Chimera browser

Chimera was a vintage Desktop web browser that ran on Unix-like operating systems. It was developed for about 4 years before being discontinued.

It's a bit of a fun exercise in internet archeology to find out more information about Chimera. I originally had the homepage of Chimera linked as

https://www.slac.stanford.edu/grp/cd/soft/chimera/chimera.html

which refers to Chimera simply as some kind of browser dedicated to browsing online internal/private documentation rather than a full internet navigator. However an anonymous helpful person has done a bit of digging and sent me some more information about the history of Chimera which resparked the hunt! It turns out Chimera was actually more of a web browser than just a "documentation browsr", and the project had been started even earlier than I thought.

This helpful soul sent me this archived page which indicates a few things:

- There was an original "version one" of Chimera, which made it to version 1.65. Clicking around on the archived page, it reveals that Chimera was a very "X11" type browser; you can apparently set it to listen for connections and then tell it over a socket to load an image URI... Very old-school!

- Chimera 2 was a complete re-write.

- Chimera was written by "John", who on https://www.w3.org/People.html is indicated as John Kilburg. The page says "Chimera uses a modification of the NCSA HTML widget to display HTML." Even though the "Created at" date on the page says 1994, this doesn't necessarily indicate Chimera was built that early; the latest update on that page says October 1999, so I thought that it's likely John's details were added sometime after 1994...

However!

- I just found this page:

https://web.archive.org/web/19990219162203/http://src.doc.ic.ac.uk/packages/chimera/

which has a copy of the Chimera 1.65 source code (unfortunately not saved by archive.org), and the date stamp is "02-Apr-95".

Going even further, there's a "bug" directory:

https://web.archive.org/web/19991021225618/http://src.doc.ic.ac.uk/packages/chimera/bug-chimera/

that shows that bugs in Chimera were being reported as early as December 1993:

https://web.archive.org/web/19991022051520/http://src.doc.ic.ac.uk/packages/chimera/bug-chimera/dec93.gz

which makes Chimera... extremely old!

Thanks very much to the person who sent me the older links to Chimera and resparked my explorations!

The release date and the latest version number of Chimera is displayed on the download page - this is very useful - it means you can easily tell how recently the latest version has been released. Using versions of software that were released a long time ago is bad security practice; the software may have old, unpatched bugs in it.

Features

• Bookmarks
• Fonts
• Table support

The author and the contributors have compiled and run chimera 1.70 on

• i586 Linux-2.0.27-ELF and Linux-1.2.8-a.out out of the box
• IBM RS/6000 AIX 3.2.5, out of the box
• SparcUltra2 SunOS 5.5.1 (Solaris), after bypassing xmkmf and adding -l's
• Sun Sparcstation ELC SunOS 4.1.1, needed some extra cc options
• IRIX 6.3
• DEC UNIX 3.2