Mark Pilgrim delves into the origin of HTML’s IMG tag. An entertaining read for Web geeks, but boy does that make me feel old. X Mosaic, Andrew, Intermedia, A/UX, NeXT, Display Postscript, HyTime, Linux on USENET, and Midas. Wow!! I was just two years into graduate school when this stuff was breaking out. I was familiar with a lot of these technologies because my adviser was into multimedia systems and my dissertation was eventually on programming language design for multimedia scripting. I was also an early Linux adopter.
Once again though, the late lamented NeWS graphical windowing system can’t get into the mix. Could have been Flash + JavaScript + Java before any of them. Just a bit too far ahead of its time.