NCSA NEWS

NCSA Mosaic Named Top Product By Network Computing Magazine

released November 7, 2000

What product did the most to shape today's networking industry? NCSA Mosaic, according to Network Computing magazine. The magazine named Mosaic the most important product of the last 10 years in its special 10th Anniversary edition release Oct. 2. The Apache Web Server, which is based on NCSA's HTTPd Web server, placed sixth on the magazine's most important products list.

The magazine editors noted that Mosaic—although it was never sold—earned its place in history by introducing entirely new concepts first to the network computing world and soon after to all of society. "Rarely has a new technology brought about changes of this magnitude," stated the Network Computing article on Mosaic. "Without the Web, we would not have found our way to this revolution, and without a graphical browser, we would not have found our way to the Web." The magazine added that Mosaic's multiplatform support demonstrated the universality of the Internet and the software's adoption of multiple application protocols within a single viewer enabled users to leverage a variety of technologies and access all that the Internet offers.

Mosaic was released in early 1993 and offered free to the public from the NCSA website. Within a year, its user base had grown to several million worldwide. Several members of the original NCSA Mosaic team left the center to form Netscape Communications. In addition, more than 100 companies licensed Mosaic software through Spyglass, Inc., including Microsoft, which led to the development of Microsoft Internet Explorer.

The magazine credited Web servers—the first of which was NCSA HTTPd—with fueling the Internet explosion of the mid 1990s. It praised the Apache server as a product that "provides an extremely flexible and feature-rich open source alternative to those Web servers offered by industry leaders."

Other products to make Network Computing's top 10 products list include Novell's NetWare 3.x, the Cisco Systems 7500 router, and Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. The full article is available at http://www.networkcomputing.com/1119/1119f1intro.html.

 

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