A December 1994 settlement forced Clark and Andreessen to pay millions and change the company name. It didn’t work.ĭespite their attempts not to run afoul of the university, Illinois sued the startup for intellectual property infringement. So, that was a challenge.” Netscape Rising Bina remembers: “We had to start from scratch and be ten times better.
Mosaic browser code#
“I didn’t want a single line of code from, because that’s how we were going to stay out of court,” Clark says. For starters: The University of Illinois, where Bina and others still studied, held intellectual property rights to the original Mosaic as part of a university policy that’s still in effect today. They ran into roadblocks almost immediately. On April 4, 1994, Clark and Andreessen formed Mosaic Communications Corporation. “ was a first draft anyway by a bunch of students,” Clark says. But they were talented programmers and had made a revolutionary web browser once. Clark tells PM that he was initially skeptical, since it amounted to handing jobs to his partner’s friends. Out of ideas, Andreessen recommended that they simply hire the Mosaic team, who were all graduating and needed jobs. Nintendo was interested, but wanted a large ownership stake in Clark and Andreessen's venture. The Japanese gaming behemoth was on the cusp of announcing the new “Ultra 64,” known stateside as the Nintendo 64. Steve Kagan // Getty ImagesĪndreessen and Clark approached Nintendo first. Mosaic would become the foundation for almost all web browsing.
There just wasn’t enough bandwidth,” says Bina, “Of course, I was completely wrong.” “At the time, I that this was a terrible idea because it was going to break the internet. Where there once was dull, blocky text, there was now eye-popping pixelated color photos. Through the use of color photos, sound bites, video clips, and, most notably, hyperlinks, it made web browsing a point-and-click affair. What made Bina’s and Andreessen’s creation so popular was that it did it in a “pleasurable” way, as described by Wired in 1994. These early web-surfing applications were sort of like index cards with tightly packed text information on a single page, and they only ran on certain platforms.Īfter the Illinois team launched Mosaic, it immediately became the web’s most popular browser because of its user-friendly design.
Mosaic browser software#
“He gave me his sales pitch.on his vision of what the internet could be.”īrowsers, an software application used to locate and display webpages, did exist prior to 1993.
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