Monday, January 29, 2018

Mosaic’s Birthday: 25 Years of the Modern Web

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols (via @Illinois_Alma):

In the beginning, the web, or WEB as it was known then, was a mystery. Like gopher and archie, it was a character-based internet tool interface that only the proud, the few, and the early internet users knew about. Then, everything changed. First, the Commercial Internet Exchange (CIX) made it easy for anyone to get on the net, and then two graduate students, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, created the first popular web browser: Mosaic.

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It used to be magical to watch the little icon animation at the top right spin as your bits were slowly downloading. Also neat that IE included a copyright notice for Mosaic for most of those 25 years.

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