Chances are that most readers of this blog can’t do without Email and the Internet, today!  And, chances are you’ve never ever heard of Pine or Lynx.

So, is Lynx just a wild cat?  According to its Wikipedia entry :

Lynx is a free open-source, text-only Web browser for use on cursor-addressable character cell terminals.

Browsing in Lynx consists of highlighting the chosen link using cursor keys, or having all links on a page numbered and entering the chosen link’s number. Current versions support SSL and many HTML features. Tables are linearized (scrunched together one cell after another without tabular structure), while frames are identified by name and can be explored as if they were separate pages. Lynx cannot inherently display various types of non-text content on the web, such as images and video, but it can launch external programs to handle it, like an image viewer or video player.

Because lynx does not support graphics, web bugs that track user information are not sent, and emails can be read without the invasion of privacy of HTML enabled web browsers.

Speaking of web browsers, here’s a bit from the Univ. of Washington on Pine :

Pine – a Program for Internet News & Email – is a tool for reading, sending, and managing electronic messages. Pine was developed by UW Technology at the University of Washington.

The guiding principles for Pine’s user-interface were: careful limitation of features, one-character mnemonic commands, always-present command menus, immediate user feedback, and high tolerance for user mistakes.

Read those descriptions again to try and understand what these state-of-the-art technologies came with.

Back in those days, (I’m talking about the mid ’90s here!) you had to be a University student or a geek to see one of these in action.  Those from India may also recall VSNL’s “shell account” as another affordable way to hop on to the Internet and use one of these beauties…

Pine was the first email client I had the pleasure of using, and Lynx was the browser using which I first set eyes on the World Wide Web…  And, it was simply love at first sight!