Welcome to the Rider’s Digest blog, where we share behind-the-scenes updates on Horse and what it’s really like to build an indie browser from scratch.
Hello, Riders, It’s been a week since we took time off from building Horse Browser and enjoyed a much-needed vacation to Elly’s home country, the UK. We’ve been reflecting on our trip and wanted to share some things that inspired us along the way.
All You Need Is Lovell
First up, we took a trip to Jodrell Bank Observatory, where we got to see the Lovell Telescope. It’s the third largest telescope in the world, a brilliant feat of engineering and just happens to be down the road from where Elly grew up. The observatory was the vision of a single scientist, Sir Bernard Lovell, and its telescope, engineered by Sir Charles Husband, continues to make important astronomic discoveries since being completed in 1957.
We were interested to learn more about its construction and how, during the build, the cost of engineering over-ran its budget. The spiralling cost led to an enquiry by the Public Accounts Committee and Lovell was threatened with prison. It’s crazy to think the telescope and its discoveries might never have existed.
While it might seem silly to compare building a browser to the world’s biggest telescope (although they both involve engineering… of different kinds!), we found lots of inspiration in the history of Jodrell Bank. It’s always surprising to learn that even the most impressive projects come up against obstacles and detractors. To build anything you need some pretty extreme perseverance.
Bumping into Internet Friends
London is home to many world-class research archives & institutions and we were lucky enough to be staying close to the Sir Francis Crick Institute and Wellcome Collection, as well as the British Library and British Museum, where we stopped off to visit the Rosetta Stone. Deciphering languages and code is Pascal’s jam.
While in London, we also swung by the Microsoft, Samsung and Apple stores to see what’s new. In fact we were in the Apple Store in Covent Garden, when one of our very earliest Riders, @marcinignac, came up to say hello. This was such a magical moment of our trip.
Dreaming Spires
Our final destination was the University of Oxford (Elly’s alma mater). It’s a special spot for Horse Browser since it’s where Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, studied in the 1970s. He built his first computer while studying there. In 1990, he proposed and created a World Wide Web while working at CERN. Thinking about its original design inspired Pascal to build Horse Browser’s navigation style, Trails.
While in Oxford, we also took a tour of the beautiful Bodleian Library. The library contains over 13 million books and continues to take in a physical copy of every single item published in the UK and Ireland. To us, the logistics of this physical archive seems even more of a reason to improve how people store and organise research online.
During the Bodleian tour, we also learnt about the historical development of the library’s shelving and cataloguing systems. Early chained libraries used fore-edge shelving with numbers or pictures drawn on the book’s fore-edge so readers could detect the book’s contents at a glance. This ingenuity reminded us of how we’re using emojis as our own cataloguing system in Trails… Those early libraries were onto something!
