Coded by Larry Mears ©1986

Was this the world's first graphical browser, and am I the world's first 'Web' Designer?

I think so...but read on and decide for yourself....

Steve Turnbull ©2001

1989 - An animated graphical Internet list of the early worldwide Atari network, fully functional, with around 24 nodes - or "sites" as they're called today, So how come the history books say this didn't happen until 1993?! I challege this history, and I have the code to prove it!! See the code, and how it worked here.

From 1986 through 1992, I created colorful, smoothly animated, musical, mouse-clickable and linked pages for an early worldwide Atari online network audience of hobbyists and enthusiasts, using the FIDOnet and CrossNet protocols of the Internet. I created hundreds of these online graphic pages, and I believe I'm the very first to do so. I'd love to say they were the first graphical "Web pages", but hey, I can't... because the Web hadn't been invented yet!

But wait a minute, you say. How can that be? The mainstream Internet History Books say that online network graphics pages like these were still 3 to 4 years in the future!

Yet the graphics and code I now put before you clearly says otherwise.

Before going any farther, I want to make clear that I am certainly not making any sort of claim that I, or Larry Mears, or Instant Graphics! had anything to do with the invention of the World Wide Web that we know today. Nope, all credit for that rightly goes to Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of today's HTTP and URL protocols. But that doesn't prevent me from pointing out some unarguable facts concerning who really created the very first graphical browser and the very first Internet vector graphics. I challenge the accepted "facts" concerning these matters, and I'd like to tell my side of this historical story, because...well, heck...it's true and it did happen...and I have the pictures and code to prove it.

At quick look back on Computing History...

If you had been online before the 1990's then you will probably remember well the following facts, but for those who were not there, let me set the scene.

In 1986 at least, All online communication was in text.

The world of telecommunication was a mostly silent world of letters as far as you could see. There were no online pictures at all. Nada...ziltch. The speed of a fast modem then was 2400 baud, prohibitively slow to send graphic data in real time, as even a small picture might take 5-10 minutes to download. Besides, there were no "graphic browsers" invented to see them yet anyway.

Yet because of an amazing accessory called Instant Graphics!, the animated graphic screen (shown at top) took about 7 seconds to load, with animations and three-part music playing smoothly from then on. You could even use your mouse to click from one page to the next. When the music came blaring out and the screen started to dance along, well...

Nothing even remotely like this had ever been seen before.
It was extraordinary... stunningly beautiful, and wickedly fast.

Larry Mears, an enthusiastic and competent C+ programmer from Huntsville Alabama, wrote Instant Graphics! in 1986. It was the worlds FIRST online graphic "browser" that interpreted simple text commands to drive built-in graphic routines. For the first time in telecommunication, you could now create lines, circles, fills, color, sound and animation on a remote users computer, in real time, using only a text file! It was absolutely revolutionary! You could be online, reading a simple text message that would suddenly and shockingly turn into an animated movie with impressive sound effects right before your eyes.

I was awestruck when I first saw what IG could do. I knew immediately that once the rest of the computing world saw this stuff, there would be no going back to plain text. It would become an entirely new medium of animated online thought.

1989 - Animated volcano screen with explosion sounds, and my face being made from arcs and circles. Years before Flash™ too!

The most amazing and powerful part of IG!, was the ability to quickly move, or "blit", any part of the screen to memory. By then "blitting" pieces of the memory back to the visible screen at high-speed, a smoothly flowing animation could be created, much like Flash™ works today, I believe.

However, there was one major drawback: The actual text coding necessary to do all this had to be painstakingly created by hand, entirely in numbers, letters, and symbols. It was difficult to produce even a colored circle exactly where you wanted it to appear. The task at first seemed so daunting, that even the most hard-core Atari programmers would shy away from the tedious challenge

But heck, I just couldn't get over it.

I suddenly saw a vast, entirely new world
of telecommunication before me...
A graphical network that would change the world!

A computing world with excitement, color, sound, pictures and real-time cartoon movies spreading around the world. Creating these artistic scenes, movies, music and sound on remote screens of a worldwide online network became my passion for the next four years,...no, actually it became my ...

	1988 - The bubbles would appear, grow, then pop! See the code

My friend Paul Alyward, sysop of The London Smog BBS in Santa Ana California, allowed me to use his bbs to develop and experiment with creating what I believe to be the worlds first fully mouse-driven, online graphical user interface in history. "Mr. Rodgers" was my online name then. The London Smog was already a popular destination for Atari file seekers, and I soon started to hear from many sysops and users who were astonished with what was happening on their screens. The shock of the jump, from a text world to this entirely new colorfully animated world, was earth-shattering. Now others started to learn IG!

1989 - Animated calling card I made for Larry Mears, the author of IG! The white symbols and lines would smoothly morph, over about 20 seconds, from a computer logic flowchart and into a Christian cross, reflecting his strong beliefs.

To help start spreading the word on this amazing new way of telecommunication, in 1988 I began creating animated "calling cards" for those BBS sysops who found the coding part too difficult. They could embed the card into their messages whenever they would call to another BBS, leaving it on the message board as a way of greetings and a signature. It slowly started to catch on as they spread from board to board. Soon they had spread to Atari BBS's in England and Germany, by using FIDOnet and the now vanished CrossNet. The online Atari network bbs "nodes" slowly began to turn on, like beacons of light in a dark world of text. First three, then six, now eleven. It seemed to be growing.

Yet today's Internet historical lore say's that the first graphical network with a graphical user interface didn't exist until at least two years later. I wish somebody would have told me that back in 1989 so I could have stopped wasting so much of my time on something that didn't exist yet.

1990- Animated spinning cubes. This screen shot only shows one small part of a complex animated sequence. Here, all five cubes are smoothly spinning in opposite directions while thumping music plays.

The London Smog BBS quickly became the de facto Instant Graphics! support board. I moderated the colorful discussion boards and created many demos and tutorials on the subject. The network "nodes" would post these demos on their own message boards, and the excitement increased. Still, no matter how much I wished otherwise, only a few brave souls were attempting to tackle the coding.

Creating some "generic" mouse-driven menu screens that made it easy for sysops to personalize them to their own bbs's helped out somewhat, but it just wasn't enough, What was really needed was a "WYSIWYG" graphic editor, but I was on a different , and had no time or interest in that kind of giant programming project.

I began uploading my files to GEnie (the General Electric Information service) in late 1989, hoping to reach a wider audience, and it started to work. Two other C+ programmers began to code IG Editors to create the difficult IG! script. Unfortunately the programs were buggy, and they created huge amounts of redundant code, which slowed the graphic transmission time down to a crawl. (It took the instant! out of IG!). Most new enthusiasts would start out using the simple IG Editors, get poor results and quickly lose interest. Coding by hand was clearly the superior option, and for animation and sound, it was the only option. Yes, it was still difficult at first... but once you "got it", you could really make 'er fly!

Ahh...now games! At the time, online games were also entirely text based. There were some games using ANSI graphics at the time, but they were just jerky blocks of color. It was pathetic even then.

The combination of mouse, color, music, and animation seemed a natural for use with online games, so I changed tack. I became LightHeaded™ Software, and started programming games that would produce the graphic code needed to drive IG! games. The first was "Crapz!" a dice rolling game. There was nothing special to the simple gameplay, but for the first time ever in online gaming history, the animated dice smoothly rolled, the music and sound effects played in three-part harmony, and the users' mouse clicked it's way through the colorful game. It really was beautiful.

I then began writing a new program named "Wildcardz!", a high-speed poker game.. It was my magnum opus, taking four months to create in 1992. It was a new game that really strutted IG!'s stuff. A fully detailed deck of 52 cards could be smoothly fanned across the screen in seconds, while gameplay reproduced an animated poker table game...chip stacks and all! It produced the graphics on the remote player's screen, not by sending pre-coded chunks of graphic commands, but by creating and assembling the IG! code "on the fly" in response to the users mouse clicks and mouse movements. It could also interrogate the players' machine, and have the mouse cursor screen position sent back to the program for further action. Knowing exactly where the cursor was pointing on the screen now meant that an online racing game, or a shooter game, or any type of "mouse/screen control" game was now possible.

But then, evolution stepped in....

The Atari 1040ST - 1Mb memory @ 8Mhz.

But now, there was a problem. It was slowly becoming self-evident to us all, that we were a small cadre of programming enthusiasts working on a computer that was dying. The graphically powerful Atari was starting to fade away into history under the double whammy of cheap, graphically challenged PC's, and terribly poor Atari business management. As it became clear that the less worthy PC would probably dominate the future, the Atari programming community began leaving for greener pastures. Atari bbs network traffic dried up as sysops dropped away in increasing numbers. Everyone was vanishing. Larry Mears had also decided to leave the Atari platform by then, and was already starting to rewrite Instant Graphics! to run under DOS. But the graphic deficiencies of the PC meant that the new code would have to radically change. It would not (could not!) be as powerful as IG! was now, but maybe someday it would. In 1992 He asked me if I would like to join him by learning the new code, and to create new online graphic screens for the PC. He said we might even change the world.

But that would mean ditching my beloved 32-bit graphic powerhouse to buy what I considered to be an inferior business machine. With a growing family, money was tight, and a new computer was out of my reach. As an artist, the loss of graphic ability was unacceptable to me, and...hey, I was getting burned out anyway. After four years of intense programming I was exhausted. My optimistic early vision of a world joining in to create a colorful, animated universe of thought, design and music had failed to materialize. I now thought it never would. I was disillusioned. I decided to quit.

My had now come to an end. I put my computer away in the basement in disgust, and began to pursue other artistic projects. Computers and the Internet just completely vanished from my radar screen for years.

Out of curiosity, and as a reward to myself for surviving a terrible near-fatal illness that destroyed my life 1998, I bought a Mac G3 in 1999 to rejoin this awesome new world. I was shocked to see what the internet had become. It was as if my dreams had happened when I wasn't looking. I felt like Rip Van Winkle!!

The Internet of today is a little different than what I had at first dreamed, but it's not that much different. It still seems like my old home...except for all these dumb advertisements ("Punch the Monkey!"??...Heaven help us all..). Which made me think that maybe I should stake my claim to this one small, but colorful, corner of Internet and Computing History, and see what happens when I say, I AM...

I'm sorry if this doesn't seem to fit into today's accepted theory of Internet History , but I challenge anyone to prove me wrong... just make sure you have your pictures, dates, and code ready for inspection like I do!

If others were doing this on some other computer platform, I never saw it - and I looked around pretty good back then. The online computing world was not so big at that time, and it would have been impossible to miss.

Maybe my story was missed because I did this all YEARS before the "Web" became so wildly popular with the whole world. Maybe because I dropped out of computing after years of effort - right when the Internet's Web revolution started - and didn't get a chance to point out my stuff while others were patting themselves on the back for "inventing the first graphical browser"!!

Maybe the true scientists, technicians and inventors behind the creation of today's graphical Internet didn't look up long enough from their research to see what was happening right next door in the Atari world...and heck, maybe I didn't see their stuff either, because, well, I was on a too.

Created on 7/4/2001
©Steve Turnbull 2001

Editors Note:
Larry Mears, the creator of Instant Graphics! has contacted me since the writing of this page. He still lives in Huntsville Alabama with his loving wife, his two ever-growing sons, and a whole gang of close relatives. He is still as prolific a programmer as he ever was, and is now working on a Java based version of this same concept. It's called Vecta-Sketch and it's terrific! You can see it in action by visiting Larrys' site at http://larrymears.tripod.com/ And tell him 'Mr. Rodgers' sent you.

If you find any factual, historical, or practical error in my recounting of the above history, or if you
have anything you might want to add...pictures, links, memories or whatever....

1991 is also the year in which Tim Berners-Lee, working at CERN in Switzerland, posts the first computer code of the World Wide Web in a relatively innocuous newsgroup, "alt.hypertext." The ability to combine words, pictures, and sounds on Web pages excites many computer programmers who see the potential for publishing information on the Internet in a way that can be as easy as using a word processor.

1993 - Mosaic, the first graphics-based Web browser, becomes available.

FidoNet consists of approximately 30,000 systems world-wide which comprise a network which exchanges mail and files via Modems using a proprietary protocol. They are connected for the purposes of exchanging E-Mail to the Internet through a series of gateway systems which interact with the Internet via UUCP with cooperating UNIX-based smart-hosts which act as their MX-receivers.