Line Mode Browser
Multi-platform command-line web browser
The Line Mode Browser (also known as LMB, WWWLib, or just www) is the second web browser ever created.
The browser was the first demonstrated to be portable to several different operating systems.
Operated from a simple command-line interface, it could be widely used on many computers and computer terminals throughout the Internet.
The browser was developed starting in 1990, and then supported by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as an example and test application for the libwww library.
History
One of the fundamental concepts of the "World Wide Web" projects at CERN was "universal readership". In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee had already written the first browser, WorldWideWeb (later renamed to Nexus), but that program only worked on the proprietary software of NeXT computers, which were in limited use. Berners-Lee and his team could not port the WorldWideWeb application with its features—including the graphical WYSIWYG editor— to the more widely deployed X Window System, since they had no experience in programming it. The team recruited Nicola Pellow, a math student intern working at CERN, to write a "passive browser" so basic that it could run on most computers of that time.
The name "Line Mode Browser" refers to the fact that, to ensure compatibility with the earliest computer terminals such as Teletype machines, the program only displayed text, (no images) and had only line-by-line text input (no cursor positioning).
Development started in November 1990 and the browser was demonstrated in December 1990.
“Line Mode Browser” enters the record as multi-platform command-line web browser. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Line, Mode and Browser can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Line Mode Browser” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Line, Mode and Browser provides the most credible route into that argument.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1826369. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1990.
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This entry incorporates text from “Line Mode Browser” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.