When was mosaic introduced

Ping Fu, undergraduate student assistant Marc Andreessen and Unix specialist Eric Bina began work on a browser version for X-Windows on Unix computers, first to be released as version 0.

A final Version 1. A version of Mosaic for the Macintosh was developed by Aleks Totic and released a few months later, making Mosaic the first browser with cross-platform support, which besides its graphical user interface might be considered its most important breakthrough. Clark, one of the founders of Silicon Graphics, Inc. SGI , and four other former students and staff of the University of Illinois, started Mosaic Communications Corporation, which eventually became Netscape Communications Corporation , producing the famous Netscape Navigator.

Spyglass subsequently licensed their technology to several other companies, including Microsoft for use in Internet Explorer. The NCSA stopped developing Mosaic in January , since Netscape and Microsoft began to bring large development teams to bear on development of their own browsers. A few people noticed that the Web might be better than Gopher. Several million then suddenly noticed that the Web might be better than sex. But these pieces of "multimedia" were hidden behind links.

If you wanted to look at a picture, you had to click on a link, and the picture would open in a new window. A team of students at the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications, or NCSA, decided the web needed an experience more stimulating and user-friendly than that, so they set to work to build a better browser.

Borrowing design and user interface cues from some other early prototype browsers, they went through a handful of iterations before arriving at the final 1. The result, NCSA Mosaic , was the first web browser with the ability to display text and images inline , meaning you could put pictures and text on the same page together, in the same window. It was a radical step forward for the web, which was at that point, a rather dull experience. It took the boring "document" layout of your standard web page and transformed it into something much more visually exciting, like a magazine.

And, wow, it was easy. If you wanted to go somewhere, you just clicked. Search for:. Living Internet. For information, please contact the author. Less than 18 months after its introduction, Mosaic had become the Internet "browser of choice" for more than a million users and set off an exponential growth in the number of Web servers and surfers. Marc Andreessen, a member of the team that developed Mosaic, would later help found Netscape Communications.

Today, NSF is devising strategies and plans to develop and deploy an advanced cyberinfrastructure—a state-of-the-art computing, information, networking and instrumentation infrastructure that will revolutionize the conduct of science and engineering research and education the same way Mosaic and the Internet have revolutionized how people communicate, shop and stay informed.

Investigators Joseph Hardin Marc Andreeson.