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Over the past decade, the World Wide Web has become a ubiquitous presence and a multi-billion-dollar industry, according to analysts. And one catalyst for the Web’s explosive growth came from the UI’s Urbana campus. Mosaic, the first graphical Web browser made available to the public at large, was developed by a software development group at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). Although the Internet had been in existence for many years when Mosaic debuted in 1993, Mosaic helped it evolve into an information superhighway by sparking the public’s interest in exploring this new frontier. “NCSA became part of Internet history when it released Mosaic and the general public began to discover the Web,” said NCSA Director Dan Reed. “Today’s browsers still depend on that original bit of ingenuity.” In the early 1990s, the network of computers that made up the Internet and the data they contained were largely the realm of universities, information technology professionals and the military. Simply locating and accessing information on the system could be a daunting task for nontechnical people who lacked proficiency with Unix software. “It was the dark ages,” said Michelle Butler, technical program manager at NCSA and one of the many staff and students connected with the Mosaic project. “You couldn’t get to any information out there at all. There was no way to search it or list where things were at. There was no common spot to get data from or a common format for data. There was no reason for the regular person to use their home computer to access the Internet because there was nothing out there for them.” The prototype for Mosaic was developed during 1992 by a group of NCSA staff and students who were intrigued by two recent developments in computing: the hypertext protocol, a system of electronic links for structuring and displaying documents, and a program called the World Wide Web, a system for linking computer systems and sharing documents over the Internet that was developed in 1989 by a software engineer at CERN, the European Particle Physics Research Laboratory, in Switzerland. The NCSA team visualized greater potential applications for these mechanisms and incorporated them into a software program that was given the name Mosaic. When Mosaic made its 1993 debut, it opened up the Internet for nontechnical consumers by simplifying access. Users did not need to be proficient with a slew of cumbersome, single-purpose applications; even neophytes could “surf” Internet pages with relative ease, thanks to hyperlinks – electronic links that allowed users to jump between documents and parts of documents. Behind the scenes, Mosaic could interface with protocols such as FTP, Gopher and Telnet to find and retrieve information. Files Mosaic could not handle internally, such as sound files and JPEG images, were automatically routed to external players or viewers. But perhaps what really sparked the public’s imagination was Mosaic’s graphical capabilities, which delivered full-color images, sound and textual formatting, adding exciting dimensions to Internet materials. Once users discovered that perusing documents in cyberspace could be fun and relatively easy, more people started getting interested in using the Internet and the number of Web pages available began to multiply exponentially. Businesses also began taking notice of the Internet and its potential as a marketplace and advertising medium. Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), the scripting language Mosaic used to create the graphical and textual effects, started becoming the standard protocol for Web pages. Until that time, users often encountered problems loading and viewing pages when the coding was incompatible with their browsers. “Mosaic actually evolved the entire Internet,” Butler said. Although other browsers existed at the time, Mosaic was the first widely distributed product. Noncommercial users could download it free from the NCSA site. The X (Unix) platform version was released in April 1993, and versions for Windows and Macintosh followed in December, providing the browser to users with all sizes of computer systems. Within a year of Mosaic’s release, the NCSA Web site recorded more than a million downloads, and that number doubled again by 1995, with new users acquiring the popular browser at the rate of 70,000 per month. “We couldn’t keep the server up to hand this code out fast enough,” Butler said. In 1994, NCSA began transferring Mosaic to the commercial sector via Spyglass Inc., and licensing agreements with more than 100 software development companies, including Microsoft, which incorporated it into Internet Explorer. Although NCSA no longer supports Mosaic, documentation and information are still available in the archives on NCSA’s site. The 10th anniversary of Mosaic’s release will be commemorated April 29 with a symposium featuring a panel discussion by several computing experts, who will talk about Mosaic’s impact and the future of computing.
NCSA Web browser ‘Mosaic’ was catalyst for Internet growth
By Sharita Forrest, Assistant Editor (217) 244-1072; slforres@illinois.edu
