SlipKnot was one of the earliest World Wide Web browsers, available to Microsoft Windows users between November 1994 and January 1998.

They would run a terminal emulator program on their PCs, temporarily turning the machines into black screen terminals, dial into the Unix server, and then run text-based internet software such as pine and elm for e-mail, gopher for file retrieval, and lynx or www for a text-based browsing experience of the new World Wide Web.

This was evident in the design of the program – for instance, after clicking on a hypertext link, the user had to wait until all parts of the page had been retrieved by the browser before anything showed on the screen.

High-speed connections allowed TCP/IP's ability to do multiple retrievals at once, and for the delay between the user's request for a page and its appearance to be short.

Having seen Mosaic late in 1993 and been captivated by its potential, Peter Brooks set out in April 1994 to create a fully graphic, multifont web browser for home PC users.

First, SlipKnot would request the retrieval of individual parts of a desired web page – the text, and then each picture – into files on the Unix host.