MOSAIC

Post one: A short report on MOSAIC, the "first" web browser created for my Multi Genre Research Paper. Although it is a first draft in this form, I would like all comments and thoughts. Good or bad.



The beginning of web browsing as we know it: MOSAIC

By Ryan Holzapfel

MOSAIC is the first web browser to incorporate web page viewing, File Transfer Protocol(FTP), multimedia file viewing, and many other things we take for granted in our web browsers of today. Before MOSAIC, there were separate programs for web page viewing and FTP sites. For instance, if you wanted to go to http://www.example.com and look at their webpage, and it listed a document for download that you wanted. Then you would have to go to a FTP site to retrieve the file. Lets call it ftp://example.com. Now, you would have to open your FTP client and go to that address to download the file. MOSAIC made this process obsolete.

MOSAIC was created by the NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications). The project was headed by Marc Andreessen. MOSAIC was first released in 1993. In 1994, NCSA assigned the rights to Spyglass Inc. Shortly after that, Spyglass Inc. licensed the rights to the technology to Netscape and Microsoft which were interested in developing their own browsers, similar to MOSAIC. In 1997, MOSAIC development was discontinued.

MOSAIC is still available for download on the internet, but the web is too advanced for it to work anymore.