Happy 31st Anniversary of the First Public Release of NCSA X/Mosaic (v0.5).
Sadly, I could not find an actual screenshot of v0.5, so this one of v1.2 from wikipedia will have to do.
I worked on X/Mosaic (v2.6+) at NCSA SDG as a "student programmer" back in '95-'96, after the Netscape Exodus but while Mosaic was still under active development. It was a good learning experience and a way to earn $10/hr in an on-campus job as a Computer Engineering undergrad.
“Would you like to use the browser by Company X, or the browser by the company that survives on half-a-billion dollars a year from Company X, or the browser by the company that gets paid an estimated $20 billion a year by Company X even though it can survive without it?”
We desperately need a web browser by an independent organisation funded by EU taxpayer money and maintained for the common good.
Both companies’ web #browsers trace their origins to #Mosaic by The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications (#NCSA).
#Microsoft#InternetExplorer was based on code licensed from Spyglass, a #Mosaic trademark and technology licensee who had supposedly only used the original code sparingly.
@aral The salient point is that although both companies’ #browsers did not appreciably derive actual mechanisms (code) from #NCSA, they would not exist without #NCSAMosaic’s initial research, design, and refinement.
So both @kpeace and @keithzg are correct depending on one’s perspective.
D2 just got an email asking if was interested in #NCSA, and I think that's cool. Then I read about it, and apparently it's some sports thing. Weird. Oh well, only NCSA I know is this one: https://ncsa.illinois.edu/
"30 years ago this week…something called the World Wide Web launched into the public domain…#CERN owned Berners-Lee's invention and…had the option to license [it] out…for profit. But Berners-Lee believed that keeping the web as open as possible would help it grow…[He] eventually convinced CERN to release the World Wide Web into the #PublicDomain without any #patents or fees."
@petersuber I vividly remember the early days of the web when it was unclear whether it would matter to average people compared to walled-garden services like #AOL (then #AmericaOnline), #Prodigy, or #CompuServe.
IMHO the web’s early rise depended on two other factors:
• Graphical #browsers like #NCSA#Mosaic on mainstream computer operating systems (1993)
• Decommissioning of the US government-funded #NSFNET backbone, effectively ending restrictions on commercial Internet traffic (1995)