Cello is an early, discontinued graphical web browser for Windows 3.1; it was developed by Thomas R. Bruce of the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School. It was released as shareware in 1993. While other browsers ran on various Unix machines, Cello was the first web browser for Microsoft Windows, using the winsock system to access the Internet. In addition to the basic Windows, Cello worked on Windows NT 3.5 and with small modifications on OS/2.
Cello was created because of a demand for Web access by lawyers, who were more likely to use Microsoft Windows than the Unix operating systems supporting earlier Web browsers, including the first release of Mosaic. The lack of a Windows browser meant many legal experts were unable to access legal information made available in hypertext on the World Wide Web. Cello was popular during 1993/1994, but fell out of favor following the release of Mosaic for Windows and Netscape, after which Cello development was abandoned.You can view yahoo browser statistics at https://web.archive.org/web/20021204042351/http://www.cen.uiuc.edu/~ejk/bryl/ which show Cello being used.
Cello was first publicly released on 8 June 1993. A version 2.0 was announced, but development was abandoned. Version 1.01a, 16 April 1994, was the last public release. Since then, the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School has licensed the Cello 2.0 source code, which has been used to develop commercial software.
The browser is no longer available from its original homepage.The original cello site at https://www.law.cornell.edu/cello/cellotop.html is no longer up. The original ftp site at ftp://ftp.law.cornell.edu/pub/LII/Cello is no longer up. The original gopher server at gopher.law.cornell.edu:70/11/listservs/cellol/ is no longer up. However, it can still be downloaded from mirror sites.Cello can still be downloaded at https://browsers.evolt.org/browsers/archive/cello .
Development and history
The development of Cello started in 1992, with beta versions planned for June 1993 and a release for July 1993. It was publicly announced on 12 April 1993.
The Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School created the first law site on the Internet in 1992 and the first legal website in 1993. However, at the time, there were no web browsers for the Microsoft Windows operating system, which was used by most lawyers. Thus, to allow lawyers to use their website, the Legal Information Institute developed the first Windows-based Web browser. This was made possible by a grant from the National Center for Automated Information Research.This can be seen in the "About Cello" dialog in Cello. It is also stated in the "Notices, Acknowledgments, Disclaimers" section of the included .hlp file in Cello.
Although other browsers at the time were based on CERN's WWW libraries called libwww, PCs of the time were not powerful enough to run the UNIX-oriented code. As a result, Thomas Bruce had to rewrite most of the WWW libraries to work on Microsoft Windows. Unlike most commercial browsers at that time, Cello used none of Mosaic's source code and thus had a different look and feel.
Steven Sinofsky, president of the Windows division at Microsoft wrote in a June 1994 email: We do not currently plan on any other client software [in the upcoming release of Windows 95], especially something like Mosaic or Cello. Nevertheless, on 11 January 1995, Microsoft announced that it had licensed the Mosaic technology from Spyglass, which it would use to create Internet Explorer. On 15 August 1995, Microsoft debuted its own web browser Internet Explorer 1 for Windows 95. While it did not ship with the original release of Windows 95, it shipped with Microsoft Plus! for Windows 95.
Usage When released in 1993, Cello was the only browser for the Microsoft Windows platform. Shortly after launch, Cello was being downloaded at a rate of 500 copies per day. As such, it achieved a fair amount of use and recognition within the legal community, including a number of PC users with between 150,000 and 200,000 users. In 1994, most websites were visited using either the Cello browser or the Mosaic browser. Despite having fewer features than Mosaic, Cello continued to be used due to its simpler interface and lower system requirements.. Retrieved 2014-03-17. Cello was praised for being easy to install, because it wasn't necessary to install Win32s or a TCP/IP stack for Windows 3.1. Following the release of Windows 95, which offered a much better TCP/IP interface, Cello fell into disuse and was abandoned.
By 1995, Cello, like the Mosaic browser, was overshadowed by two newer browsers — Netscape and Internet Explorer — and fell into disuse. By 1999, Cello was considered to be a "historical" browser.
Cello is considered to be one of the early casualties of the first browser wars.
Features Cello had the following features:
Unlike Mosaic, Cello did not have toolbar buttons, and instead commands were accessed through pull-down menus.
Supported Protocols Cello supported the following protocols: HTTP 1.0, Gopher (but not Gopher+), read-only FTP, SMTP mailing, Telnet, Usenet, CSO/ph/qi directly and WAIS, HyTelnet, TechInfo, Archie, X.500, TN3270 and a number of others through public gateways.
Supported FTP servers Cello supported the following FTP servers: most Unix servers (including SunOS, System V, and Linux), IBM VM, VMS systems, Windows NT, QVTNet, NCSA/CUTCP/Rutgers PC servers, FTP Software PC server, HellSoft NLM for Novell.
Internet Connection Cello works best with a direct Ethernet connection, but it also supports SLIP and PPP dialup connections through the use of asynchronous sockets. Cello has an integrated TCP/IP runtime stack.
Release history
The following versions were released:
+ 16-bit Cello Releases Version DateIf no reference is given and dates differ across files, oldest date is taken. Development cycle Exe sizeSize taken from uncompressed exe file properties. Zip file size not used, because it's changeable (depends on compression method or files inside zip). (in kb) Download Notes 0.1 8 June 1993 Beta 347 evolt Requires DistinctMirror ftp.w3.org/pc-binaries/windows to run 0.2 14 June 1993 Beta Changelog 0.3 16 June 1993 Beta Changelog 0.4 18 June 1993 Beta Changelog 0.5 24 June 1993 Beta Changelog 0.6 30 June 1993 Beta ChangelogWINSOCK alpha r36 September 1993Alpha374Double click to visit link, right click to show url. Browser request contain only a GET line.GET url\x0a Doesn't support redirectionsWINSOCK alpha r614 October 1993Alpha362 (cello-ws.zip)Browser request contain only a GET line.GET url\x0d\x0a Doesn't support redirections 0.8 5 November 1993 Beta Changelog (Distinct version discontinued) 0.9Given in the "about Cello" - windows in Cello .9 beta 12 November 1993 Beta-pre 0.9Given in the "README.1ST" of Cello 16 November 1993 Beta 487 Changelog. GET requests use presently invalid protocol version.GET url HTTP/V1.0
Fix: load exe file into hex editor (also available online, for example hexed.it). Search for string "HTTP/". Remove byte with letter "V", insert byte after string "User-Agent:" and set it to space. Save the file under new name. Redirections are supported.Browser hangs when "Location" header isn't an exact match (for example if its all in lowercase like on this redirect test page) Crashes on pages with unsupported image filesAlso crashes when image source doesn't contain an url with file extension.
Supported images (information taken from exe file; both lowercase and uppercase file extensions): gif (not animated), bmp, pcx, xbm. 0.9Given in the "DEFAULT.HTML" of Cello .9 22 November 1993 WINSOCK alpha r9.2 494 Issues from 0.9 beta still present. New issue: in img tag, src must be the last attributeIf src attribute isn't last, Cello will treat everything after src= as image url (after removing all quotes), to the end of img tag. 1.0 17 February 1994 Release evolt 1.01 Release 1.01a 17 March 1994 release 521 , evolt Changelog 2.0 Alpha development ceased, first version to support HTML forms
Although Cello 2.0 had been announced, development ceased before a public release.
IBM released a fix for their TCP/IP V2.0 stack so that Cello would work with OS/2 WinOS/2 on 9 February 1994.
Browser comparison table The following table shows how Cello compared to browsers of its time.
+ Comparison of Web Browsers Browser Cello NCSA X-Mosaic NCSA Mosaic Netscape Navigator Spyglass Mosaic AIR Mosaic InternetWorks Win-Tapestry IBM WebExplorer Operating system Win UNIX WinWinWinWinWinWinOS/2Version 12.42.0 alpha 311.023.06Beta 41.670.91 proxy extended htmlPerformance multithreading dynamic linking deferred image multi-pane multi-windowConfigurability kiosk mode external playersIntegration d&d to clipboard spawnable players search engine(Find)Navigation hotlist bookmark folders categories (tags) menu/button bar import export annotation auto time stamp Source:
Derivatives The first edition of BURKS, a project to produce non-profit CD-ROMs of resources for students of Computer Science, was based on Cello. InterAp, by California Software Inc, was based on Cello and featured a web browser with Telnet, FTP, and a Visual Basic-compatible scripting language called NetScripts. A version of Lovelace came bundledYou can still download latest bundle (with unmodified exe of Cello 1.01a) by manually replacing "lovelace.zip" with "lovecell.zip" in the http server link. with Cello.
Technical While originally Cello required the Distinct Corporation's TCP/IP stack, with the release of Cello Beta Version .8, Cello dropped support for Distinct, and became exclusively Winsock-based.
Originally, although Cello could run on OS/2, OS/2's implementation of Winsock had bugs that prevented Cello from accessing the Internet. The bug, APAR #PN52335, was later fixed allowing Cello to properly work on OS/2.
The user agent for Cello is LII-Cello/<version> libwww/2.5.
DDE support Cello featured Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) support. OLE support and DDE client support were planned, but never released.
An example of how to invoke Cello from a Microsoft Word macro: Sub MAIN ChanNum = DDEInitiate("Cello", "URL") DDEExecute(ChanNum, "http://www.law.cornell.edu") DDETerminate(ChanNum) End Sub
System requirements Cello has the following system requirements:
Processor: 80386(386SX) at 16 MHz or better Operating system: Windows 3.1 / 3.11 / Windows NT 3.5 / OS/2. Ram: 2 MB RAM, 4 MB RAM recommended A TCP/IP connection running Winsock
Criticism Cello was not very stable and its development halted early.
Cello did not render graphics well and required that the user reload the webpage when resizing the window. Like most browsers at the time, Cello also did not support any web security protocols. It was also said that Cello rendered HTML "crudely" and pages would appear jaggedly.
Cello also had sub-par performance in accessing the Internet and processing hypermedia documents.
See also Lynx Mosaic MacWeb Libwww
Notes
References
Bibliography
Further reading
External links