Which CERN student wrote the original Line Mode Browser?

Nicola Pellow, a CERN student working on the early Web project, wrote the original Line Mode Browser.

Pellow joined CERN in November 1990 as an undergraduate mathematics student from Leicester Polytechnic. Tim Berners-Lee’s first browser worked on NeXT computers, which were powerful but uncommon, so the project needed a simpler client that could run on many different systems and terminals.

Pellow wrote the Line Mode Browser in C. Instead of displaying graphics in a window, it presented text line by line and accepted basic keyboard commands. That minimal design made it portable to systems ranging from VAX computers to Sun and IBM workstations.

The browser was demonstrated in late 1990 and released to a limited audience in March 1991. It helped spread access to the nascent Web beyond CERN’s NeXT machines. Later, Pellow worked on MacWWW, an early browser for classic Macintosh computers. Adele Goldberg, Mitchell Baker, and Susan Kare are associated with other areas of computing, not authorship of this browser.