Viola Press Mentions

Press clippings of Viola mentions from books and magazines that I have come across.

As word about the new concept spread, collaborators outside of CERN began to spring up. One of earliest full-screen browser was Viola, developed by Pei Wei, then of the University of California at Berkeley. This tool contained many elaborate features, and Berners-Lee said it easily could have attained the important role later assumed by Mosaic if Wei had chosen to "productize" it.

In January 1993, 50 Web servers were in existence, and at that time the Viola browser was made available for the X Window system. Viola was the early leader in Web browsing technology, offering the first glimpse of the graphical, mouse based hypertext system originally conceived by the Web proposal.

... computers at CERN, which had two browsers available free to anyone who wanted to make copies. One had been created at CERN, the other by a former Berkeley student named Pei Wei....

Basically, he had something very like Java, and as he went ahead and wrote something very much like Hot Java, the language was called 'Viola' and the browser was called 'ViolaWWW'. It didn't take off very quickly because you had to first install 'Viola' nobody understood why you should install an interpreter, and then this 'WWW' in a Viola library area. You had to be system administrator to do all that stuff, it wasn't obvious. But in fact what he did was really ahead of his time. He actually had Applets running. He had World Wide Web pages with little things doing somersaults and what have you.

Berners-Lee and his CERN compatriot Robert Cailliau put the free Web software on the Internet in 1991. It didn't take off until 1993, when Marc Andreessen and his colleagues at the University of Illinois, who had seen one of the early Web browsers called ViolaWWW, wrote the now famous Mosaic.

Within a few months of the release of www, the first graphically based Web browser began to appear. The first was Viola, written by Pei Wei, an undergraduate computer science student at University of California, Berkeley in late 1991. Primitive by today's standards, it was revolutionary at the time, and was shown at Web and hypertext conferences to great effect. With Viola, you simply clicked on a link in the text, and you were tranported elsewhere in the document or on the Web.

The Early Browsers: In 1991, Pei Wei had written a program called Viola. It was a HyperText system somewhat like HyperCard and ran under UNIX and X11 workstations. In early 1992, Pei reworked Viola to be a graphical browser for HTML. Viola allowed the user to have more than one font, links were boxed and needed a click of the mouse button for actuation, there was a "history" for ready access to pages already visited, and Viola had the capability to bookmark pages and to display the source markup for the page being viewed.