Mosaic

Developed by Marc Andreessen, a twenty-one-year-old computer programmar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

On January 29, 1993, Andreessen made a historic annoucement to the www-talk mailing list. "By the power vested in me by nobody in particular, alpha/beta version 0.5 of NCSA's... World Wide Web browser, X Mosaic, is hereby released."

During 1993 and 1994, the Mosaic web browser, originally developed for Unix, was released first for Windows and Macintosh. The Web phenomenon had begun, and growth in traffic suddenly became exponential as new users flocked to the easy-to-use Internet. During 1994, the number of web-sites grew from a few hundred to more than ten thousand.

Source: Wishart/Bochsler: Leaving reality behind, 2003.

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