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NCSA Mosaic

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This article is about the browser produced by NCSA. For the browser that was later renamed, see Netscape Navigator.
NCSA Mosaic
Developer(s)NCSA
Initial release0.5 / January 23, 1993; 31 years ago (1993-01-23)[1]
Final release
3.0 / 1997; 27 years ago (1997)
Written inC[2]
PlatformWindows, Unix, Amiga, Macintosh
Available inEnglish
TypeWeb browser
LicenseProprietary
Websitewww.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Projects/mosaic.html

NCSA Mosaic, or simply Mosaic, is the web browser credited with popularizing the World Wide Web. It was also a client for earlier protocols such as FTP, NNTP, and gopher. The browser was named for its support of multiple internet protocols.[3] Its clean, easily understood user interface, reliability, Windows port and simple installation all contributed to making it the application that opened up the Web to the general public.[4] Mosaic was also the first browser to display images inline with text instead of displaying images in a separate window.[5] While often described as the first graphical web browser, Mosaic was preceded by WorldWideWeb and the lesser-known Erwise[6] and ViolaWWW.

Mosaic was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)[5] at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign beginning in late 1992. NCSA released the browser in 1993,[7] and officially discontinued development and support on January 7, 1997.[8] However, it can still be downloaded from NCSA.[9]

Netscape Navigator was later developed by Netscape, which employed many of the original Mosaic authors; however, it intentionally shared no code with Mosaic. Netscape Navigator's code descendant is Mozilla Firefox.[10]

Twenty years after Mosaic's introduction, the most popular contemporary browsers, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Mozilla Firefox retain many of the characteristics of the original Mosaic graphical user interface (GUI) and interactive experience.

Background

NCSA Mosaic 1.0 running under System 7.1, displaying the Mosaic Communications Corporation (later Netscape) website.

David Thompson tested ViolaWWW and showed the application to Marc Andreessen.[11] Andreessen and Eric Bina originally designed and programmed NCSA Mosaic for Unix's X Window System called xmosaic[5][7][11][12] Funding for the development of Mosaic came from the High-Performance Computing and Communications Initiative, a program created by the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991.[13]

Development of Mosaic began in December 1992. Versions 0.1–0.9 were the first developed and released.[14] Version 1.0 was released on April 22, 1993, followed by two maintenance releases during summer 1993. A port of Mosaic to the Commodore Amiga was available by October 1993. Ports to Windows and Macintosh had already been released in September.[11] Version 2.0 of NCSA Mosaic was released in December 1993, along with version 1.0 releases for both Windows. An Acorn Archimedes port was underway in May 1994.[citation needed]

File:Ncsa30.jpg
NCSA Mosaic 3.0

Marc Andreessen, the leader of the team that developed Mosaic, left NCSA and, with James H. Clark, one of the founders of Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI), and four other former students and staff of the University of Illinois, started Mosaic Communications Corporation. Mosaic Communications eventually became Netscape Communications Corporation, producing Netscape Navigator.

Spyglass licensed the technology and trademarks from NCSA for producing their own web browser but never used any of the NCSA Mosaic source code.[15] Microsoft licensed Spyglass Mosaic in 1995 for US$2 million, modified it, and renamed it Internet Explorer.[16] After a later auditing dispute, Microsoft paid Spyglass $8 million.[16][17] The 1995 user guide The HTML Sourcebook: The Complete Guide to HTML, specifically states in a section called Coming Attractions, that Explorer "will be based on the Mosaic program" (p. 331). Versions of Internet Explorer before version 7 stated "Based on NCSA Mosaic" in the About box. Internet Explorer 7 was audited by Microsoft [citation needed] to ensure that it contained no Mosaic code, and thus no longer credits Spyglass or Mosaic.

Licensing

The licensing terms for NCSA Mosaic were generous for a proprietary software program. In general, non-commercial use was free for all versions (with certain limitations). Additionally, the X Window System/Unix version publicly provided source code (source code for the other versions was available after agreements were signed). Despite persistent rumors to the contrary, however, Mosaic was never released as open source software during its brief reign as a major browser; there were always constraints on permissible uses without payment.

Immediate effect

Other browsers existed during this period, notably Erwise, ViolaWWW, MidasWWW, tkWWW and Cello. These browsers, however, would not have the same effect as Mosaic on public use of the Internet.[18]

In the October 1994 Issue of Wired, Gary Wolfe notes in the article, "The (Second Phase of the) Revolution Has Begun: Don't look now, but Prodigy, AOL, and CompuServe are all suddenly obsolete - and Mosaic is well on its way to becoming the world's standard interface":

When it comes to smashing a paradigm, pleasure is not the most important thing. It is the only thing. If this sounds wrong, consider Mosaic. Mosaic is the celebrated graphical "browser" that allows users to travel through the world of electronic information using a point-and-click interface. Mosaic's charming appearance encourages users to load their own documents onto the Net, including color photos, sound bites, video clips, and hypertext "links" to other documents. By following the links - click, and the linked document appears - you can travel through the online world along paths of whim and intuition. Mosaic is not the most direct way to find online information. Nor is it the most powerful. It is merely the most pleasurable way, and in the 18 months since it was released, Mosaic has incited a rush of excitement and commercial energy unprecedented in the history of the Net.[19]

Importance of Mosaic

File:Mosaic browser plaque ncsa.jpg
Plaque commemorating the creation of Mosaic web browser by Eric Bina and Marc Andreessen, new NCSA building, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Mosaic was the web browser which led to the Internet boom of the 1990s. Robert Reid underscores this importance stating, "while still an undergraduate, Marc wrote the Mosaic software ... that made the web popularly relevant and touched off the revolution" (p.xlii). Reid notes that Andreessen's team hoped:

... to rectify many of the shortcomings of the very primitive prototypes then floating around the Internet. Most significantly, their work transformed the appeal of the Web from niche uses in the technical area to mass-market appeal. In particular, these University of Illinois students made two key changes to the Web browser, which hyper-boosted its appeal: they added graphics to what was otherwise boring text-based software, and, most importantly, they ported the software from so-called Unix computers that are popular only in technical and academic circles, to the Windows operating system, which is used on more than 80 percent of the computers in the world, especially personal and commercial computers.(p.xxv).

Mosaic was not the first web browser for Windows; this was Thomas R. Bruce's little-known Cello. The Unix version of Mosaic was already making it famous before the Windows and Mac versions came out. Other than displaying images embedded in the text rather than in a separate window, Mosaic did not in fact add many features to the browsers on which it was modeled, like ViolaWWW.[5] But Mosaic was the first browser written and supported by a team of full-time programmers, which was reliable and easy enough for novices to install, and the inline graphics proved immensely appealing. Mosaic made the Web accessible to the ordinary person for the first time and had already 53% market share in 1995.[20]

Reid also refers to Matthew K. Gray's well-respected website, Internet Statistics: Growth and Usage of the Web and the Internet, which indicates a dramatic leap in web use around the time of Mosaic's introduction (p.xxv).

In addition, David Hudson concurs with Reid, noting that:

Marc Andreessen's realization of Mosaic, based on the work of Berners-Lee and the hypertext theorists before him, is generally recognized as the beginning of the web as it is now known. Mosaic, the first web browser to win over the Net masses, was released in 1993 and made freely accessible to the public. The adjective phenomenal, so often overused in this industry, is genuinely applicable to the... 'explosion' in the growth of the web after Mosaic appeared on the scene. Starting with next to nothing, the rates of the web growth (quoted in the press) hovering around tens of thousands of percent over ridiculously short periods of time were no real surprise (p.42).

Ultimately, web browsers such as Mosaic became the killer applications of the 1990s. Web browsers were the first to bring a a graphical interface to search tools the Internet's burgeoning wealth of distributed information services. A mid-1994 guide lists Mosaic alongside the traditional, text-oriented information search tools of the time, Archie and Veronica, Gopher, and WAIS [21] but Mosaic quickly subsumed and displaced them all. Joseph Hardin, the director of the NSCA group within which Mosaic was developed, said downloads were up to 50,000 a month in mid-1994 [22]

By November, 1992 there were 26 Websites in the world [23] and each one attracted attention. In its release year of 1993, Mosaic had a What's New page, with about one new link per day. This was a time when access to the Internet was expanding rapidly outside its previous domain of academia and large industrial research institutions. Yet it was the availability of Mosaic and Mosaic-derived graphical browsers themselves that drove the explosive growth of the Web to over 10,000 sites by Aug 1995 and millions by 1998.[24] Metcalf expressed the pivotal role of Mosaic this way:

"In the Web's first generation, Tim Berners-Lee launched the Uniform Resource Locator (URL), Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and HTML standards with prototype Unix-based servers and browsers. A few people noticed that the Web might be better than Gopher.

In the second generation, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina developed NCSA Mosaic at the University of Illinois. Several million then suddenly noticed that the Web might be better than sex.

In the third generation, Andreessen and Bina left NCSA to found Netscape..."

— Bob Metcalfe, InfoWorld, August 21, 1995, Vol. 17, Issue 34.[25]

End of Mosaic

Mosaic's popularity as a separate browser began to lessen upon the release of Andreessen's Netscape Navigator in 1994. This was noted at the time in The HTML Sourcebook: The Complete Guide to HTML.[26]

By 1998 its user base had almost completely evaporated, being replaced by other web browsers. After NCSA stopped work on Mosaic, development of the NCSA Mosaic for the X Window System source code was continued by several independent groups. These independent development efforts include mMosaic (multicast Mosaic)[27] which ceased development in early 2004, and Mosaic-CK and VMS Mosaic.

VMS Mosaic, a version specifically targeting OpenVMS operating system, was one of the longest-living efforts to maintain Mosaic. Using the VMS support already built-in in original version (Bjorn S. Nilsson ported Mosaic 1.2 to VMS in the summer of 1993),[28] developers incorporated substantial part of HTML engine from mMosaic, another defunct flavor of the browser.[29] As of 3 September 2003, VMS Mosaic supports HTML 4.0, OpenSSL, cookies, and various image formats including GIF, JPEG, PNG, BMP, TGA, TIFF and JPEG 2000 image formats.[30] The browser works on VAX, Alpha, and Itanium platforms.[31]

Another long-lived version of Mosaic – Mosaic-CK, developed by Cameron Kaiser, – saw its last release (version 2.7ck9) on July 11, 2010.[32] The stated goal of the project is "Lynx with graphics" and runs on Mac OS X, Power MachTen, Linux and other compatible Unix-like OSs.[32]

Features

Mosaic was based on the libwww library[33][34][35] and thus supported a wide variety of internet protocols included in the library: Archie, FTP, gopher, HTTP, NNTP, telnet, WAIS.[7]

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Stewart, William. "Mosaic -- The First Global Web Browser". Retrieved 22 February 2011.
  2. ^ "xmosaic 1.2 source code". NCSA. 1994-06-29. Retrieved 2009-06-02.
  3. ^ Douglas Crockford (Sep 10, 2011). Crockford on JavaScript - Volume 1: The Early Years. YouTube. Event occurs at 1:35:50.
  4. ^ Andreessen, Marc. "Mosaic -- The First Global Web Browser". Retrieved 2006-12-16.
  5. ^ a b c d Berners-Lee, Tim. "What were the first WWW browsers?". World Wide Web Consortium. Retrieved 2010-06-15.
  6. ^ Holwerda, Thom (3rd Mar 2009). "The World's First Graphical Browser: Erwise". OSNews. Retrieved 2009-06-02. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  7. ^ a b c Vetter, Ronald J. (1994). "Mosaic and the World-Wide Web" (PDF). North Dakota State University. Retrieved 20 November 2010. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  8. ^ "Exhibits - Internet History - 1990's". Computer History Museum. 2006. Retrieved 2006-12-16.
  9. ^ "Mosaic FTP". NCSA. Retrieved 30 May 2010.
  10. ^ Clark, Jim (1999). Netscape Time. St. Martin's Press.
  11. ^ a b c Berners-Lee, Tim (ca. 1993/1994). "A Brief History of the Web". World Wide Web Consortium. Retrieved 16 August 2010. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |year= (help)CS1 maint: year (link)
  12. ^ Andreessen, Marc; Bina, Eric (1994). "NCSA Mosaic: A Global Hypermedia System". Internet Research. 4 (1). Bingley, U.K.: Emerald Group Publishing Limited: 7–17. doi:10.1108/10662249410798803. ISSN 1066-2243.
  13. ^ "Vice President Al Gore's ENIAC Anniversary Speech". Cs.washington.edu. February 14, 1996. Retrieved July 27, 2009.
  14. ^ "The History of NCSA Mosaic". NCSA. Retrieved 2009-06-02.
  15. ^ Sink, Eric (2003-05-15). "Memoirs From the Browser Wars". Eric Sink's Weblog. Retrieved 2006-12-16.
  16. ^ a b Thurrott, Paul (22 January 1997). "Microsoft and Spyglass kiss and make up". Retrieved 9 February 2011.
  17. ^ Elstrom, Peter (22 January 1997). "MICROSOFT'S $8 MILLION GOODBYE TO SPYGLASS". Bloomberg Businessweek. Retrieved 9 February 2011.
  18. ^ "A Little History of the World Wide Web From 1960s to 1995". CERN. 2001-05-05. Retrieved 2006-12-16.
  19. ^ Wolfe, Gary (1994). "The (Second Phase of the) Revolution Has Begun". Wired Magazine. Retrieved 2006-12-16. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  20. ^ Cockburn, Andy; Jones, Steve (6 December 2000). "Which Way Now? Analysing and Easing Inadequacies in WWW Navigation". CiteSeerx: 10.1.1.25.8504. {{cite journal}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help); Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  21. ^ Lucey, Sean (9 May 1994). "Internet tools help navigate the busy virtual highway". MacWeek: 51.
  22. ^ Levitt, Jason (9 May 1994). "A Matter of Attribution: Can't Forget to Give Credit for Mosaic Where Credit is Due". Open Systems Today: 71.
  23. ^ http://info.cern.ch/
  24. ^ http://news.netcraft.com/archives/category/web-server-survey/
  25. ^ Roads and Crossroads of Internet History Chapter 4: Birth of the Web
  26. ^ Ian S. Graham, "Coming Attractions" section, The HTML Sourcebook: The Complete Guide to HTML, p. 332. "Netscape Communications has designed an all-new WWW browser Netscape, that has significant enhancements over the original Mosaic program."
  27. ^ dauphin, Gilles (1996). "W3C mMosaic". World Wide Web Consortium. Retrieved 2007-11-02.
  28. ^ Nilsson, Bjorn (1993). "README.VMS". National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Retrieved 2007-11-02.
  29. ^ NCSA and VMS Mosaic Version Information
  30. ^ "OpenVMS.org - OpenVMS Community Portal (VMS Mosaic V4.2)". OpenVMS.org. 2007. Retrieved 2007-11-02.
  31. ^ "Mosaic 4.0 freeware_readme.txt". Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. 2006. Retrieved 2007-11-02.
  32. ^ a b "Official Mosaic-CK homepage".
  33. ^ Kahan, José (7 June 2002). "Change History of libwww". World Wide Web Consortium. Retrieved 30 May 2010.
  34. ^ Petrie, Charles; Cailliau, Robert (November 1997). "Interview Robert Cailliau on the WWW Proposal: "How It Really Happened."". Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Retrieved 18 August 2010.
  35. ^ Kahan, José (5 August 1999). "Why Libwww?". Retrieved 15 June 2010.

Further reading

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