Traffic Toolshop Times

Quick!  Identify the correct answer concerning the birthplace of the internet browser:

1. A secluded, tiny office in the Silicon Valley region of California.
2. The basement of a computer science building at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
3. In the lab of a technology company located in North Carolina’s Research Triangle.
4. On a university campus in the heart of Illinois.

If you chose “D” then pop that cork and start celebrating!  The National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, a sleepy Midwestern university town is indeed the birthplace of technology that made the Internet user-friendly, thereby making it a daily necessity of life for hundreds of millions of individuals.

University of Illinois student Marc “Andreessen and a full-time salaried co-worker Eric Bina worked on creating a user-friendly browser with integrated graphics that would work on a wide range of computers. The resulting code was the Mosaic web browser.”[1]

A while after graduating Andreesen and co-founder Jim Clark started a company in Mountain View, California. They soon changed the name from Mosaic to Netscape Navigator to stay in good graces with the University of Illinois.

This concept of taking the World Wide Web that Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues at CERN had created and combining it with a user-friendly browser that appealed to the masses resulted in the internet boom heard around the world.  “Mosaic is clumsy but extraordinarily fun. With Mosaic, the online world appears to be a vast, interconnected universe of information. You can enter at any point and begin to wander; no Internet addresses or keyboard commands are necessary. The complex methods of extracting information from the Net are hidden from sight. Almost every person who uses it feels the impulse to add some content of his or her own. “[2]

Think about it.  If you had to type long lines of code just to go to a website would you do it?  Navigator (a.k.a. Mosaic) enabled everyone to have an enjoyable ride on the information superhighway. Many other browsers are now in use but it is Netscape Navigator that brought the Internet from a limited use tool to the mass market commodity we all enjoy today.