Mosaic

In the early 1990s, the World Wide Web designed by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN remained confidential: its first browsers — WorldWideWeb on NeXT, the text-mode Line Mode Browser, ViolaWWW — existed only on a few academic platforms and were austere. At the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a team funded by the High Performance Computing Act passed in 1991 at Senator Al Gore's initiative was working on scientific visualisation. Two students, Marc Andreessen and the programmer Eric Bina, started developing a new browser there in December 1992, initially for X Window on UNIX workstations. The first public release of NCSA Mosaic was made available on 22 April 1993. Its main contribution lay in the convergence of three ideas: an accessible graphical interface (point-and-click, back/forward buttons, bookmarks), inline image display via the <img> tag introduced by Andreessen, and cross-platform availability — Windows and Macintosh from the autumn of 1993, which massively broadened the audience. Mosaic was distributed free of charge and met with immediate success in American and then European universities. In September 1993 a Windows version aimed at the general public was released, and the number of users began to grow exponentially. NCSA issued commercial licences in 1994, notably to Spyglass, from which Internet Explorer would be derived. In 1994, Andreessen left the NCSA, joined forces with Jim Clark, the founder of Silicon Graphics, and created Mosaic Communications, quickly renamed Netscape Communications. Their browser Netscape Navigator, released in December 1994, rapidly overtook Mosaic and triggered the Internet bubble with its initial public offering on 9 August 1995. Mosaic ceased to be maintained in January 1997, but its code inspired the whole lineage of modern browsers. Together with the Web and the Internet, it remains the tool that made the digital infrastructure accessible to the general public and launched the founding decade of the Web era.