This week marks the 30th anniversary of the web, or at least the date that Tim Berners-Lee made a proposal at the Swiss particle physics lab CERN involving the creation of a hypertextual system that would end up becoming the web as we know it today.
The history of web browsers on Apple devices takes a lot of twists and turns. Fortunately, I’ve been around for most of them. In fact, my first magazine cover story ever was in July 1996 about the first big browser war. You might be surprised just how much impact Apple has had on the development of the web itself.
Prehistory: The first era
Perhaps most importantly, the first web browser was created on a product that, while not labeled with an Apple logo, is now the intellectual property of Apple. Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first browser, itself called WorldWideWeb, on a NeXT computer in 1990. NeXT, a company founded by Steve Jobs, was purchased by Apple in 1997, and its NextStep operating system became the foundation of Mac OS X, which itself became the foundation for iOS. Thousands of iOS developers work with foundational frameworks with names that start with NS, like NSText, without every realizing that the NS stands for NextStep.
Read more at MacWorld.com