Mosaic has been described as "the killer application of the
1990s" because it was the first program to provide a slick
burgeoning wealth of distributed information services
(formerly mostly limited to
FTP and
Gopher) at a time when
access to the
Internet was expanding rapidly outside its
previous domain of academia and large industrial research
institutions.
NCSA Mosaic was originally designed and programmed for the
XWindow System by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina at NCSA.
Version 1.0 was released in April 1993, followed by two
maintenance releases during summer 1993. Version 2.0 was
released in December 1993, along with version 1.0 releases for
Marc Andreessen, who created the NCSA Mosaic research
along with five other former students and staff of the
university who were instrumental in NCSA Mosaic's design and
development.
(1995-04-06)