23

I want to trace the development of the web browser back to the earliest point.

The code that would become WebKit began in 1998 as the KDE HTML (KHTML) layout engine and KDE JavaScript (KJS) engine.

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit

KHTML itself came into existence on November 4, 1998,[5] as a fork of the khtmlw library

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KHTML

Anyone know where I can find the earliest repos?

hippietrail
  • 6,646
  • 2
  • 21
  • 60
vaughan
  • 333
  • 6
  • 3
    The oldest I could fit on github was 1.4, and dates back to 2011 : https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/tree/webkitgtk/1.4 – Olivier Sep 11 '23 at 16:08
  • 4
    You could check out CD-ROM images of contemporary Linux distributions that used KDE. Archive.org has a lot of them. – Michael Graf Sep 11 '23 at 16:15
  • For Mozilla family see here: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/40852/source-code-of-original-netscape-navigator – vaughan Sep 11 '23 at 18:07
  • https://sourceforge.net/projects/nirvana.berlios/ has a copy from 2005 just after the Apple fork. So load up on guns and bring your friends, etc, etc. – Tommy Sep 11 '23 at 18:55
  • 12
    I rather like this question, since, while specific, it's also valuable for the more general question: how do you find historical versions of open source software. In theory, it's all been version controlled from near the beginning, but in practice it's not obvious how to find that beginning, or if that beginning even still exists in any meaningful way. – Dranon Sep 11 '23 at 19:32
  • 3
    @Dranon many projects were not version controlled, or not publicly version controlled, and published only through tarballs of releases published on Usenet or FTP sites; those can be quite difficult to track down now. Some current projects with public repositories are still not really publicly version controlled (and perhaps not really version controlled at all, at least as most people understand VCS-backed development); see for example Bash where the repository only tracks release artifacts, not separate meaningful changes. – Stephen Kitt Sep 12 '23 at 07:45
  • @Dranon As a fan of Westwood’s games back-in-the-day (1990s) it was a huge shame when EA (who acquired Westwood in the 2000s) said they had lost all the source-code and assets of the original C&C games (fortunately they somehow found it recently for the Remastered versions) but yeah - it’s a huge problem for nostalgia-tripping gamers. I suppose smaller games studios (like WW) in the 1990s probably didn’t use any source-control at all - especially when the leading solutions (Perforce, SourceSafe, etc) were really awful. – Dai Sep 13 '23 at 03:49

1 Answers1

34

As luck would have it, in 2016 one of the KDE developers reassembled the 1.1.2 release of KDE, i.e. the endpoint of KDE 1.

From that rerelease you can find the KDE 1 version of khtmlw.

As per the modification dates, some of these files have been updated to build in the [then-]modern world. But checking the commit history, commit bffedd0 appears to have been the final change made to khtmlw for KDE 1, back in 1999. So you can clone the repository and check out that commit to undo the modern alterations if desired.

Commit history otherwise seems to extend back to Apr 13, 1997 so all intermediate versions between then and 1999 should be available.

gsc
  • 103
  • 3
Tommy
  • 36,843
  • 2
  • 124
  • 171
  • 1
    Further history of khtml can be found on https://github.com/KDE/kdelibs khtml directory, from Nov 4 1998 to Aug 9 2017 (up to KDE 4), and then on https://invent.kde.org/frameworks/khtml from Dec 18 2013 up to now (KDE Frameworks 5, it will no longer be developed on KDE Frameworks 6, which will only be able to use Qt WebEngine). – ninjalj Sep 13 '23 at 14:24