How the World Got Wired

Chapter 9 — Mosaic, the Pivot

In the autumn of 1992, at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, a tall, restless undergraduate was working a part-time job in a public computer lab. His name was Marc Andreessen. He was six feet four inches tall. He spoke very fast and had a habit of pacing while he thought. He was twenty-one years old.

He was earning, by the hour, about what you might earn now for babysitting.

The computer lab Andreessen worked in was called NCSA — the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. It was part of the University of Illinois, and it was paid for, almost entirely, by the United States National Science Foundation. Which means it was paid for by the American public. Andreessen was a student employee. He had a desk. He had a computer. He had a small group of other students he was friendly with. And he had, somewhere in the back of his mind, the feeling that the World Wide Web — which you read about three chapters ago — was about to become something much bigger than the few thousand scientists currently using it could possibly imagine.

He just had to make it usable by normal people first.

The Web Was Not Yet Pretty

In 1992, the web existed, but barely. Tim Berners-Lee had turned on the world’s first web server two years earlier. By the autumn of 1992, there were perhaps two or three dozen web servers in the world. The total number of web pages in existence was probably in the low hundreds.

To visit one of these pages, you needed a browser — and the browsers that existed in 1992 were not very good.

Berners-Lee had written the first browser himself, on his NeXT computer at CERN. But it only ran on NeXT computers, which were extraordinarily rare. Other people had written simple text-only browsers that ran on Unix workstations — the kind of computers used by scientists, with green text glowing on black screens. These browsers worked, but they could only show text. Not images. Not colors. Not the way you would actually want to look at things. And they were hard to install. You had to be a fairly skilled engineer just to get one running.

Andreessen and a colleague at NCSA — a more experienced programmer named Eric Bina — decided to build a different kind of browser.

They wanted one that ran on the computers normal people actually had, which in 1992 mostly meant Windows machines and Macintoshes. They wanted one you could install by clicking a single button, without any technical knowledge. And they wanted one that could show images directly inside a web page, mixed with the text, the way the pages of a magazine mix pictures and words.

This last idea — putting images inside web pages — sounds obvious to you. Every web page you have ever looked at has pictures in it. But in 1992, this was a strange and slightly controversial idea. Berners-Lee himself had not really intended images to be a central part of the web. He had imagined the web as a tool for sharing documents, mostly scientific ones, with words. Andreessen and Bina thought, instead, that images would be the thing that made the web feel alive — that turned it from a tool for scientists into something the rest of the world might want to use.

They were right.

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