NCSA Mosaic was one of the first widely used graphical web browsers, developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois. NCSA credits “Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina” with the work and describes Mosaic as “the first published browser that automatically displayed pictures along with text, as in the pages of a magazine layout or an illustrated book.” That single feature, inline images, is what set Mosaic apart from the text oriented browsers that came before it.
Mosaic mattered because it was both visual and easy to install. NCSA records that the software spread rapidly: by December 1993 the center reports that over 5,000 copies were being downloaded each month and that it was receiving hundreds of thousands of email inquiries weekly.
The recognition was immediate. NCSA notes that the New York Times put Mosaic on the cover of its business section in December 1993 and called it “the first ‘killer app’ of network computing — an applications program so different and so obviously useful that it can create a new industry from scratch.”
Mosaic’s success directly seeded the commercial browser industry. Its developers went on to build Netscape Navigator, and Microsoft later licensed Mosaic technology by way of Spyglass for early versions of Internet Explorer, making Mosaic the common ancestor of the browsers that fought the first browser war.