RELIC: Mosaic

Words by Jose Alvarez

Are you browsing the Internet from a computer or a mobile device? Are you old enough to remember browsing the World Wide Web in the early 1990s? You might remember Mosaic Web Browser, the very first web browser that popularized the World Wide Web and the Internet. While there are a multitude of browsers one can use to surf the Web today, there were very few solutions 30 years ago.

Tim Berners-Lee, who is known as the inventor of the World Wide Web, invented the web browser WorldWideWeb/Nexus in 1990 for the NeXTSTEP operating system. NeXT is known as the company that Steve Jobs founded when he was originally forced out of Apple in 1985. Other browsers soon followed, such as the Helsinki University of Technology’s Erwise in 1992 and Pei-Yuan Wei’s ViolaWWW in the same year. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was impressed by ViolaWWW and inspired Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, two NCSA employees, to create Mosaic.

The NCSA was helped by then-Senator and future Vice President Al Gore’s High Performance Computing Act of 1991, also known as the Gore Bill, which was a continuation of previous efforts to create an information superhighway in the United States. The Gore Bill was not only instrumental in funding Mosaic, but also helped to lay the foundations for a high-speed fiber optic computer network. Gore himself coined the term information superhighway, which Mosaic would help deliver into homes as the Internet became popular. Development began in 1992 and the first iteration of Mosaic was released in 1993. The web browser was ported to Unix, Microsoft Windows, Macintosh, and even the Commodore Amiga by the end of 1993.

One of the major selling points of Mosaic was that it added graphics to supplement text-based software, previously the only way to browse the Internet. It was then ported, as mentioned earlier, to Microsoft Windows, which held 80 percent (if not more) of the share of the operating system market at the time. It also supported File Transfer Protocol, Network News Transfer Protocol, and Gopher, which were all previous ways to access the Internet. According to Robert Reid, author of the 1997 book Architects of the Web, “Their work transformed the appeal of the Web from niche uses in the technical area to mass-market appeal.”

Andreessen, who led the development of Mosaic, left NCSA and partnered with James H. Clark, one of the founders of Silicon Graphics, Inc. (at the time one of the most prominent hardware and software producers in Silicon Valley), as well as other students and staff from the University of Illinois, to create the Mosaic Communications Corporation. This eventually evolved into Netscape Communications Corporation and the creation of Netscape Navigator in 1994, one of the most popular early Web browsers. By 1997, Mosaic had been discontinued, while Netscape Navigator had taken over in the mid-90s and held a sizable share of the browser market in the early 2000s. However, Internet Explorer and other browsers supplanted Netscape Navigator, with other browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and Google Chrome entering the Web browser arena in the 2000s. Support for Netscape Navigator itself lasted until 2008, making it one of the longest lasting Web browsers.

Andreessen is still very involved in technology to this day: he co-founded Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz in 2009 in Menlo Park, California. As of 2019, he also has a net worth of US$1.3 billion. Some projects that have been funded by Andreessen Horowitz include Skype, Facebook, Groupon, Twitter, Zynga, Airbnb, GitHub, Lyft, Oculus VR, and BuzzFeed; more recently, Andreessen has also expressed interest in investing in cryptocurrency. As someone who invented one of the earliest methods of accessing the Internet, Andreessen continues to play a role in its development to this day, almost 30 years later.