25 years of Mosaic: the beginnings of the modern Web


25 years of Mosaic: the beginnings of the modern Web



In the beginning, the Web or WEB as it was then called was a mystery. Like Gopher and Archie, it was a text-based internet interface that only the proudest, most knowledgeable Internet user knew. But everything changed quickly. First, the Commercial Internet Exchange allowed anyone to connect to the Internet . Then two students from the University of Illinois UrbanaChampaign's National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, created the first popular Web browser: Mosaic .

The first beta version of Mosaic for Unix systems using X Window was released on January 23, 1993. It was still not the first graphical browser. This honor goes to ViolaWWW , a Unix browser, although some argue that the little known Erwise should be considered the first web browser.

On Windows, it is Cello who wins the title of first graphic browser. But no matter who was first, everyone agrees that Mosaic was the first truly popular GUI browser.

Mosaic has changed everything. Mosaic was particularly fast and allowed users to display images within pages, which earned it some popularity. Early browsers could display images only in separate windows. Mosaic was also the first "easy to use" browser. It is also this browser that has popularized icons, favorites and a more attractive interface.

Which does not mean that anyone could use Mosaic. The software was far from simple to install . At that time, being able to connect to the Internet was a particularly delicate task. For example, Windows did not natively support the fundamental protocol used by the Internet, TCP / IP until the arrival of Windows 95. If you wanted to use TCP / IP on Windows 3.1, you had to use the incomprehensible but must-have Trumpet Winsocket and find an ISP.

But the difficulties of access did not prevent people from rushing on this new medium. As Bob Metcalf, co-founder of Ethernet, wrote in 1995: "[with the development of Mosaic], several million people suddenly discovered that the web could be better than sex"

That may be true. As pointed out by the musical Avenue Q, " The internet is for porn ". But we did not know it yet.

More seriously, the NCSA explained that shortly after the release of Mosaic, " more than 5,000 copies were uploaded each month. The center received hundreds of emails each week and internet traffic was exploding . In mid-1994, Joseph Hardin, then director of the NCSA, claimed that Mosaic downloads were around 50,000 per month. At the time when the average flow was around 28.8 kb / s, this is a remarkable figure.

Andreessen and Bina quickly realized that Mosaic could make their fortune. In October 1994, they leveraged the Mosaic development experience to create the first commercial browser: Netscape Navigator. Five years later, Netscape released its source code under open source license . This code will eventually become the base of the Firefox browser.

Microsoft, despite what Bill Gates later said, took time to realize the importance of the web and the Internet. Microsoft tried to catch up by copying the browser code inspired by Mosaic developed by Spyglass to develop the first version of Internet Explorer (IE). IE 2.0 was released as an add-on for Windows 95 in the Microsoft Plus package of August 1995. There has never really been a version 1.0 of Internet Explorer.

Mosaic has changed the world. Today, we live our lives entirely on the web and we all have some debt to Mosaic. Although the program itself was quickly supplanted by Mosaic and had lost most of its users in 1998, we still live in a world whose foundations were laid by Mosaic.

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