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Has it only been ten years? This month marks the 10th anniversary of a piece of software that literally changed the world. That program was Mosaic -- the proto graphical Web browser that made the popularization of the Internet possible.

Using CERN’s World Wide Web hypertext protocol, first invented by Tim Berners-Lee. A team of researchers at the University of Illinois’ National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) developed NCSA Mosaic. In April, 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.

The Mosaic project’s lead developer, Marc Andreessen, went on to co-found Netscape, whose revolutionary Navigator browser dominated the market for half a decade until it was overtaken by Microsoft’s uninspired, but predatorily marketed and hyped Internet Explorer.

The original Mosaic was a Unix application, but Macintosh and Windows versions were launched later in 1993.

I missed out on the early versions of Mosaic and Netscape -- Internet dial-up service didn’t reach my neck of the woods until October, 1997, and broadband still hasn’t reached us.

So I thought it might be fun to take a look at the browser that started it all. Mosaic can still be downloaded from various Websites. I found an excellent archive of obsolete Mac browsers at this Website , and downloaded a copy of Mosaic 1.0.1 -- dated 11/29/93.

Mosaic started right up in OS 9.2.2 running in Classic Mode under OS X 10.2.4 on my Pismo PowerBook. I discovered that it was extremely fast, although page rendering left quite a bit to be desired, especially graphics. Here’s what the Applelinks Homepage looked like.

Text content was perfectly readable, however.

Unfortunately, Mosaic shared a characteristic that I recall plagued many of the early Web browsers, including Netscape through the 4.0 series -- instability. It soon got bogged down loading some graphic content and crashed hard, taking Classic Mode down with it and requiring a Force Restart of Classic.However, the remarkable thing was that it ran at all on this setup. Not bad backwards compatibility!

For more Mosaic history, visit:
http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Divisions/PublicAffairs/MosaicHistory/impact.html

Charles W. Moore

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