Web browser turns 25!
Pramod Jajoo
Startup Advisor, Mentor and Angel Investor. Ex-SVP at Flipkart. Former CTO of Bigbasket. Former SVP Technology and India Country Head @ ShipBob.
Strictly speaking, it is not correct to say Web browser turned 25. There were a few browsers prior to Mosaic, but Mosaic took the world by storm when it was beta-released on 23rd Jan 1993 (for Unix operating systems running X-Windows)! Mosaic was the first popular web browser and what we know today as web browsers have their roots in it. Built by two graduate students, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Mosaic forever changed the trajectory of the technology industry.
I was at Sun Microsystems at that time, and quickly got hold of Mosaic and installed it on my SPARCstation. Web was really SMALL at that time - mostly universities, research organizations and few corporate sites were on it. But, the graphical way (including images on the same page!) of navigating the web, as provided by Mosaic, was just magical.
In the summer of 1993, I distinctly remember having animated discussions with a few friends of mine during a long hike in Sanborn Park in Saratoga. All of us were fascinated by the prospect of this technology, but most of us underestimated how quickly it would transform the world.
Things changed fast! By early next year, silicon valley was abuzz with excitement about this new technology when Jim Clark, who was a legend in the valley, founded Netscape with Marc Andreessen. That was the catalyst - within a few months literally hundreds of companies (including Amazon) were founded to take internet technology to masses. Initially, the internet was mostly limited to Unix based users, but that changed dramatically when Windows 95 included native support for TCP/IP and AOL dial-up service provided the internet connectivity to masses. There was no looking back! Hotmail came out in early 1996 and provided the first killer app for the web - email! I was in thick of things - I was part of the programming languages and tools group at Sun, and most of the first generation companies ran their infra on Sun machines and powered by Sun compilers. Sun unleashed Java in 1995 and cemented its “We are the dot in dot com†pole position. Next five years (till Nasdaq crashed in Mar 2000) were super exciting and full of wild times. I do not think I have ever worked harder or have had more fun in my career outside of that period. We were all making history and loving every minute of it!
Internet has changed the world... and
We have Mosaic to thank for playing a big role in that transformation! Happy 25th birthday, Mosaic.
-Pramod Jajoo
Wicked Problem Solver- Doctor of Management, MBA, IT and Cybersecurity Consultant/Environmental and Social Sustainability Consultant
11 个月I was there at the beginning!
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7 å¹´Wow! I totally remember this splash screen and the madness that ensued during the subsequent years.
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7 å¹´I was one of the skeptics at the time of the release of Mosaic. I was using Gopher (a non graphical precursor to www, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol) ), and saw no need for graphics and text on the same page. Luckily, I was proven wrong. Mosaic was a major key in the transformation of the internet into something more democratic.
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7 å¹´I remember pointing installing Mosaic and pointing it at the 10 websites that made up the internet at that time (everything else was bulletin boards or compuserve / AOL.
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