NCSA Mosaic

» see ncsa.illinois.edu/Projects/mosaic as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

NCSA Mosaic was released on 22 april 1993 from the national center for supercomputing applications at the university of illinois. the lead developer was marc andreessen, an undergraduate at the time. eric bina did much of the actual coding. the team also built versions for X Window System, mac, and windows, which was rare for academic software at the time.

i never used mosaic. by the time i got online in turkey in late 1998, mosaic was already dead. the browsers in use were netscape navigator (sometimes still being shipped on cds with magazines) and internet explorer (bundled with windows). but mosaic is the browser that made the web a thing for non-academics. without it the web does not become a mass-market technology in 1995.

the specific innovation that mattered was inline images. before mosaic, browsers existed but they showed text only. images opened in a separate viewer if at all. mosaic put the image right in the page next to the text. that one change is what turned "documents with hyperlinks" into something that felt like a magazine.

ncsa stopped active development of mosaic on 7 january 1997. by then andreessen had left to start netscape, and netscape navigator had taken most of the audience. internet explorer had launched in 1995 and was being bundled with every copy of windows 95. mosaic could not compete with either, and the academic team had moved on.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it actually did ~

mosaic was a hypertext browser that rendered HTML documents and could fetch them over HTTP, gopher, FTP, NNTP, and a few other protocols. it had bookmarks. it had a back button. it had a list of recently visited pages. all of this is normal now and was novel then.

the inline image support was the biggest user-facing thing. you wrote <img src="..."> in your HTML and the image appeared in the page. before mosaic, links to images opened in a separate program. mosaic's decision to render images in-place changed what the web looked like. once one popular browser did this, every other browser had to. the rest of the web's visual layer descended from this decision.

mosaic also had forms, which let pages have text inputs and buttons. this was the foundation for any kind of interactive web page. before mosaic forms were widely supported, the web was read-only. with forms, you could submit a search query, send an email, log into a service. the entire concept of a "web app" exists because of forms in graphical browsers.

~ the academic origin ~

the team was small. marc andreessen, eric bina, and a handful of other undergrads and staff at NCSA. the project was funded by the high-performance computing initiative through congress. it was technically a side project of the supercomputing center, not a main deliverable.

the licensing was permissive enough that companies could build commercial products on it. spyglass licensed mosaic and built a commercial version. microsoft licensed spyglass mosaic as the basis for what became internet explorer 1.0. the mosaic codebase fed into a big chunk of the early commercial web browser market.

andreessen left in 1994 to start mosaic communications corporation, which became netscape. netscape navigator was a clean-room rewrite, not based on the ncsa code, but it took the design ideas and the user-facing direction. the joke was that netscape was "mosaic with the volume turned up." andreessen and his team were trying to ship features faster than ncsa could.

~ how it died ~

the browser wars killed mosaic. netscape navigator launched in december 1994. by 1995 it had taken most of the audience that had been on mosaic. internet explorer 1.0 launched in august 1995 with windows 95 plus pack. by 1996 ncsa mosaic was a distant third in market share.

ncsa is a research center, not a software company. they did not have the headcount or the mandate to compete with two well-funded commercial browsers. on 7 january 1997 they stopped active development. the source code is still available. some hobbyists have built modern ports that run on current systems, mostly as a museum exercise.

~ what it left ~

the entire web. it is hard to overstate how much of the modern web descends from decisions made in mosaic in 1993 and 1994. the in-page image. the back button. the rectangle-of-text-with-links layout. the URL bar. the bookmark system. forms. every browser since then has been a refinement of choices mosaic made.

the people. marc andreessen went on to co-found netscape, then netscape was bought by AOL, then andreessen co-founded andreessen horowitz which became one of the largest VC firms. several other ncsa mosaic team members had similar trajectories into the 1990s commercial web. the pipeline from "graduate student writing a browser" to "valley billionaire" started here.

the source code as a museum piece. you can download mosaic 2.7 today. it will not render most modern websites because it does not support most of HTML 4 or any of CSS. but you can fire it up and load a simple page and see what 1993 felt like. it is one of the few pieces of software where running the original code is itself a kind of historical experience.

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