Section 1.2. Mosaic

1.2. Mosaic

Also in April 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign released Mosaic 1.0 for the Unix operating system (1.0 for Windows and Mac OS appeared in December). This was the big one, the software that finally began to make the Web popular. As you can see in [click here], Mosaic looks a lot like the web browsers we use today, with menus, buttons, images that appeared inside the web page instead of in a separate window (yes, that is how browsers had displayed images prior to Mosaic), and an address bar.

And who were the main coders behind Mosaic? An employee of the NCSA named Eric Bina and a young intern named Marc Andreessen, who was still an undergraduate at the University of Illinois. Andreessen was responsible for several features that you can't see in [click here], and those were the things that really made Mosaic special. For instance, Mosaic was the first browser that was easy for "normal" Internet users (although "normal" in 1993 was pretty advanced compared to the general population) to download, install, and use. Further, Andreessen was careful to actually support Mosaic's users: he listened to their requests and complaints and improved the browser accordingly, and he provided support if users needed it. The result? Mosaic was the most user-friendly web browser available in the early 1990s, the one that was "good enough" and easy enough to appeal to most users.

Mosaic got a lot of press, and the word spread fast among Net users: if you wanted to enjoy the online world in a whole new way, get Mosaic on your computer. The following selections from newsgroup postings of the time give you an idea of the breathless wonder and excitement that Mosaic engendered in its users:

Richard Melick on November 17, 1993

"I got Mosaic up and running last night on my PC at home and I wanted to tell everyone that it looks great! NCSA has provided us with a peek of the future of the Internet with this product... I think that this program is a real winner! I would recommend it to any Windows user with a direct link to the Internet."

Arnold Bloemer on December 10, 1993

" If you're not using Mosaic for X version 2.0, upgrade immediately! You'll be glad you did. Kudos to Eric Bina and Marc Andreessen, the developers of NCSA Mosaic... Their work is helping to revolutionize the way that people `view' the Net."

Joe Kohn on March 8, 1994

"I saw Mosaic the other day for the first time, and it completely knocked my socks off... I was just floored by what I saw... With Mosaic, you could search the net by using your mouse. I want it... It's kind of incredible that I've been using the net for probably 2 years, and seeing Mosaic, it was like I was seeing something different than I'd ever seen before. I was seeing the future. I haven't seen anything so that completely impressed me in a long long time... maybe never. I want Mosaic, and I want it now!"

Nenette Alejandria on March 24, 1994

"I REALLY love Mosaic!! I've been downloading tons of stuff from everywhere! As Aimee said, it is pretty amazing! Words don't do justice. I recommend that you all try it sometime."

Mosaic was a phenomenal success, and it helped to popularize the still-young World Wide Web. In just a few months, traffic on the Net devoted to the Web jumped over 10,000%, as more than a 1,000 copies of Mosaic were downloaded every day (that might seem like a small number now, but remember how small the online population was in 1993-4).

Time capsule

For a fantastic artifact of the time, read Wired magazine's October 1994 article "The (Second Phase of the) Revolution Has Begun," available at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.10/mosaic_pr.html. It begins like this: "Don't look now, but Prodigy, AOL, and CompuServe are all suddenly obsoleteand Mosaic is well on its way to becoming the world's standard interface." In 1994, this looked like the truth.