We all accessed the internet through computers until mobile phones entered our lives. Our most basic programs have become web browsers. So what do we know about the history of web browsers? How did we get to this day? Let’s talk a little bit about NCSA Mosaic.
The year is 1993, accessing the internet is already quite difficult these days, and a browser? What the hell… NCSA Mosaic decided to prioritize something 29 years ago. In the past, it was called text based; It emerged as a revolution after browsers that could only display text, and pioneered the ability to display other things besides text. Nowadays, pictures started to be included on the websites. The “internet”, which only contains plain text, has now taken its first step into turning into a huge porn archive 🙂
One of the biggest revolutions of NCSA Mosaic is that in its predecessors, separate browsers were needed to download things and separate browsers to search. ncsa mosaic finished this and allowed us to handle it all from a single browser.
A writer in wired magazine published in October 1994 describes him as follows:
“Mosaic’s captivating look encourages users to upload their own documents to the Net, including color photographs, sound bites, video clips, and hypertext links to other documents. By following the links, you can travel paths of whim and intuition in the online world. Mosaic is the best way to find information online.” “It’s not the direct way. It’s not the most powerful way. It’s just the most enjoyable way, and in the 18 months since its launch, Mosaic has provoked an influx of excitement and commercial energy unprecedented in the history of the internet.”
In November 1992, there were twenty-six websites in the world, and each one attracted great attention. In 1993, the year of its launch, mosaic had a what’s new page and about one new link was added every day. This was a time when access to the Internet was rapidly expanding beyond the previous realm of academia and large industrial research institutions. Nevertheless, the availability of mosaic and mosaic-derived graphical browsers enabled the web to expand to over 10,000 sites by August 1995 and millions of sites by 1998. Metcalfe expressed the important role of mosaic as follows:
“In the first generation of the web, Tim Berners-lee initiated the Uniform Resource Locator (URL), Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and HTML standards with Unix-based prototype servers and browsers. A few people realized that the Web could be better than Gopher.
In the second generation, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina developed NCSA Mosaic at the University of Illinois. Several million people suddenly realized that the web might be better than sex.
In the third generation, Andreessen and Bina left NCSA to found Netscape…”