A report on Libwww, Line Mode Browser and WorldWideWeb

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.

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.

In 1991 and 1992, Tim Berners-Lee and a student at CERN named Jean-François Groff rewrote various components of the original WorldWideWeb browser for the NeXTstep operating system in portable C code, in order to demonstrate the potential of the World Wide Web.

By this time, several others, including Bernd Pollermann, Robert Cailliau, Jean-François Groff, and visiting undergraduate student Nicola Pellow – who later wrote the Line Mode Browser – were involved in the project.

Berners-Lee and Groff later adapted many of WorldWideWeb's components into a C programming language version, creating the libwww API.

From 1995 onwards, the Line Mode Browser was no longer released separately, but part of the libwww package.