Happy Birthday Mosaic: World's First Popular Graphical Web Browser Turns 20


Bangalore: Back in 1993, accessing the web was more of a geek thing. With maximum internet speed hitting 28.8Kbps, there was difficulty in accessing character-based interface programs such as Lynx and WWW; then Mosaic came in and changed it all, inspiring the current generation web browsers.

Though not a first graphical web browser, that honor goes to ViolaWWW, which however, only worked on Unix workstations using the X Windows System and Cello, the first graphical Web browser for Windows— Mosaic was hugely credited for popularizing web and taking it to common users.

Mosaic was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign beginning in late 1992 and releasing the browser on 29 April 1993. Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, both staff at NSCA, originally designed and programmed Mosaic for Unix's X Window System called xmosaic.

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