Nicola Pellow

Nicola Pellow
Alma materLeicester Polytechnic
Known forLine Mode Browser
MacWWW
Scientific career
FieldsInformation technology
InstitutionsCERN

Nicola Pellow is an English mathematician and information scientist who was one of the nineteen members of the WWW Project at CERN working with Tim Berners-Lee.[1] She joined the project in November 1990, while an undergraduate maths student enrolled on a sandwich course at Leicester Polytechnic (now De Montfort University).[1][2] Pellow recalled having little experience with programming languages, "... apart from using a bit of Pascal and FORTRAN as part of my degree course."[2]

Almost immediately after Berners-Lee completed the WorldWideWeb web browser for the NeXT platform [3] Pellow was tasked with creating a browser using her recently acquired skills in the C programming language.[2] The outcome was that she wrote the first generic Line Mode Browser[4][5][6] that could run on non-NeXT systems.[1][5][7] The WWW team began to improve on her work, creating several experimental versions.[8] Pellow was involved in porting the browser to different types of computers.[9]

She left CERN at the end of August 1991 but returned after graduating in 1992 to work with Robert Cailliau on MacWWW,[10][11] the first web browser for the classic Mac OS.[9][12]

  1. ^ a b c "Ten Years Public Domain for the Original Web Software". CERN. Archived from the original on 29 June 2017. Retrieved 21 July 2010.
  2. ^ a b c Gillies, James; Cailliau, R. (2000). How the Web was Born: The Story of the World Wide Web. Oxford University Press. pp. 6. ISBN 0192862073. nicola pellow.
  3. ^ A screenshot from TBL's first web browser
  4. ^ A view from Nicola Pellow's line mode browser
  5. ^ a b "Dream team of web developers to recreate line-mode browser | CERN". home.cern. Retrieved 2 November 2016.
  6. ^ Berners-Lee, T.J.; Cailliau, R.; Groff, J.F. (1992). "The World-Wide Web" (PDF). Computer Networks and ISDN Systems. 25 (4–5): 458. doi:10.1016/0169-7552(92)90039-S.
  7. ^ Lasar, Matthew (11 October 2011). "Before Netscape: the forgotten Web browsers of the early 1990s". Ars Technica. Retrieved 8 January 2014.
  8. ^ Isaacson, Walter (7 October 2014). The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. Simon and Schuster. p. 415. ISBN 9781476708713.
  9. ^ a b Stewart, Bill (2015). "Web Browser History". Living Internet. Retrieved 21 March 2017.
  10. ^ "MacWWW: the first web browser for the Apple Macintosh platform". www.internet-guide.co.uk. Retrieved 2 November 2016.
  11. ^ Screenshot of the first Mac web browser
  12. ^ Berners-Lee, Tim (3 November 1992). "Macintosh Browser". World Wide Web Consortium. Retrieved 2 June 2010.