
25 years ago today, NCSA Mosaic 1.0 was released - espeed
http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/enabling/mosaic/versions
======
zhte415
Reading this today on Firefox on a laptop running Linux.

22 years ago (when using the internet for the first time) it would have been
on Netscape running on a green screen Unix terminal in university lab.

I used my first credit card to buy a CD from Amazon in the US. Never thought
it would work. But then 2 weeks later a brown box arrived in my halls of
residence in London and... well that really did change the world. Not the CD,
the browser.

A lot has changed. It has been very incremental and lots of stop-starts, and
there have been many pains (supporting standards) but it feels like yesterday.
Nice to take stock and look back.

~~~
dbcurtis
Ha ha, very similar story. I was working with one of the guys that I managed,
and he showed me a book relevant to our project that I decided I needed to
buy. “Darn, can’t get away at lunch today to hit the bookstore.” He says:
“Order it from Amazon.” so I say: “What is Amazon?” him: “It’s a web store.
Here is the URL.” me: “I don’t have a web browser”. Him: “ftp the tarball for
Mosaic from NCSA and do the standard ./configure; make all; and you will be
good to go.”

Here is the thing that really impresses me about Bezos. In a world where Sili
Valley engineers were spreading Mosaic by word of mouth and just getting to
about 50% penetration among engineers, Amazon was already a store.

------
mark_l_watson
I used a text based browser for a year or so. Then, when Mosaic was released,
I thought “wow they are really on to something here.”

I was happy with the lynx like text browser but seeing embedded images was
mind blowing.

In the 1980s the Internet was gopher and ftp sites. At work I collected
indices of what was on different ftp sites. I was sort of like a human search
engine.

~~~
Fnoord
Was it easier or harder to find the information you were after back then?

~~~
fit2rule
Back in those days I literally maintained a bookmarks folder with every web
page of any value, anywhere, on the Internet.

That quickly stopped. Bookmarks were functional for about a year, and then
quickly became useless. The new hot was the search engine that'd just do the
work of finding new sites to read for you.

~~~
Fnoord
Navigation-wise?

~~~
fit2rule
Not sure what you mean by navigation?

Since it was possible I've pretty much just used "print to PDF" to save web
pages I like, which means I can use tools such as 'ls' and 'grep' to find
stuff I only remember by a few key words, and I have an easy to maintain
filesystem with tons of stuff that is easily and readily available, offline,
which is great .. plus instead of having to deal with a proprietary format for
saving URL's, its just PDF's. And boy is it fun to mine data out of my
collection of everything interesting I've ever read online since .. I guess ..
1997 ..

~~~
Fnoord
Utilising the browser to navigate through the web compared to its ancestors.

My first browser was Netscape Navigator 3. I remember how little RAM I had,
couldn't keep many windows open (tabs did not exist yet) assuming Windows 9x
didn't crash. Some webpages were annoying with blink, horrible colour
combinations, many (bloated) pictures, or they had MIDI, GIFs, etc. What I'm
wondering about is was all that harder to browse then say Gopher or Usenet?
Why is it a website like HN with so little fluff is a breeze to use while
Aliexpress or Google News sucks?

~~~
fit2rule
The web has a serious case of bloat disease. Sure, back then, site were
smaller - we didn't have all the bandwidth we have today. But as bandwidth
grew, so did the bloat.

------
limeblack
You can still run it on Debian[0].

[0] [https://github.com/alandipert/ncsa-
mosaic](https://github.com/alandipert/ncsa-mosaic)

------
sien
There is a very good podcast episode on this from The Internet History
Podcast:

[http://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2014/01/mosaic/](http://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2014/01/mosaic/)

Well worth a listen for anyone who remembers Mosaic.

There is now a book out from the podcast series too.

~~~
darkmuck
This podcast is fantastic! I've listened to every episode. I wish there were
more similar podcasts or other forms of media that chronicle the history of
the internet and related tech.

------
justinator
<blink>Thanks for the memories</blink>

~~~
mixmastamyk
Believe Netscape added that, while Mosaic added <img …>.

~~~
wdr1
Yep.

[http://www.montulli.org/theoriginofthe%3Cblink%3Etag](http://www.montulli.org/theoriginofthe%3Cblink%3Etag)

------
lettergram
I work right next to the NCSA building, still amazed by some of the work they
do. Especially, the move to add corporate partners.

Ironically, still bitter about losing out on all the upside of the web
browser. The university of Illinois is pretty notorious for missing out on the
upside of their work: the browser, transistor, LED, MRI, and others...

~~~
greglindahl
U Illinois got stock in Netscape, even though no NCSA Mosaic code was used in
Netscape's codebase.

~~~
ncsacodger
That was Netscape's story at the time when they were being sued for copyright
infringement, but it was fairly obvious that there was a certain amount of
code copying. There were error messages with the same misspellings in them...
Anyhow Netscape decided to settle the lawsuit and give UI the Netscape stock.
Interestingly UI then licensed Mosaic to a company called Spyglass, and that
version went on to become Internet Explorer 1.0.

------
godzillabrennus
Wasn't there some strange IP ownership conflicts between this version and the
one that eventually became Netscape?

Not to mention there was the swirl society of Netscape:
[http://totic.org/nscp/swirl/swirl.html](http://totic.org/nscp/swirl/swirl.html)

------
ngcc_hk
Use that.

Anyone remember gopher? And the two links protocol, with backlinks.

~~~
chrissnell
Yes, I do. I loved Gopher. When I was a senior in high school in 1992, a buddy
and me discovered Gopher. We were a really unlikely pair of nerds: I was into
skateboarding and my buddy was a starting lineman on the HS football team. For
the post-internet generation here, you have to understand just how unusual and
uncool it was to be into computers in the early 90s. Even the nerds at my
school weren't into BBSes or the early Internet but we were, in a closeted
sort of way. So, every day at lunchtime, we would go home to our respective
houses and get on a BBS and chat with each other just because the technology
was so cool.

One day, we were on a local Waffle BBS (I think it ran on BSD-OS or something
like that) and we read about a dialup at the local university that could be
used to get a gopher client. You would dial into their terminal server and
this gave you unauthenticated telnet access anywhere. From there, we would
telnet to liberty.wlu.edu, some kind of *nix server (probably Sun) that had a
no-auth-required login that would get you a Gopher client. From there, we
would browse the Gopher-web, which was pretty amazing for 1992. We'd visit
gopher servers in Sweden, Japan, Germany, everywhere. We believed that when we
went from the WLU gopher (in Virginia) to a Gopher server in Sweden, that a
modem was dialing between those two locations and so on. We were really
worried that we'd get in huge trouble for racking up tens of thousands of
dollars in long distance.

Yeah, I loved gopher. :)

~~~
stevekemp
I remember explaining to my parents what email was, and at one point one of
them asked if it cost more money to send an email to a recipient that was
further away. That's a similar level of cuteness.

------
mschaef
I was in college at the University of Texas at the time, and my first exposure
to Mosaic was in their new Student Microcomputer Facility. (Aka the SMF or
'Smurf lab.)

The SMF was a large and brand new ncomputer lab in the undergraduate library,
equipped with something like 200 computers... 50 of them were Mac Quadras with
17 (!) inch monitors and the rest were Dell Dimension machines... 486DX2/66,
local bus video, and 15 inch screens. These all had Mosaic installed with a UT
page of some sort as the home. So, clicking on the icon brought up this
hypertext display with this colorful 3-D rendered banner image at the top. It
looked a lot like the hypertext help facility that Microsoft introduced with
Windows 3.0, but better and network connected, and open, and accessible. Truly
next generation stuff at the time, in particular in comparison to the purely
character based internet that came immediately before. (Think telnet, archie,
ftp, etc.)

------
InclinedPlane
I started using NCSA Mosaic in the computer lab at college in 1994. It was a
very different world online back then, there was so much potential and so much
hope. Even so it was hard to imagine the degree to which the internet and
especially the web would become an omnipresent part of the lives of most
people in the developed world, for good and bad. Certainly the idea that there
would be billions of pocket computers might as well have been science fiction.

~~~
mschaef
> Certainly the idea that there would be billions of pocket computers might as
> well have been science fiction.

There were a lot of people working on the ideas behind this kind of portable
computing, even then. Just a few examples:

* Electronic pocket calculators were a thing back into the early 1970's

* HP had a portable almost-PC called the 95LX that was released in '91, and the Newton was also early 90's.

* Companies like Sharp were making pocket computers back into the early 80's. Some of these were PDA-style organizers, but there were also some that just ran BASIC on a one line display

* PenPoint and Pen windows were also early 90's.

Maybe the scale would have seemed incredible, but the concepts were very much
in flight at the time.

------
JeanMarcS
I installed Mosaic on the computer I add in my office at University.

It was 1994.

Am I that old ??

~~~
billwashere
I was 2 in 1994. So I skipped over using Mosaic and straight to IE5...

------
pishpash
Miss the animated icon, such drama when browsing over dialup.

~~~
kalleboo
Browser throbbers were great. The Netscape "meteor shower" felt like it added
some cyberpunk mystique to the nighttime browsing experience.

NCSA Mosaic:
[https://66.media.tumblr.com/619788fdd7d7c121578500013afd7ba7...](https://66.media.tumblr.com/619788fdd7d7c121578500013afd7ba7/tumblr_mgq6c7VjRE1rrl4xho1_r1_400.gif)

Netscape:
[https://i.stack.imgur.com/oqMri.gif](https://i.stack.imgur.com/oqMri.gif)

------
tmoot
It's too bad we lost blue waters.

------
sys_64738
Still my default browser!

------
kizer
Was there frequently while finishing up school last year.

Today, I assume we'd need to fill every office in that building with a
talented engineer to produce a competitive browser from scratch.

------
rmason
I can truthfully say that downloading Mosaic changed my entire life. It was
1994 and after I finished installing Trumpet Winsock on my Windows 3.1 machine
I finally got it running.

Started browsing and all of a sudden realized that it was 5 am and I was due
at work in 3 hours! Four years later I'd quit my job as an ag agronomist for a
fertilizer company and betting on my hobbyist programming skills started
building web businesses. It hasn't been at all a smooth ride, tell people at
times I felt like I took an oath of poverty ;<). But it's a journey than I am
quite glad I started.

------
ChrisArchitect
watch this scene from Halt and Catch Fire where they talk about the browser as
the doorway to the possibilities of the 'World Wide Web'. It's great
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mi_fKu9WTAE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mi_fKu9WTAE)

~~~
ChrisArchitect
and also an actual scene from the season 4 opening montage showing them
discovering Mosaic itself
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_l4dRfY-t0I&t=4m54s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_l4dRfY-t0I&t=4m54s)

------
ddunkin
I still have a 3 1/4" floppy of the 1.0 release, right next to a sealed CD of
Netscape 4.0. Good times.

~~~
einr
PC floppies come in 3.5" or 5 1/4"

;)

~~~
fit2rule
Well, there was the 3" floppy for a while too, you know ..

EDIT: Really: 3", not 3.5".

~~~
einr
There was, but not so much on PC compatibles.

------
chipaca

        snap install mosaic
    

:-)

------
fit2rule
I remember the day very well .. I'd just gotten an SGI machine for work, and
was one of the few who could run Mosaic "out of the box" without faffing
around with WinTrumpet and TCP/IP hacks and so on .. I recall the thought
process that went "oh so this is just a fancy gopher, really, for transferring
files without going through FTP or whatever.." straight to "oh, shit, it can
preview images and I don't have to open them separately" .. to "this is the
future, all computers sharing docs freely and easily to each other in a user-
friendly way, which doesn't involve FTP or whatever.."

It was such a great experience, there were orders placed in the office that
day for a few more Indy's for the execs, since nobody sensible wanted a Mac in
those days and Windows was just out of the question.

Then, someone noticed that Mosaic was released for Linux too, and suddenly the
Indy's weren't so hot but a 486 loaded with RAM would do .. the web truly
transformed the hardware world as well as the online information society, too.

------
quickthrower2
The bold (<B>) and italics (<I>) tags now work.

------
agumonkey
dearly missed

------
brian_herman
And the internet was born!

~~~
NeedMoreTea
No, not at all. There was a lot more to the internet than just the web which
was a later arrival to the net. The internet had been around for years. TCP/IP
had been standardised for a decade or so.

http was just one of many protocols, and should never have ended up being used
for everything, it's not suited. There was plenty of reason to be online years
before Mosaic too. They just didn't yet have pretty pictures, ads and tracking
built in to every request. :p

~~~
scholia
True, but the browser brought a GUI and ease of use. More people could use a
browser to run ftp than could -- or at least, would -- run ftp.

