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1.2. MosaicAlso 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:
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).
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