NCSA Mosaic, colloquially Mosaic, is a discontinued web browser that was instrumental in popularizing the World Wide Web and the general Internet during the 1990s. Although not the first web browser (preceded by WorldWideWeb, Erwise, and ViolaWWW), it was the first browser to display images inline with text instead of a separate window. It supported various Internet protocols such as HTTP, FTP, NNTP, and Gopher. Its interface, reliability, personal computer support, and simple installation contributed to Mosaic's initial popularity. Mosaic was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign beginning in December 1992, released in January 1993, with official development and support until January 1997. Mosaic lost market share to Netscape Navigator in late 1994, and had only a tiny fraction of users left by 1997, when the project was discontinued. Microsoft licensed one of the derivative commercial products, Spyglass Mosaic, to create Internet Explorer in 1995.
History
In 1991, the High Performance Computing Act of 1991 was passed, which provided funding for new projects at the NCSA, where, after trying ViolaWWW, David Thompson demonstrated it to the NCSA software design group. This inspired Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina – two programmers working at NCSA – to create Mosaic. Andreessen and Bina began developing Mosaic in February 1991 for Unix's X Window System, calling it xmosaic. Marc Andreessen announced the project's first release, the "alpha/beta version 0.5," on January 23, 1993. Version 1.0 was released on April 21, 1993. Ports to Microsoft Windows and Macintosh were released in September. A port of Mosaic to the Amiga was available by October 1993. NCSA Mosaic for Unix (X Window System) version 2.0 was released on November 10, 1993 and was notable for adding support for forms, thus enabling the creation of the first dynamic web pages. From 1994 to 1997, the National Science Foundation supported the further development of Mosaic. 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. Mosaic's popularity as a separate browser began to decrease after the 1994 release of Netscape Navigator, the relevance of which was noted in The HTML Sourcebook: The Complete Guide to HTML: "Netscape Communications has designed an all-new WWW browser, Netscape, that has significant enhancements over the original Mosaic program." In 1994, SCO released Global Access, a modified version of SCO's Open Desktop Unix, which became the first commercial product to incorporate Mosaic. However, by 1998, the Mosaic user base had almost completely evaporated as users moved to other web browsers.
Licensing The licensing terms for NCSA Mosaic were generous for a proprietary software program. In general, non-commercial use was free of charge 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. As of 1993, license holders included these:
Amdahl Corporation Fujitsu Limited (Product: Infomosaic, a Japanese version of Mosaic. Price: Yen5,000 (approx US$50) Infoseek Corporation (Product: No commercial Mosaic. May use Mosaic as part of a commercial database effort) Quadralay Corporation (Consumer version of Mosaic. Also using Mosaic in its online help and information product, GWHIS. Price: US$249) Quarterdeck Office Systems Inc. The Santa Cruz Operation Inc. (Product: Incorporating Mosaic into "SCO Global Access", a communications package for Unix machines that works with SCO's Open Server. Runs a graphical e-mail service and accesses newsgroups.) SPRY Inc. (Products: A communication suite: Air Mail, Air News, Air Mosaic, etc. Also producing Internet In a Box with O'Reilly & Associates. Price: US$149–$399 for Air Series.) Spyglass, Inc. (Product: Spyglass Mosaic, essentially licensing the Mosaic name, as it was written from scratch, not using NCSA's Mosaic code. Relicensing to other vendors. Signed a deal with Digital Equipment Corp. to ship Mosaic with all its machines. Signed a deal with Microsoft to license Spyglass' code to develop Internet Explorer)
Features Robert Reid notes that Andreessen's team hoped:
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