Happy Birthday to You

Mosaic was released in April 1993 by the school's National Center for Supercomputing Applications as free software. It became the foundation for today's Web browsers, such as Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Netscape Communications' Communicator. Mosaic's lead developer, Marc Andreessen, became one of Netscape's founders and took some of his UI colleagues with him.

"It was an accelerator for the whole Internet," said Larry Smarr, the former director of the computing center. "It sort of took the Internet to the next level of capability."

Before Mosaic, access to the Internet and the World Wide Web was limited to text. The new software brought a way to integrate images and sound with words.


I remember Mosaic, seeing it out of the corner of my eye in 1993 in some small office in a small college in Indiana.

At first, I was staring at this putty-gray slate on the monitor, a bland slab that wasted screen space. Suddenly, text appeared and then a kaleidoscope of a picture, the pixels in COPS-style fuzz out, barely gaining resolution until the image turned from stained glass to something stuck between lifelike and crude iconography. A college logo, a cartoony rendering of the weather outside? I can't remember. Color, text, shape all the gray slab...long before anyone could sculpt with HTML, so the image was at the top of the page and the text ran like water...down the page, in mini rivers left to right.

No one said, "This is a web page" or "This is the Internet." This moment of communications history was lost on us, Trojan Horsed as yet another booting-up application. In fact, I was blase about the whole affair, and I still was a year later when I was in graduate school and I got a hold of a text-based Web tool, Kermit. As a variant on the text-only Lynx, Kermit was a step backwards, but this was in 1994, when schools and a few other outlets were connected to the Web. Getting online was the domain of the cybersavvy...its main star, the leather and chrome clad hacker, who could negotiation the tricky netherworld of BBS. The Internet, complete with foreign magic portals like "telnet," "gopher" and "FTP," was a jungle for us newcomers. Yet, the whiz-bang of Gibson's cyberspace looked flat boring with no pictures or a larger heterogeneous playground to interact with. Few got addicted to it (including me, with the idea of getting e-mail and chatting with random folks across the world), but really, why send e-mail to a classmate when he was a couple floors down, ready for a beer and pizza?

In the early 90s, the Web was primordial soul of text, images and little sound. DejaNews archived virtually everything on Usenet, the Grand Central Station for the Web back then. No one knew what the Web was for. No one rushed to pour money into it. It was just a way to toss words on an invisible wall, and see what happened when they were read. Using Kermit, the cyberworld looked like a giant Infocom game. Before the web got hot, it was Brigadoon, and I kind of wish it never got found and turned into a mall/casino/adult book store/Speaker's Corner.

Mosaic helped people "see" the Web, attracting more people to it and eventually the hullabaloo that gassed and crashed the New Economy. Now, the Web is background noise. Google has more than three trillion pages indexed. E-mail is a godsend we never realized we needed. Every night, I sit in front of a high-tech lingerie of a Macintosh, complete with scandalous see-through curves, writing for my personal Weblog stage-show. It's a far cry from the stegosaurus of Mac I ogled back then, watching the basic cave etchings of Web communication appear in front of me.

If you want to "see" what the Web world looked like through Mosaic's eyes, go here and contain your laughter, like when you see home movies of your folks at the beach before they had you, and you're sitting there embarrassed with how alien they looked in worn-out Kennedy-era go-go fashions and obsolete slicked-back/puffed-up coiffure. Remember, the Web was trying really hard to look good, but no one gave it a mirror (or an idea of what to look like) before it walked out the door 10 years ago.