1993: NCSA Mosaic 1.0, the first web browser to achieve popularity among the general public, is released. With it, the web as we know it begins to flourish.

The web in the early 1990s was mostly text. People were posting images, photos, and audio or video clips on web pages. But these pieces of "multimedia" were hidden behind links. If you wanted to look at a picture, you had to click on a link, and the picture would open in a new window.

A team of students at the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications, or NCSA, decided the web needed an experience more stimulating and user-friendly than that, so they set to work to build a better browser. Borrowing design and user interface cues from some other early prototype browsers, they went through a handful of iterations before arriving at the final 1.0 release April 22, 1993.

The result, NCSA Mosaic, was the first web browser with the ability to display text and images inline, meaning you could put pictures and text on the same page together, in the same window.

It was a radical step forward for the web, which was at that point, a rather dull experience. It took the boring "document" layout of your standard web page and transformed it into something much more visually exciting, like a magazine.

And, wow, it was easy. If you wanted to go somewhere, you just clicked. Links were blue and underlined, easy to pick out. You could follow your own virtual trail of breadcrumbs backwards by clicking the big button up there in the corner.

At the time of its release, NCSA Mosaic was free software, but it was available only on Unix. That made it common at universities and institutions, but not on Windows desktops in people's homes.

The NCSA team put out Windows and Mac versions in late 1993. They were also released under a noncommercial software license, meaning people at home could download it for free. The installer was very simple, making it easy for just about anyone to get up and running on the web.

It was then that the excitement really began to spread. Mosaic made the web come to life with color and images, something that, for many people, finally provided the online experience they were missing. It made the web a pleasure to use.

And after viewing dozens of pages with photos on them, people felt compelled to learn how to do the same thing with their pictures. Pretty soon, everyone had to have their own homepage on the web.

Gary Wolfe described the general euphoria in the October 1994 Wired magazine:

With Mosaic, the online world appears to be a vast, interconnected universe of information. You can enter at any point and begin to wander; no internet addresses or keyboard commands are necessary. The complex methods of extracting information from the net are hidden from sight. Almost every person who uses it feels the impulse to add some content of his or her own. Since Mosaic first appeared, according to the NCSA, net traffic devoted to hypermedia browsing has increased ten-thousandfold.

Marc Andreessen, the Mosaic-browser project leader, left NCSA in 1993 and founded Mosaic Communications with Jim Clark, the co-founder of Silicon Graphics, Inc., or SGI. Under their new corporate banner, they continued to develop their browser, licensing its page-rendering technology to other companies.

Andreessen and Clark renamed the company Netscape Communications in 1994 and released the flagship Netscape Navigator browser. The newer, more powerful browser soon grew to dominate the fledgling web, quickly surpassing Mosaic. It drew accolades from almost everyone – except those anxious to kill it.

Netscape enjoyed a short reign as king of the hill before ceding the browser throne to Internet Explorer. The downtrodden Netscape was reborn as Mozilla, but it failed to take off. The Mosaic-Netscape-Mozilla browser eventually found new life as Firefox, released a decade after the first Mosaic browser.

Source: Various

Image: National Center for Supercomputing Applications

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