(Thomas Haigh here...) This one I know the answer to. As I wrote in a footnote to "The Web's Missing Links: Search Engines and Portals" in *The Internet and American Business*, edited by William Aspray and Paul Ceruzzi, MIT Press, 2008:159-200: The idea of a home page went back to Tim Berners-Lee and the origin of the Web. Berners-Lee had imagined that browsers would include integrated editing capabilities, so that each user would have a personal home page that he or she could edit to include links to pages of interest as well as public messages for other visitors. (Something rather like a blog). This explains the dual meaning of the term home page as both “the default start page for someone’s browser” and “the main page holding information about a person or company.” James Gillies and Robert Cailliau, How the Web Was Born: The Story of the World Wide Web (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 193-4. Remember that TBL's original browser could edit web pages as well as display them. (This was easy to implement on his NeXT computer because of its library of powerful, reusable object tools). In his original scheme the home page would fulfill the same function that bookmarks were used for in later browsers, but would be shared with everyone on the web. Thinking about how the web would have developed if this integrated editing capability had been retained is an interesting exercise. In fact the edit capability vanished from Mosaic, the first widely used browser. Browsing and editing were done with different tools, and bookmarks were private. Browser makers configured home page defaults to point to their own websites. Many early personal home pages really did include a mixture of links to recommended sites and information about their owners. You could argue that making this list of favorite pages public prefigured more recent social media innovations such as the "like" button. TBL discusses his original browser at http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb.html, including a screenshot<http://www.w3.org/History/1994/WWW/Journals/CACM/screensnap2_24c.gif>. He writes The "Link" menu you can see. "Mark all" would remember the URI of where you were. "MArk selection" would make an anchor (link target) for the selected text, give it an ID, and remember the URI of that fragment. "Link to Marked" would make a link from the current selection to whatever URI you had last marked. So making a link involved browsing to somewhere interesting, hitting Command/M, going to the document you were writing and selecting some text, and hitting Command/L. "Link to new" would create a new window, prompt for a URI (ugh - it should have made one up!) and make a link from the selection to the new document. You never saw the URIs - you could of course always find documents by following the link to them. However the ability to save the edited page directly to the web server was not implemented. It would browse http:space and news: and ftp: spaces and localfile: space, but edit only in file: space as HTTP PUT was not implemented back then. More on the history of web browsers in Thomas Haigh, "Protocols for Profit: Web and E-mail Technologies as Product and Infrastructure" in *The Internet and American Business*, edited by William Aspray and Paul Ceruzzi, MIT Press, 2008: 105-158 (preprint online)<../Writing/ProtocolsForProfitDRAFT.pdf>and on the history of web navigation in "The Web's Missing Links: Search Engines and Portals" [in the same volume]:159-200 (preprint online) <../Writing/WebsMissingLinksDRAFT.pdf>. Best wishes, Tom Haigh www.tomandmaria.com/tom On Sun, May 6, 2012 at 10:50 AM, Marianne van den Boomen < M.V.T.vandenBoomen@uu.nl> wrote:
Hi Sue,
Intriquing question! I remember working with Mosaic and Cello back in 1994, and they both already had a home button (an online check for screenshots affirms this). As far as I can see Tim Berners-Lees first browser in 1991 did not have a home button (see http://info.cern.ch/NextBrowser.html) neither did the 1993 version (see here http://info.cern.ch/NextBrowser1.html) Yet, the screenshot does show a page called My homepage (in the title bar called: Tim's home page). May be the home of the home button is just Tim's home page? ;-)
kind regards
Marianne van den Boomen
On 6-5-12 11:46, Sue Thomas wrote:
Hi
I wonder if anyone can help? I'm trying to track down when and why it was decided to use the term 'Home' and its accompanying icon in web browser design. Does anyone have any information on that?
We have got so used to it that it's almost invisible in our consciousness, but Home is not default in every part of the world. In the Middle East for example, that function is called the Main Page, not the Home Page. I'm thinking that 'home' is probably an American concept in this context.
I'd also like to collect more equivalencies from non-English speaking countries, so please do get in touch if your country's browser features something other than 'home'.
I'd be most grateful for your thoughts on the above. Please reply backchannel to sue.thomas@dmu.ac.uk
Many thanks
Sue
_________
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met vriendelijke groeten,
Marianne van den Boomen
Media and Culture Studies | University Utrecht Office: Kromme Nieuwegracht 20 (room T2.13A) Mail: Muntstraat 2a | 3512 EV UTRECHT Phone: +31 (0)30 253 9607 M.V.T.vandenBoomen@uu.nl | www.hum.uu.nl www.newmediastudies.nl | www.vandenboomen.org
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-- Maria Haigh, Ph.D. mhaigh@uwm.edu Associate Professor University of Wisconsin Milwaukee School of Information Studies Northwest Quadrant Building B, Room 2585 P.O. Box 413 2205 E. Newport Milwaukee, WI 53211 Tel. 414-229-5397 http://www.tomandmaria.com/maria/