A decade already

[avram]

Just ten years ago...

• Version 1.0 of the Linux kernel was about to be released.
• Intel had just introduced the 66-MHz Pentium chip.
• Doom was the hot new computer game.
• The Internet was 25 years old.
• The economy was slowly recovering, after two years of recession (that one seems kinda familiar, except for the recovering part).
• NCSA released version 1.0 of Mosaic (which later became Netscape Navigator).

Comments

[akawil]

Actually, Mosaic became Internet Explorer — NCSA licensed their code as Spyglass Mosaic, and then Spyglass was bought by Microsoft.

Netscape Navigator was developed independently, though Netscape hired Marc Andreesen, the principal developer of Mosaic, to do it.

See http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_web_browser.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

If the article "Imposter Boy" is to be believed, Marc Andreesen did almost nothing on the Mosaic project beyond stealing the idea for it from a colleage at the NCSA.

Cite: http://www.chrispy.net/marca/gqarticle.html

Andreessen essentially snatched the Mosaic project away from the guy who'd had the idea. Soon after meeting with Hardin, Thompson made what would turn out to be a big mistake: He showed the browsers to his colleague Andreessen. Then Thompson went off to an out-of-town conference. Another bad move.

Andreessen acted swiftly. In one sleepless weekend, he hacked out a crude prototype for a new Web browser. (Andreessen's peers didn't consider him a great programmer, but he was known for being a remarkably fast one.) Then Andreessen used the prototype as a ploy for recruiting a colleague named Eric Bina to team up with him.

Bina was the head programmer on Mosaic. None of the ideas of Mosaic were original to it, or to Andreesen.