A friend and colleague from Melbourne (.au) recently e-mailed some humorous recollections marking the 10th anniversary of NCSA Mosaic. “Does that make you feel old?”
Not really.
After all, those are all Internet Years and you can not so easily convert them to Dog Years, then divide by 7 and subtract 3…
As it hints at from the old home page or nearby, it was October 1993 when a colleague handed me a floppy disk (likely 800k). Jim said, “Alan, you’re into the Internet, try this program called Mosaic“.
Well I did. I was immediately hooked and saw that all this effort to try and create hypertext learning content in HyperCard and Toolbook was not worth it when you could easily do it with a lowly text editor and a simple construct called HTML.
I had actually toyed with the WWW in text browsers the year before but had not seen anything interesting besides some arcane physics articles from CERN.
But a visual browser did it all. In one fell swoop I took in the NCSA Beginner’s Guide to HTML and in a few steps I had set up a server using MacHTTP (it still exisits as software!) running on a Mac SE/30.
We have not stopped our presence on the web since- see the full history, a trip through several server platforms, on our server stats site.
You can also read about what we thought early on in our August 1994 issue of the MCLI Labyrinth, our center’s publication on instructional technology (in priont and web since 1992 and still up as the mcli Forum)
A decade of Mosaic. And last time I checked from the evolt browser archive, the NCSA Mosaic 1.0.3 (the first one I ran) still runs on my Mac.
See you in 10 years.
