NCSA
Mosaic is free for internal use by commercial organizations, and is also available
for licensing by commercial organizations for modification and/or distribution.
For information, please contact the author. For more information on the NCSA Mosaic
project in general, please feel free to contact the author.
-
Marc Andreessen, NCSA Mosaic Technical Summary, Feb 20, 1993. |
Mosaic
was the first popular Web browser, and greatly helped spread use and knowledge
of the web across
the world.
In 1992, Joseph Hardin and Dave Thompson worked at the NCSA
(National Center for Supercomputer Applications), a research institute at the
University of Illinois. When they heard about Tim Berners-Lee's
work, they downloaded the ViolaWWW browser, and then demonstrated the web to
NCSA's
Software Design Group by connecting to the web server at CERN
over the Internet. The group was duly impressed.
Two students from the group, Marc
Andreessen and Eric Bina, began work on a browser version for X-Windows on Unix
computers,
and released the first
version
in February, 1993. Bina provided expert coding support. Andreessen provided excellent
customer support, monitoring the newsgroups continuously to ensure that they
knew
about and could fix any bugs and make desired enhancements.
A
version of Mosaic for the Macintosh was developed by Aleks Totic and released
a few months later, making Mosaic the first browser with cross-platform support.
One of the NCSA's missions is to aid scientific research by producing
noncommercial software, giving Hardin and Thompson a ready-made vehicle to set
up a funded project to develop Mosaic as a free, publicly available browser, managed
by Hardin, and with Andreessen as the software lead.
Mosaic built on Berners-Lee's
server, and provided support for graphics, sound, and video clips. An early version
introduced forms support, enabling many powerful new uses and applications. Innovations
with use of bookmarks and history files were added. Mosaic quickly became the
most popular web browser, helping accelerate the growth in web use even more.
In
August, 1994, NCSA assigned all commercial rights to Mosaic to Spyglass, Inc.
Spyglass subsequently licensed their technology to several other companies,
including
Microsoft for use in Internet Explorer.
The NCSA stopped developing Mosaic
in January 1997, since Netscape and Microsoft
began to bring large development teams to bear on development of their own browsers.
Resources. The
following references provide more information:
- Andreessen, Marc; NCSA
Mosaic Technical Summary; National Center for
Supercomputing Applications; February 20, 1993.
(Here under
the name "mosaic.orig.ps", and here under the name "mosaic.2.1.ps" for
Revision 2.1 from
8 May.)
- A list of home pages of early Netscape programmers can be found linked on the Netscape About page.