WorldWideWeb, NeXTSTEP, 1990. The browser that was also an editor.
How to spot NeXTSTEP.
The scroller is on the left
NeXTSTEP put it there, opposite to almost everything since. Combined with the next point it is the fastest way to identify a NeXT screenshot.
Both arrows sit together at one end
of the scroller, rather than one at the top and one at the bottom.
#fff#aaa#555#000Four grays and nothing else
White, light, dark, black. Every bevel on screen is built from that palette.
Helvetica, not a bitmap face
NeXT shipped Display PostScript, so the interface used real scalable type years before anyone else.
Not a form. Not a CMS. The page itself. WorldWideWeb, the first browser Tim Berners-Lee wrote in 1990, was also an editor. Reading and writing were the same act, and every page you visited was a page you could change.
Now try it in the browser you are actually using. Click into this paragraph and type. Nothing happens.
Mosaic arrived in 1993, ran on everything, and shipped read-only. It won. The write half of the web never came back, and getting it back now means renting it: a CMS, a platform, an account, someone else's terms.
Publishing needed no permission, and reading and writing were the same window.