Mosaic (web browser)
NCSA Mosaic is a 1993 at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications ( NCSA ) developed Web browser. He was on the World Wide Web browsers, ViolaWWW (1990) and Erwise (1992 ), the fourth of its kind, except the text could also view embedded elements such as graphics, interactive elements, without these having to be loaded separately. The end of 1993 were about 2 million copies of NCSA Mosaic in circulation.
History
On April 21, 1993, the revolution of the internet has been announced in the following words on the mailing list www-talk:
"This is the version 1.0 of NCSA Mosaic, a networked information system and a World Wide Web browser, released for X Window Systems. "
The development of the NCSA Mosaic was at the beginning of a project of the Software Group at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications ( NCSA ) at the University of Illinois. The development team was led by Eric Bina and Marc Andreessen. From the Viola browser, switch buttons for Home and navigation (previous - back ) taken from the text -only Lynx browser bookmarks. There were pictures in the GIF and HDF formats are presented.
Beta versions were released in September 1993, the Unix operating systems SunOS, IRIX, AIX, OSF / 1, HP- UX, and with the X Window System, for Apple Macintosh System 7 and for Amiga, Windows NT on DEC Alpha, PowerPC and MIPS machines. Versions for x86 hardware and Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 followed by.
The company Spyglass was commissioned to sell the software. Microsoft acquired in 1994 for $ 2 million a general license. As of 1995, the Group paid 98 cents per copy. Yet up to version 6 was the Microsoft Internet Explorer, the words' Based on NCSA Mosaic ".
With the beginning of the growing popularity of the World Wide Web browser quickly gained notoriety. The name Mosaic was briefly in the years 1993/1994 a synonym for web browsers.
1994 Marc Andreessen grew out of the NCSA team and others founded the company Netscape, the browser Netscape Navigator developed, which quickly replaced the NCSA Mosaic as the leading browser. The development of NCSA Mosaic was set in January 1997 with the release of version 3.0.
On 8 March 2010, the code base on GitHub was published by Alan Dipert. The license is not known precisely, it will only refer to the COPYRIGHT file containing the license text from 1993. Alan Dipert indicates to be able to compile the source code under Ubuntu 9.10, and has attached a screenshot.