On This Day 17 Years Ago

From Wired Magazine:

April 22, 1993: NCSA Mosaic 1.0, the first web browser to achieve popularity among the general public, is released. With it, the web as we know it begins to flourish.

The web in the early 1990s was mostly text. People were posting images, photos, and audio or video clips on web pages. But these pieces of “multimedia” were hidden behind links. If you wanted to look at a picture, you had to click on a link, and the picture would open in a new window.

A team of students at the University of Illinois’ National Center for Supercomputing Applications, or NCSA, decided the web needed an experience more stimulating and user-friendly than that, so they set to work to build a better browser. Borrowing design and user interface cues from some other early prototype browsers, they went through a handful of iterations before arriving at the final 1.0 release April 22, 1993.

The result, NCSA Mosaic, was the first web browser with the ability to display text and images inline, meaning you could put pictures and text on the same page together, in the same window.

It was a radical step forward for the web, which was at that point, a rather dull experience. It took the boring “document” layout of your standard web page and transformed it into something much more visually exciting, like a magazine.

Read the rest here.