Internet History: Lynx, the Text-Only Web Browser

There's not a lot of nostalgia for a return to the text-only web. There are a lot of possibilities for doing so, but I think the lack of nostalgia mostly has to do with the fact very few people outside of academics and students in a very narrow window of time ever really experienced the web on a text browser. 

Lynx was first introduced in 1992, and NCSA Mosaic, which was the first mainstream graphical web browser, came out the next year. Given the choice most people picked the one with the pretty pictures. I actually remember my computer teacher at the time, who was completely blinded by Apple devotion to entertain the idea of anything but a rich GUI, scoffing when he first got the school online and discovered the included browser from whatever ISP the school was on only provided a text browser. 

I'd say his cult-like devotion to Apple was foolish but he bought stock when it was less than a dollar a share. So he fooled himself into becoming very wealthy. But anyway!

Not everyone made the switch to a graphical web browser, even when they had the opportunity. Downloading graphics (.jpegs and .gifs) took a lot of time back then. If you had a 56.6kbps modem, you were cooking, but even then it could be a struggle for images we would now consider laughably small. My brother built a webpage with a 140kb image of a cartoon beaver and it slowed his site to a crawl during loading. This blog post is probably more than 140kb in code alone.

In spite of the switch in the mid-1990s to graphical web browsers, Lynx was around for a little while, and is actually STILL around. In fact, it's still being updated.

Here's what my profile looks like in Lynx running on Fedora Linux:

In spite of having no images whatsoever, I personally spent hours and hours on the web via Lynx reading what people had written online back in the day. It was kind of perfect because so much thought was put into the words back then: you didn't need to see the images at all. 

Let me go back a second: I say "so much thought was put into the words" but that's not entirely true. There were some pretty bad sites back then, just like today, but people put the words they wrote front-and-center, so I guess it would be more appropriate to say people put more emphasis on words.

If you went to a page with an image, you just saw 

[IMAGE]

inline with the text. If there were multiple images you'd see [IMAGE] [IMAGE] [IMAGE]. At first it was rare but became more prevalent. Eventually you'd spend half your time navigating past the images to get to the actual text.

The modern web doesn't work very well with Lynx, because what we use now is so far removed from what people were making back then. The idea of a website for a product was completely foreign. I remember when I heard Levi's had a website, thinking how dumb that was. Why would a business want to be on the internet? 

You can still find and use Lynx today, it's still being maintained by a dedicated group of enthusiasts and there are some sites out there designed with Lynx in mind. I... don't know of any other than the Lynx page I made for my own domain. That page is also HTML 1.0, so it looks like a default web page from 1994 (except modern browsers render the background as white instead of grey). It's also not really serious, it's just me pretending it's 1994 and maybe 1% of people on Earth cared about the internet.

Who wants to start a Lynx webring?