A rotating reading device designed for consulting multiple books at once: a mechanical ancestor of tabbed browsing and split screens. Formerly at http://www.mindspring.com/~jntolva/ramelli.html.
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Reading machines browsers
To browse means to read superficially or at random, to shop around without necessarily buying, to feed by continual nibbling. An old verb, it goes back to the 15th century. In the 19th it gave rise to a noun (browser) that remained little used until the creation of Mosaic, in the mid-1990s. As the support par excellence of online reading, the most common browsers (Netscape and Internet Explorer) almost transformed the idea of the Net into the experience of a vast 19th-century library. Almost… Cyberspace is too big to be governed by a single synonym.
A browser that treats the web as a fluid media stream rather than a sequence of pages, composing text, images and data into a dynamic environment. http://www.netomat.net/.
A browser that overlays content from multiple sites into a single, chaotic collage, turning surfing into a visual and political clash of pages.
An artist-made browser by JODI that sabotages the conventions of interface and navigation, exposing how much “reading” depends on software defaults.
A time machine for the web that lets you browse archived sites through emulated period browsers such as Netscape Navigator. Reloading GeoCities in its original environment, it brings back not only the pages, but the look and feel of mid-1990s web surfing.
Note: This link was added in the 2025 update. After twenty-five years of web transformations, it became necessary to keep a gateway to the internet powered by Netscape — the browser environment in which The Book after the Book was originally conceived.