Before Netscape: Web browsers of the early 1990s (2011)

What’s striking about these early applications is that they had already worked out many of the features we associate with later browsers. No, Pei Wei didn’t play the viola, “it just happened to make a snappy abbreviation” of Visually Interactive Object-oriented Language and Application, write James Gillies and Robert Cailliau in their history of the World Wide Web. One of the most significant and innovative features of ViolaWWW was that it allowed a developer to embed scripts and “applets” in the browser page.

Source: arstechnica.com