Mosaic (web browser)

Mosaic is considered by scholars to be the first important World Wide Web browser and Gopher client, and was the first browser which ran on Windows (rather than UNIX), which opened the web up to the general public ^*.

It was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) beginning in 1992, released in 1993, and officially ended on January 7, 1997 ^*.

General Background

Web browsers were "the killer application of the 1990s" because they were the first programs to provide a multimedia graphical user interface to the Internet's burgeoning wealth of distributed information services (formerly mostly limited to FTP, Usenet and Gopher) at a time when access to the Internet was expanding rapidly outside its previous domain of academia and large industrial research institutions.

At the time of Mosaic's development, other browsers existed, notably ViolaWWW. This is outlined in Ed Krol's popular user guide to the Internet, published in 1992, Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog, which was published prior to the introduction of Mosaic.

These browsers, however, would not create the kind of impact that Mosaic did upon public use of the internet ^*. In the October 1994 Issue of Wired, Gary Wolfe notes in the article, "The (Second Phase of the) Revolution Has Begun: Don't look now, but Prodigy, AOL, and CompuServe are all suddenly obsolete - and Mosaic is well on its way to becoming the world's standard interface":

When it comes to smashing a paradigm, pleasure is not the most important thing. It is the only thing. If this sounds wrong, consider Mosaic. Mosaic is the celebrated graphical "browser" that allows users to travel through the world of electronic information using a point-and-click interface. Mosaic's charming appearance encourages users to load their own documents onto the Net, including color photos, sound bites, video clips, and hypertext "links" to other documents. By following the links - click, and the linked document appears - you can travel through the online world along paths of whim and intuition. Mosaic is not the most direct way to find online information. Nor is it the most powerful. It is merely the most pleasurable way, and in the 18 months since it was released, Mosaic has incited a rush of excitement and commercial energy unprecedented in the history of the Net ^*.

Mosaic background

NCSA Mosaic was originally designed and programmed for Unix's X Window System by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina at NCSA. Funding for the development of Mosaic came from the High-Performance Computing and Communications Initiative, a program created by the High Performance Computing Act of 1991 (or The Gore Bill after its author, then-Senator Al Gore) ^*.

Development of Mosaic began in December 1992. Version 1.0 was released on April 22, 1993, followed by two maintenance releases during summer 1993. A port of Mosaic to the Commodore Amiga was available by October 1993. Version 2.0 of NCSA Mosaic was released in December 1993, along with version 1.0 releases for both the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows. An Acorn Archimedes port was underway in May 1994.

The licensing terms for NCSA Mosaic were generous for a proprietary software program. For all versions non-commercial use was generally free (with certain limitations). In addition the X Window System/Unix version publicly provided source code (source code for the other versions was available after agreements were signed). Despite persistent rumors to the contrary, however, Mosaic was never released as open source software during its brief reign as a major browser; there were always constraints on permissible uses without payment.

Marc Andreessen, the leader of the team that developed Mosaic, left NCSA and, with Jim 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. Mosaic Communications eventually became Netscape Communications Corporation, producing Netscape Navigator.

Spyglass licensed the technology and trademarks from NCSA for producing their own web browser but never used any of the NCSA Mosaic source code. ^* Spyglass Mosaic was later licensed by Microsoft, and it was modified and renamed Internet Explorer. If an Internet Explorer user selects "help" from the menu bar, and then "about", a credit to Mosaic will be displayed. In addition, the 1995 user guide The Complete Guide to HTML, specifically states in a section called Coming Attractions, that Explorer "will be based on the Mosaic program" (p. 331).

Importance of Mosaic

Scholars consider Mosaic to be the web browser which led to the internet boom of the 1990s. Robert Reid underscores this importance stating, "while still an undergraduate, Marc wrote the Mosaic software...that made the web popularly relevant and touched off the revolution" (p.xlii). Reid notes that Andreessen's team hoped:

to rectify many of the shortcomings of the very primitive prototypes then floating around the Internet. Most significantly, their work transformed the appeal of the Web from niche uses in the technical area to mass-market appeal. In particular, these University of Illinois students made two key changes to the Web browser, which hyper-boosted its appeal: they added graphics to what was otherwise boring text-based software, and, most importantly, they ported the software from so-called Unix computers that are popular only in technical and academic circles, to the Microsoft Windows operating system, which is used on more than 80 percent of the computers in the world, especially personal and commercial computers. (p.xxv).

Reid also refers to Matthew Gray's well-respected website, Internet Statistics: Growth and Usage of the Web and the Internet, which indicates a dramatic leap in web use around the time of Mosaic's introduction (p.xxv).

In addition, David Hudson concurs with Reid, noting that:

Marc Andreessen's realization of Mosaic, based on the work of Berners-Lee and the hypertext theorists before him, is generally recognized as the beginning of the web as it is now known. Mosaic, the first web browser to win over the Net masses, was released in 1993 and made freely accessible to the public. The adjective phenomenal, so often overused in this industry, is genuinely applicable to the...'explosion' in the growth of the web after Mosaic appeared on the scene. Starting with next to nothing, the rates of the web growth (quoted in the press) hovering around tens of thousands of percent over ridiculously short periods of time were no real surprise (p.42).

End of Mosaic

Mosaic's popularity as a separate browser began to lessen upon the release of Andreessen's Netscape Navigator in 1994. As Ian S. Graham notes in the section called "Coming Attractions" in The Complete Guide to HTML, "Netscape Communications has designed an all - new WWW browser Netscape, that has significant enhancements over the original Mosaic program" (p. 332).

By 1998 its userbase had almost completely evaporated. After NCSA stopped work on Mosaic, development of the NCSA Mosaic for the X Window System sourcecode was continued by several independent groups. These independent development efforts include mMosaic (multicast Mosaic) which ceased development in early 2004 and VMS Mosaic ^* which is still under active development (as of May 2006).

References

Graham, Ian S. The Complete Guide to HTML. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1995. (First Edition)
Hudson, David. Rewired: A Brief and Opinionated Net History. Indianapolis: Macmillan Technical Publishing, 1997
Reid, Robert H. Architects of the Web: 1000 Days That Built the Future of Business. New York: John Wiley and Sons Inc., 1997.
Wolfe, Gary.The (Second Phase of the) Revolution Has Begun: Don't look now, but Prodigy, AOL, and CompuServe are all suddenly obsolete - and Mosaic is well on its way to becoming the world's standard interface. Wired Magazine, 2:10, October 1994.

External links

NCSA Mosaic -- September 10, 1993 Demo
Beyond the Web: Excavating the Real World Via Mosaic - early application of Mosaic
Mosaic for modern Linux systems
Mosaic archive on evolt.org
Mosaic for OpenVMS systems

Web browsers | Gopher Clients | History of computing | Internet history