http://www.zdnet.com/article/mosaics-birthday-25-years-of-the-modern-web/?loc=newsletter_featured_related_listing&ftag=TRE-03-10aaa6b&bhid=24728584684180976123116719441341
Mosaic's birthday: 25 years of the modern web
25 years ago, the first release of Mosaic web browser appeared and the web, as
you know it, began.
By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols for Networking | January 23, 2018 -- 23:03 GMT
(15:03 PST) | Topic: Networking
In the beginning, the web, or WEB as it was known then, was a mystery. Like
gopher and archie, it was a character-based internet tool interface that only
the proud, the few, and the early internet users knew about. Then, everything
changed. First, the Commercial Internet Exchange (CIX) made it easy for anyone
to get on the net, and then two graduate students, Marc Andreessen and Eric
Bina, at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, created the first popular web browser:
Mosaic.
Mosaic's first beta was released for Unix operating systems running X Window on
January 23, 1993. It wasn't the first graphical web browser. That honor goes to
ViolaWWW, a Unix browser, although some argue the even more obscure Erwise
should get the credit for being the first web browser. The early browser Cello
takes the prize for being the first Windows graphical web browser. No matter
who really gets the credit for being the very first web browser, no one can
argue Mosaic was the first popular web browser.
Mosaic changed everything. Because Mosaic was fast and enabled people to see
images within pages, it quickly gained fans. Earlier browsers could only show
images in separate windows. Moasic was also the first "easy to use" browser. It
also popularized icons, bookmarks, and a more attractive interface.
That's not to say anyone could use Mosaic. It was far from simple to set up. In
those days, getting on the internet was a major pain in the rump. For instance
Windows didn't natively support the internet's fundamental protocol, TCP/IP,
until Windows 95 appeared. If you wanted TCP/IP on Windows 3.1x, you needed to
use the arcane but absolutely necessary Trumpet Winsocket program, and find an
internet service provider (ISP).
Just because it was hard to do, it didn't stop people. As Bob Metcalfe,
co-founder of Ethernet, wrote in 1995, after Andreessen and Bina developed NCSA
Mosaic, "Several million [people] then suddenly noticed that the web might be
better than sex."
Well maybe. As the popular musical Avenue Q wittily points out, "The Internet
Is For Porn." But, we didn't know that yet.
More dryly, the NCSA stated that soon after Mosaic was released, "more than
5,000 copies were being downloaded each month; the center was receiving
hundreds of thousands of email inquiries a week, and internet traffic was
dramatically rising." By mid-1994, Joseph Hardin, an NCSA director, claimed
Mosaic downloads were up to 50,000 a month. In the day when 28.8 kilobits per
second was a fast internet connection, that's a remarkable number.
Andreessen and Bina quickly realized they could make a mint from Mosaic. In
October 1994, they used their experience in building Mosaic to create the first
successful commercial web browser: Netscape Navigator. Five years later almost
to the day, Netscape would release the Netscape source code as open source.
This code would become the foundation to the Firefox web browser.
Microsoft, despite what Bill Gates would later claim, was late in realizing
just how important the internet and the web would be. Microsoft played catch up
by copying Spyglass' Mosaic-like code base to make the first version of
Internet Explorer (IE). IE 2.0 was released as an add-on to Windows 95 in the
Microsoft Plus package in August 1995. There was never an IE 1.0.
Mosaic transformed our world. Today, we live our lives on the web, and we all
owe a debt of gratitude to Mosaic. While the program itself, superseded by
Netscape, lost most of its users by 1998, we're still living in the world
Mosaic pioneered.
