1993: Web browsers add multimedia and MTV.com goes online
Mosaic adds an image tag to HTML and becomes the first modern web browser in 1993. Soon after, MTV VJ Adam Curry builds one of the world's first commercial websites — not that his bosses care.
Any history of web design has to begin with the first graphical web browser to go mainstream: Mosaic, later to be renamed Netscape Navigator.
At the beginning of 1993, college student Marc Andreessen wrote a message to the WWW-Talk mailing list calling for volunteers to test a new GUI (graphical user interface) browser in development — "initially it's hypertext only, but will soon have multimedia capabilities also." Later in the month came the announcement of “alpha/beta version 0.5” of the browser, which Andreessen was now calling X Mosaic. The X signified that it was built for the X Window System, which meant that it only worked on a few platforms — notably, not yet including Microsoft Windows or Apple Macintosh.
The first to reply to this announcement was the Web’s inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, who put copies of the X Mosaic files onto the CERN server. “Every new browser is sexier than the last," Berners-Lee wrote in encouragement. "There is a lot of cross-fertilisation going on, which is very good. KUTGW [Keep Up The Good Work] everyone…"
Then came the move that launched the first era of visual web design. On 25 February 1993, Andreessen wrote to the WWW-Talk mailing list proposing a new HTML tag: IMG. What he and his programming partner, Eric Bina, were suggesting was a method to embed images inside an HTML page. Up till this point, web browsers were largely text-based — you could add a text link that pointed to an image file, but it would open in a separate window. The IMG tag would make web pages truly multimedia.
Andreessen brashly informed the mailing list that he and Bina had already implemented the tag in X Mosaic: “This [embedded images] is required functionality for X Mosaic; we have this working, and we’ll at least be using it internally.”
The IMG tag didn't officially become a web standard for another couple of years, but that didn't matter. Mosaic supported multimedia from this point on; and it was Mosaic that ultimately brought the web to a wide audience. There were other GUI web browsers in 1993, but they had slightly different ways of supporting images. ViolaWWW displayed images as objects or panes, but they weren't integrated within the HTML flow. Erwise had a separate image viewer for graphics and never did support the IMG tag.
Version 1.0 of X Mosaic was launched in April — coincidentally, the same month that Berners-Lee's employer, CERN (a European scientific research center), released the World Wide Web as free open source software. By September, Mosaic was also available on Windows and Macintosh.
Now the web was off to the races: the platform was free to use and build on, and it had at least one multimedia-capable browser that could be used on mainstream operating systems.
Early web designs
Even though I'm starting this history of web design in 1993, the fact is that web design didn't even exist at this point. It couldn't, because the first versions of HTML — the web's markup language — only described the structure of a web page, not its presentation. Look no further than web page backgrounds in 1993, which were almost always grey. That's because there was no way to control the background colour, since there was no bgcolor attribute in HTML. So early browsers used the default background colour of operating system windows — which was usually grey, even in Apple computers.
The lack of visual design during 1993 was also due to the web's early users being predominantly academics, like Berners-Lee and indeed Andreessen (who was still a student at NCSA, a supercomputing facility at the University of Illinois). Academic websites tended to have a bland, textual design, because they were purely functional — the idea was to share information with fellow academics, and so flair was not required.
One of the more exciting examples of an academic web page was NCSA's 'What's New' page, which was basically just a long list of hyperlinks along with some comments. But it was the best way to keep track of new websites coming online during 1993; it functioned as a kind of portal for the early web.
Even with the earliest non-academic web pages, which began to turn up on the NCSA 'What's New' page towards the end of the year, there wasn't much in the way of a layout. Typically there was descriptive text to explain the purpose of the site, along with a bunch of blue, underlined hypertext links (often the most colourful thing on the page). Occasionally there were large images, as seen in the science website screenshot above. But because of bandwidth restrictions, in most cases images were just small graphics — for example, of the site or brand name.
The birth of MTV.com
Given that web design hadn't yet been born, it makes sense that one of the earliest commercial web pages on the internet wasn't created by a designer. Rather, MTV.com was set up by a tech tinkerer who worked in traditional media.
Adam Curry wasn't a graphic designer, but he did have a glamorous job. He was a video disc jockey (VJ) at MTV, and had shoulder-length dirty blond hair, slicked back like he was a member of INXS. He was tall and good looking, and had a charasmatic presense on television. These attributes would be enough for most people to forge a successful media career, but Curry also had an innate curiosity for media technology. He was interested in new ways to distribute media, and by early 1993 was active in internet systems like Gopher and mailing lists.
In June 1993, Curry tried to convince an MTV executive to let him start an "internet service" at MTV.com (at this point, he was likely referring to Gopher and FTP). This request was declined, but Curry says he was given permission to explore internet distribution independently, at his own cost. On his podcast show many years later, Curry implied that MTV was only concerned about being on AOL — a walled garden service that wasn't yet connected to the web. "They said, 'Oh, you know, [...] you can use it [the MTV.com domain]. Don't worry, we've got the AOL keyword. We're not interested in the internet.'"
As noted, Curry was mainly focused on a Gopher service at this time — which makes sense, because until CERN made the web open source at the end of April 1993, Gopher was the more popular internet protocol. According to a 1994 Wired report, Curry registered the domain name mtv.com with the InterNIC in June 1993, "partly because it was a cool address to have, and it was available." But his intention was to use the domain to run a Gopher site:
"Curry hung his own computer on the Internet and put up a gopher site, which offered, among other things, a daily entertainment "Cybersleaze Report" and "Adam Curry's Brain Waves," providing Curry's own spin on the rock and roll scene. He paid for the site himself and considered it kind of a hobby."
Many years later, Curry told podcaster Joe Rogan that instead of paying the Gopher license fee, he agreed to wear a branded tee-shirt. The YouTube video below shows him doing that sometime in 1993.
It seems the first internet service to launch under MTV.com was a public FTP server at mtv.com:/pub. According to an email sent by David Farber to the Interesting People mailing list on October 7, 1993, Curry's README file was as follows:
Welcome to mtv.com!
As you can tell, the site hasn't been configured completely yet, but look for lots of stuff to be happening here in the next couple of weeks.
Anonymous ftp will get you digital audio, video, you name it. The gopher server will be up soon to, as will several mailing lists.
In the meantime, all comments and suggestions should be sent to me at adam () mtv com
Enjoy for now....
Adam Curry
Probably around this time, Curry started to build a landing page for MTV.com on the World Wide Web. In the Rogan podcast, he credits a phone call from Marc Andreessen for putting him onto the web.
As he was setting up the web server, he emailed Andreessen, who on 17 October 1993 posted it onto the WWW-Talk mailing list. The email began:
Welcome to MTV.COM!!!
Well, it's been an interesting startup, I've been learning alot about UNIX and the Net as I go along, and so far it's been fun.
Curry went on to mention the other internet services: Gopher, FTP and mailing lists. It was only at the end of the email that he talked about a web server:
I'm in the process of of setting up a WWW server that will blow the socks off your Mosaic viewer!
So at this stage, MTV.com was a multi-protocol internet service. The web server was the final piece; and still a work in progress.
After noting that this wasn't an official MTV Networks project (but he had "their blessing") and that he was paying for the T1 internet connection himself, Curry outlined his content plans:
Although the startup has been rather slow, look for this site to be really hoppin' within the next couple of weeks. My personal assistant Ken Clark ([email protected]) will be posting a weekly newsletter, we'll be putting bloopers and outtakes up in quicktime format, look for digital presskits to appear, and yes, even mailboxes for Beavis and Butthead, huh, huh,heh.heh.
He added that he intended "to post programming grids for MTV along with important development in the music bizz."
It's not clear what help Curry had setting up the web server, although given this is 1993, it's almost certain he had technical assistance. In any case, by the end of the month he had a home page for MTV.com up and running on the web. On October 30, 1993, Andreessen posted this note to the NCSA 'What's New' page:
"Adam Curry of MTV is running a Web server on mtv.com."
The link pointed to an index.html page. Unfortunately, there is no known copy or recreation of this page from 1993, but we can assume it was a list of links to the content Curry had outlined in his email to Andreessen. So it's likely his index.html page pointed to a list of Gopher, FTP, and mailing list resources (since that's what he had mentioned in his email a couple of weeks before).
Again, this was a side project for Curry and not an official MTV internet site. In an undated "What is MTV.com" file that probably comes from the FTP server, Curry writes that "this is my hobby, and you get what you pay for when you connect to this server."
MTV.com becomes a website
Things moved fast after October and more web pages were added to MTV.com over the next few weeks. An entry on NCSA's 'What's New' page dated November 21, 1993 lists several hyperlinks (which I've included here, even though they're all now broken links):
The mtv.com Web server continues to evolve -- see the A/V center (including the Quote of the Day), more music reviews, the MTV Network Resource Center, concert reviews and schedules, Adam Curry's favorite Web links, and more.
In this NCSA listing, there's no reference to a visual layout or any MTV branding. Like most early websites of the period, the home page appears to have functioned primarily as a menu-driven index. Another clue is that the landing page had the title "mtv.com Main Menu" (which was still the case even in April 1994, as you can see in the screenshot below).
As for Adam Curry, even though he was no web designer and was just as interested in Gopher as the web, in hindsight it's remarkable that he managed to set up a website at all in 1993 — given the technical expertise required and the very limited bandwidth available. By the end of 1993, there were only about 620 web servers in the world; and one of them hosted MTV.com, thanks to Curry.
In the next post in this history of web design series, I'll profile someone who also built one of the world's first websites in 1993 — but in their case, did go on to become a full-fledged web designer.
Related: Best experienced with: MTV.com and the 90s browser war
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