby a trial version is distributed without payment ahead of time as is common for proprietary software. ...

SlipKnot was given the Best Communications Shareware Program of 1995 Award by Ziff-Davis and was runner-up for the Best Overall Shareware Program of 1995. Ziff-Davis Inc. ...

By mid-1996 when further development ceased, the majority of home internet users were able to obtain TCP/IP connections that were easy to install, and all new internet software development was dependent upon that protocol.

Technical

SlipKnot's rendering engine was written in C, and its user interface in Visual Basic. Because it had only a Unix commandline to communicate with, it "drove" the Unix host by sending characters to its commandline as if a person were typing them (as a "bot"). First, SlipKnot would request the retrieval of individual parts of a desired web page -- the text, and then each picture -- into files on the Unix host. This was done by executing the text-based web browser "lynx" on the Unix host with command-line arguments indicating which URL to retrieve, and the filename to create on the Unix host when the data was finally retrieved. This retrieval, from web page host to Unix host, was usually very fast, since these machines were connected by high speed communications lines. After the URL contents were moved to the Unix host, they had to be moved down to the PC. This was done by executing the communications program zmodem (sending the zmodem command to the Unix command-line) and then instantly placing the PC into receive mode. The C Programming Language, Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, the original edition that served for many years as an informal specification of the language The C programming language is a standardized imperative computer programming language developed in the early 1970s by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie for use on the... The user interface is the part of a system exposed to users. ... This article does not cite its references or sources. ... A Uniform Resource Locator, URL (spelled out as an acronym, not pronounced as earl), or Web address, is a standardized address name layout for resources (such as documents or images) on the Internet (or elsewhere). ... [ZMODEM is a protocol for file transfer with error checking and crash recovery. ...

Once the text (HTML) portion of a web page had been retrieved (it was always retrieved first), the page would be displayed by SlipKnot and could be read by the user, after which the pictures were retrieved in the background and eventually the page fixed up to display them. In computing, HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a markup language designed for the creation of web pages and other information viewable in a browser. ...

External links

• SlipKnot's original Home Page