A decade ago, the Mosaic browser revolutionized the Web. And the price? Free

[Mark Holtz]

From SF Gate (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2003/04/27/national1622EDT0524.DTL):

A decade ago, the Mosaic browser revolutionized the Web. And the price? Free

Ten years ago this month, software developers at the University of Illinois released Mosaic, which used graphics and simplicity to open the World Wide Web to the masses.

What had been the domain of scientists and computer geeks dominated by cumbersome language and technical complexity became simple enough for nearly anyone to use.

Mosaic was released in April 1993 by the school's National Center for Supercomputing Applications as free software. It became the foundation for today's Web browsers, such as Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Netscape Communications' Communicator.

Full Article Here (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2003/04/27/national1622EDT0524.DTL)

[Mark Holtz]

From NCSA (http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Divisions/PublicAffairs/MosaicHistory/impact.html)

NSF Inititiative Leads to NCSA Mosaic and E-Commerce

The creation of NCSA's Mosaic™ Web browser—and the birth of a worldwide "dot.com" sector that is projected to be worth $6.8 trillion by 2004 (Forrester Research)—really began in the early 1960s with the creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). ARPA focused on the military's use of computer networking and communications technology. Early on, its leaders realized that to quickly advance new technologies ARPA needed to work with universities, and they began laying the foundations for what would become ARPANET.

The software program that effectively opened the Internet to millions was CERN's World Wide Web hypertext protocol, first invented by Tim Berners-Lee. A team of researchers at NCSA picked up on Berners-Lee's idea and developed NCSA Mosaic. In 1993, Mosaic became the first popular graphical Web browser and was offered free to the general public from NCSA's Internet site. By 1994, Mosaic had a user base of several million users worldwide. In addition, NCSA developed WWW server software (originally called httpd—made commercial as Apache), which is now used in about 66 percent of all Web servers.

Full article here (http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Divisions/PublicAffairs/MosaicHistory/impact.html)