Web site: ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/ (not active)
Category: Network
Subcategory: Web browsers
Platform: AmigaOS, Mac OS, Unix, OS/2, Windows, OpenVMS
License: Proprietary
Interface: GUI
Wikipedia: NCSA Mosaic
First release: January 23, 1993
NCSA Mosaic – an Internet information browser and World Wide Web client. NCSA Mosaic was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. NCSA Mosaic software is copyrighted by The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois (UI), and ownership remains with the UI.
NCSA Mosaic is a web browser with a graphical user interface and client functionality for earlier Internet protocols such as FTP, NNTP, and Gopher; its support for multiple Internet protocols gave it its name. The browser’s primary developers were Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, who worked at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Development of the browser began in late 1992, and versions for Unix, Windows, Amiga, and Mac were released in 1993.
Its intuitive interface, reliability, availability for Microsoft Windows, free downloadability, and ease of installation contributed to its widespread popularity on the Internet. Mosaic was also the first browser to display images inline with text rather than in a separate window. The browser’s introduction is considered one of the most important milestones in the development of the World Wide Web, as it popularized it through its accessibility to a wide range of personal computer users. “There are two eras of the Internet—before Mosaic and after. The combination of Tim Berners-Lee’s web protocols, which provided connectivity, and Marc Andreessen’s browser, which provided a superb interface, was explosive. In twenty-four months, the Internet went from obscurity to absolute ubiquity.”
The ideas underlying NCSA Mosaic were further developed in Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer, as well as a number of commercial browsers that failed to gain widespread adoption, including Air Mosaic, Infomosaic, and Fujitsu. Mosaic development ceased on January 7, 1997.
The NSCA Mosaic screenshot source: Wikipedia; License: Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.
