Written by the student programmer Marc Andreessen and the staff engineer Eric Bina, Mosaic ran on ordinary personal computers and was free to download. Earlier browsers had displayed images in separate windows or not at all. Mosaic's simple point-and-click interface helped turn the World Wide Web from a tool for physicists into a mass medium. By late 1993, thousands of copies were being downloaded each month. Andreessen went on to co-found Netscape, whose Navigator browser soon overtook Mosaic.
Tim Berners-Lee had invented the web at CERN in 1989, but in early 1993 there were only a few dozen web servers in the world, and using them required patience. At the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Marc Andreessen, an undergraduate earning $6.85 an hour, and Eric Bina, a full-time staff member, began writing a browser for Unix workstations in late 1992. They added a tag that let images appear on the page itself.
The first versions circulated among programmers early in 1993. Version 1.0, released on April 22, 1993, came with versions for Windows and the Macintosh soon after, which put the web within reach of millions of office and home users. It also supported other internet protocols, such as FTP and Gopher, so it could serve as a single gateway to the network.
The number of web servers exploded. Andreessen graduated, moved to California and in 1994 founded Mosaic Communications with Jim Clark, the founder of Silicon Graphics. After the university objected to the name, the company became Netscape. NCSA stopped developing Mosaic in 1997.
Key people: Marc Andreessen, Eric Bina