The creators of the early Internet browsers 'Mosaic' and 'Netscape' look back on their development
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Nowadays, there are many different web browsers, and users can freely choose the browser they prefer. However, in the early 1990s, there were only a few options such as ' NCSA Mosaic ' and ' Netscape '. Mark Andreessen , who was involved in the development of NCSA Mosaic and Netscape, tells the story of how they were born.
The true story -- as best I can remember -- of the origin of Mosaic and Netscape.
https://pmarca.substack.com/p/the-true-story-as-best-i-can-remember
Andreessen is a software engineer who developed web browsers such as NCSA Mosaic and Netscape, which appeared in the early days of the Internet. He co-founded venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz in 2009 with Ben Horowitz . In this interview, Andreessen talks with Horowitz about the origins of NCSA Mosaic and Netscape.
Marc Andreessen on Building Netscape & the Birth of the Browser - YouTube
During his freshman year at the University of Illinois, Andreessen worked in a materials lab that had access to supercomputers, 'which was a great starting point for me,' he said.
Later, during his second year of college, Andreessen worked at IBM's Austin office for nine months. During this time, Andreessen was involved in the development of workstation graphics systems at IBM. Regarding IBM at the time, Andreessen said, 'IBM was at the top of the world and was by far the most important technology company. We had a team of 6,000 people in Austin working on Unix workstations and graphical workstations.' 'At the time, everyone working in the IBM office was using the Internet, and all the workstations we were developing were based on the assumption that they would be connected to the Internet.'
As a third-year college student, Andreessen went to work at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). When asked why he started working at NCSA, Andreessen said, 'It was one of the major laboratories using large supercomputers.'
Andreessen, who has had exposure to computers and the Internet since his university days, says, 'At the time, there were three projects that were trying to create an Internet interaction model: Gopher , Waze, and the World Wide Web . People had different opinions about which of these would win. Gopher was a menu system developed in the 1980s, and Waze was a search system like Google search. In contrast, the World Wide Web was a 'revolutionary idea' developed by Tim Berners-Lee , who worked at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland, Andreessen says.
At the time, the Internet was text-based and did not yet have the ability to display visual content such as images or videos. Andreessen explained that he had used computers and developed graphical workstations during his college years, so the idea of developing a web browser called NCSA Mosaic came to him from his own experience and the popularity of the World Wide Web at the time.
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In developing NCSA Mosaic, Andreessen and his team had ideas that seemed like a leap forward to those familiar with the Internet at the time: 'everyone will have a graphical computer' and 'everyone will have a Windows, Mac, or Unix workstation.'
The world's first web browser, WorldWideWeb , developed by Tim Berners-Lee, was also text-based and had the problem of 'no graphic content.' NCSA Mosaic was designed with these in mind, making it the first web browser that could display both text and images in the same window.
NCSA Mosaic was developed with government research funding and had no commercial motivation. 'That's why we were able to gain a large number of users,' Andreessen said. Regarding NCSA Mosaic, Andreessen said, 'We just designed NCSA Mosaic for the future, and I can't say we were confident about it.'
After graduating from college, Andreessen, who didn't even know the word 'venture capital,' was fortunate enough to be contacted by businessman Jim Clark , and the two started a software development company called Netscape Communications .
Clark founded a company called Silicon Graphics and grew it into one of the world's leading high-tech companies, but he had just left the company due to a conflict with the CEO at the time. Clark had signed a contract with Silicon Graphics that prohibited him from poaching employees from Silicon Graphics, so he was unable to poach the company's talented engineers when he left. So, when he was looking for young and talented people, he found Andreessen, the developer of NCSA Mosaic.
In addition to the origins of Mosaic and Netscape, Andreessen and Horowitz also talk about a variety of other events, so if you're interested, be sure to check out the video.
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