The Web, as we know it, got its start 20-years ago, when Mosaic, the first popular Web browser, arrived.
We take the Web for granted today. But, 20-years ago, the “WEB “was a mystery that only techie geeks knew about . Then, along came the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Mosaic, the first popular graphical Web browser, and everything changed.
Today, you turn on any device, and two-seconds later, you’re on the Web. Before Mosaic even people who had access to the Internet which, if you were lucky, was at V.32 bis’s speedy 28.8Kbps. Relatively difficult to use character-based interfaces programs such as Lynx and WWW. Mosaic changed all that.
Mosaic, the creation of Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, wasn’t the first graphical Web browser. That honor goes to ViolaWWW. This browser, however, only worked on Unix workstations using the X Windows System. Cello was the first graphical Web browser for Windows. Be that as it may no one argues that Mosaic was the first truly popular Web browser.
That’s not to say that Mosaic was easy to use. It wasn’t. In the early-to-mid 1990s, simply getting on the Internet was still something of a black art. Windows, for example, didn’t natively support the Internet’s fundamental protocol, TCP/IP, until Windows 95 appeared. If you wanted TCP/IP on Windows before that, you needed to use the arcane but absolutely vital Trumpet Winsocketprogram and find an Internet Service Provider (ISP).
It was worth it though. In those early days people were frantic to get on the Web and Mosaic, a freeware browser, far more often than not, was the first browser they’d use. Andreessen and Bina, no fools they, saw the business possibilities on the Web and took the Mosaic code-base and turned it, in turn, into the first successful commercial Web browser: Netscape in October 1994.
Microsoft, which had been slow off the mark to realize how important the Internet and the Web would be, also used the Mosaic code base, via a company called Spyglass, to make the first version of Internet Explorer (IE). IE 1.0 was released in as an add-on to Windows 95 in the Microsoft Plus package in August 1995.
So, it was that by the mid-90s, Mosaic had become the most Web browser of the early popular Internet years. Indeed, even now, while the program itself is an anachronism, you can still see how its basic design decisions have strongly improved today’s Web browsers such as Firefox, its most direct descendant; Chrome and IE.
It may have been 20-years since Mosaic has been released, but we’re still seeing its influence today.
[Via ZDNet]
Happy birthday Mosaic! 20 years of the graphical Web browser
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