NCSA Mosaic

.1, displaying the Mosaic Communications Corporation (later Netscape) website In 1991, the High Performance Computing Act of 1991 was passed, which provided funding for new projects at the NCSA, where, after trying ViolaWWW, David Thompson demonstrated it to the NCSA software design group. This inspired Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina – two programmers working at NCSA – to create Mosaic. Andreessen and Bina began developing Mosaic in February 1991 for Unix's X Window System, calling it xmosaic. Marc Andreessen announced the project's first release, the "alpha/beta version 0.5," on January 23, 1993. Version 1.0 was released on April 21, 1993. Ports to Microsoft Windows and Macintosh were released in September. and was notable for adding support for forms, thus enabling the creation of the first dynamic web pages. From 1994 to 1997, the National Science Foundation supported the further development of Mosaic. Marc Andreessen, the leader of the team that developed Mosaic, left NCSA and, with James H. Clark, one of the founders of Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI), and four other former students and staff of the University of Illinois, started Mosaic Communications Corporation. Mosaic Communications eventually became Netscape Communications Corporation, producing Netscape Navigator. Mosaic's popularity as a separate browser began to decrease after the 1994 release of Netscape Navigator, the relevance of which was noted in The HTML Sourcebook: The Complete Guide to HTML: "Netscape Communications has designed an all-new WWW browser, Netscape, that has significant enhancements over the original Mosaic program." However, by 1998, the Mosaic user base had almost completely evaporated as users moved to other web browsers. ==Licensing==

The licensing terms for NCSA Mosaic were generous for a proprietary software program. In general, non-commercial use was free of charge for all versions (with certain limitations). Additionally, the X Window System/Unix version publicly provided source code (source code for the other versions was available after agreements were signed). Despite persistent rumors to the contrary, however, Mosaic was never released as open source software during its brief reign as a major browser; there were always constraints on permissible uses without payment. , license holders included these: • Amdahl Corporation • Fujitsu Limited (Product: Infomosaic, a Japanese version of Mosaic. Price: Yen5,000 (approx US$50) • Infoseek Corporation (Product: No commercial Mosaic. May use Mosaic as part of a commercial database effort) • Quadralay Corporation (Consumer version of Mosaic. Also using Mosaic in its online help and information product, GWHIS. Price: US$249) • Quarterdeck Office Systems Inc. • The Santa Cruz Operation Inc. (Product: Incorporating Mosaic into "SCO Global Access", a communications package for Unix machines that works with SCO's Open Server. Runs a graphical e-mail service and accesses newsgroups.) • SPRY Inc. (Products: A communication suite: Air Mail, Air News, Air Mosaic, etc. Also producing Internet In a Box with O'Reilly & Associates. Price: US$149–$399 for Air Series.) • Spyglass, Inc. (Product: Spyglass Mosaic, essentially licensing the Mosaic name, as it was written from scratch, not using NCSA's Mosaic code. Relicensing to other vendors. Signed a deal with Digital Equipment Corp. to ship Mosaic with all its machines. Signed a deal with Microsoft to license Spyglass' code to develop Internet Explorer) ==Features==

Robert Reid notes that Andreessen's team hoped: Mosaic is based on the libwww library and thus supported a wide variety of Internet protocols included in the library: Archie, FTP, gopher, HTTP, NNTP, telnet, WAIS. but never passed the test state. Mosaic was the first browser that could submit forms to a server. == Impact ==

Mosaic led to the Internet boom of the 1990s. In the October 1994 issue of Wired magazine, Gary Wolfe notes in the article titled "The (Second Phase of the) Revolution Has Begun: Don't look now, but Prodigy, AOL, and CompuServe are all suddenly obsolete – and Mosaic is well on its way to becoming the world's standard interface": Reid also refers to Matthew K. Gray's website, Internet Statistics: Growth and Usage of the Web and the Internet, which indicates a dramatic leap in web use around the time of Mosaic's introduction. but Mosaic quickly subsumed and displaced them all. Joseph Hardin, the director of the NCSA group within which Mosaic was developed, said downloads were up to 50,000 a month in mid-1994. In November 1992, there were twenty-six websites in the world and each one attracted attention. In its release year of 1993, Mosaic had a What's New page, and about one new link was being added per day. This was a time when access to the Internet was expanding rapidly outside its previous domain of academia and large industrial research institutions. Yet it was the availability of Mosaic and Mosaic-derived graphical browsers themselves that drove the explosive growth of the Web to over 10,000 sites by August 1995 and millions by 1998. Metcalfe expressed the pivotal role of Mosaic this way: == Legacy ==

Netscape Navigator was later developed by Netscape, which employed many of the original Mosaic authors; however, it intentionally shared no code with Mosaic. Netscape Navigator's code descendant is Mozilla Firefox; the name "Mozilla" was a corrupted portmanteau of "Mosaic killer". Spyglass, Inc. licensed the technology and trademarks from NCSA for producing its own web browser but never used any of the NCSA Mosaic source code. Microsoft licensed Spyglass Mosaic in 1995 for US$2 million, modified it, and renamed it Internet Explorer. The 1995 user guide The HTML Sourcebook: The Complete Guide to HTML, specifically states, in a section called Coming Attractions, that Internet Explorer "will be based on the Mosaic program". Versions of Internet Explorer before version 7 stated "Based on NCSA Mosaic" in the About box. Internet Explorer 7 was audited by Microsoft to ensure that it contained no Spyglass Mosaic code, and thus no longer credits Spyglass or Mosaic. After NCSA stopped work on Mosaic, development of the NCSA Mosaic for the X Window System source code was continued by several independent groups. These independent development efforts include mMosaic (multicast Mosaic), which ceased development in early 2004, and Mosaic-CK and VMS Mosaic. VMS Mosaic, a version specifically targeting OpenVMS operating system, is one of the longest-lived efforts to maintain Mosaic. Using the VMS support already built-in in the original version (Bjorn S. Nilsson ported Mosaic 1.2 to VMS in the summer of 1993), developers incorporated a substantial part of the HTML engine from mMosaic, another defunct flavor of the browser. As of the most recent version (4.2), released in 2007, VMS Mosaic supported HTML 4.0, OpenSSL, cookies, and various image formats including GIF, JPEG, PNG, BMP, TGA, TIFF and JPEG 2000 image formats. The browser works on VAX, Alpha, and Itanium platforms. Another long-lived version, Mosaic-CK, developed by Cameron Kaiser, was last released (version 2.7ck9) on July 11, 2010; a maintenance release with minor compatibility fixes (version 2.7ck10) was released on January 9, 2015, followed by another one (2.7ck11) in October 2015. The stated goal of the project is "Lynx with graphics" and runs on Mac OS X, Power MachTen, Linux and other compatible Unix-like OSs. ==Release history==

The X, Windows, and Mac versions of Mosaic all had separate development teams and code bases. Unix Windows Macintosh ==See also==