April 22, 1993: Mosaic Browser Lights Up Web

[n2doc]

By Michael Calore April 21, 2010 | 7:00 pm | Categories: 20th century, Communication, Culture


1993: NCSA Mosaic 1.0, the first web browser to achieve popularity among the general public, is released. With it, the web as we know it begins to flourish.

The web in the early 1990s was mostly text. People were posting images, photos, and audio or video clips on web pages. But these pieces of “multimedia” were hidden behind links. If you wanted to look at a picture, you had to click on a link, and the picture would open in a new window.

A team of students at the University of Illinois’ National Center for Supercomputing Applications, or NCSA, decided the web needed an experience more stimulating and user-friendly than that, so they set to work to build a better browser. Borrowing design and user interface cues from some other early prototype browsers, they went through a handful of iterations before arriving at the final 1.0 release April 22, 1993.

The result, NCSA Mosaic, was the first web browser with the ability to display text and images inline, meaning you could put pictures and text on the same page together, in the same window.



Read More http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2010/04/0422mosaic-web-browser

I remember mosaic well, the first browser I ever used.

[Richardo]

1. Nice!

Urbana is also home to the H.A.L. plant:

Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am a HAL 9000 computer. I became operational at the H.A.L. plant in Urbana, Illinois on the 12th of January 1992. My instructor was Mr. Langley, and he taught me to sing a song.

Looks like Mosaic was their followup to developing AI.
:D

[d_r]

2. I remember when

you had to have a "helper ap" to open up the .jpgs, but then it became possible for .gif's to be shown in-line! pictures right there on the page, big step up from gopher.

[kentuck]

3. Yep...

I used the L-view program. :-)

[d_r]

5. YES L-view, I had forgotten L-view

[The Doctor.]

9. 'Back in my day,

we had to read the code and color-by-numbers with crayons made from our own ear-wax to look at porn online!

The 'money shot' was always the tricky part.'

[Recursion]

19. The days of Archie and Gopher are gone

There were giants back then, users of great renown. Back when you had to actually know a little bit about computers and networks to use networked computers. Sigh.

[TlalocW]

4. I was in college right when the internet started hitting in the early 90s

I wasn't initially impressed with the browser my Physics professor was using when I went to visit him about something, but that's probably because he was looking at a car aficionado website.

IRC got so popular that a bunch of older computers were put in the backroom of a computer lab for people to do that. Some friends and I would join the #limbaugh channel as HulkHogan and MachoMan and join and have political "discussions" while staying in character as professional wrestlers. We would say things like, "HulkHogan scoops up GunHed (the moderator) and body-slams him straight to hell so he can sit and visit with Nixon." I was banned 50 times in one semester.

Netsplits on IRC happened quite frequently where everyone was kicked off the channel/server, and if you were the first to rejoin a channel, you were the OP or in charge of the channel and could kick and ban people. That would drive the #limbaugh people nuts.

I pissed off Fred Phelps' grandson so much that he left a #politics channel after he had been there for an hour bothering everyone.

A high school friend at another college was so impressed when I was able to find Disney clip-art for a Powerpoint project he had to do for a class.

Porn was hard to find, but we still found it.

And when I moved on to grad school in 1995, I was the only one in several related student organizations (Hispanic/Latino-based) that knew HTML so I was put in charge of designing/creating their organizations' websites.

TlalocW

[d_r]

6. I'd like to have back the time I spent on IRC

Wait a minute, I'm still typing things into the computer. Damn.

[Recursion]

20. I want Bungie to give back the time I spent playing Marathon

At least on IRC I learned stuff and made friends.

[n2doc]

7. kick n/t

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

8. K&R

[bleever]

10. Anyone remember U of I's Plato?

Touch screen technology back in 1980!

Okay: I'm old.

[hunter]

14. I was in a University of California computer lab when BSD was first released into the wild.

Crazy.

I got my first internet account in 1979. I've been online ever since.

I do remember Plato, my wife was a U of I grad student in the '80s. Couldn't keep me away from the U of I computers even though I myself was not a student. (Was my usual friendly self...)

They had an awesome nuclear reactor too.

No, you're not old.

I'm thinking old might be this, "Triga comes alive, 1958"

http://www.library.illinois.edu/archives/archon/index.php?p=digitallibrary/digitalcontent&id=3489

but others here on DU might disagree.

[kwassa]

11. I met my wife on Usenet! Remember Usenet? The tin and pine newsreaders.

My wife was, and still is, much more technically advanced than me. She told me about Mosaic, and jpgs, and all these other unbelievable things, on those crappy little newsreaders.

I had been an employee of DEC before it imploded, and DEC had a massive internal intranet, world-wide, live-time, that became the crack for me the turned into the World Wide Web. I remember noting live with a member in Australia about the first Gulf war as we listened to the attack live on CNN. It made me realize how small the world really was.

[Recursion]

13. Pine Is Not Elm

Pine is still alive and kicking, actually, under the name "alpine". IMHO it's the best mail reader out there.

[Recursion]

12. I miss Mosaic!!!

I still use Links+ sometime to get that old-school feel.

[hunter]

16. I better stop before I try it out on WINE.

I've already got an early "one floppy" version of Opera running in a Windows 3.1 emulator. I'm certain Mosaic 1.0 would be quite happy there too.

[Recursion]

17. I think you just need Motif/Lesstif to build it

ftp://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Web/Mosaic/Unix/source/old/

[Robb]

15. Ah, the days.

Lynx.

I remember not being able to have the username "sparky" because it would conflict with the SPAR command. :D

[Recursion]

18. Heh. There was an old IRCD that let you register with the username "/me"

That was always fun.