Background
David Thompson tested ViolaWWW and showed the application to Marc Andreessen. Andreessen and Eric Bina originally designed and programmed NCSA Mosaic for Unix's X Window System called xmosaic Funding for the development of Mosaic came from the High-Performance Computing and Communications Initiative, a program created by the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991.
Development of Mosaic began in December 1992. Versions 0.1–0.9 were the first developed and released. Version 1.0 was released on April 22, 1993, followed by two maintenance releases during summer 1993. A port of Mosaic to the Commodore Amiga was available by October 1993. Ports to Windows and Macintosh had already been released in September. Version 2.0 of NCSA Mosaic was released in December 1993, along with version 1.0 releases for both Windows. An Acorn Archimedes port was underway in May 1994.
Marc Andreessen, the leader of the team that developed Mosaic, left NCSA and, with James H. Clark, one of the founders of Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI), and four other former students and staff of the University of Illinois, started Mosaic Communications Corporation. Mosaic Communications eventually became Netscape Communications Corporation, producing Netscape Navigator.
Spyglass licensed the technology and trademarks from NCSA for producing their own web browser but never used any of the NCSA Mosaic source code. Microsoft licensed Spyglass Mosaic in 1995 for US$2 million, modified it, and renamed it Internet Explorer. After a later auditing dispute, Microsoft paid Spyglass $8 million. The 1995 user guide The HTML Sourcebook: The Complete Guide to HTML, specifically states in a section called Coming Attractions, that Explorer "will be based on the Mosaic program" (p. 331). Versions of Internet Explorer before version 7 stated "Based on NCSA Mosaic" in the About box. Internet Explorer 7 was audited by Microsoft to ensure that it contained no Mosaic code, and thus no longer credits Spyglass or Mosaic.
Read more about this topic: Mosaic (web Browser)
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