Networking and Internetworking - Guide to Cloud Computing for Business and Technology Managers - page 59

retrieve, and display the Web pages on the local machine. The user can then
click on hyperlinks on Web pages to access further relevant information that
may be on an entirely different continent. Berners-Lee developed the first Web
browser called the World-Wide Web browser. He also wrote the first browser
program, and this allowed users to access Web pages throughout the world.
The early browsers included Gopher developed at the University
of Minnesota and Mosaic developed at the University of Illinois.
These were replaced in later years by Netscape, and the objec-
tive of its design was to create a graphical-user interface browser
that would be easy to use and would gain widespread acceptance in
the Internet community. Initially, the Netscape browser dominated the
browser market, and this remained so until Microsoft developed its
own browser called Internet Explorer. Microsoft's browser would even-
tually come to dominate the browser market, after what became known
as the browser wars. The eventual dominance of Microsoft Internet
explorer was controversial, and it was subject to legal investigations in
the United States. The development of the graphical browsers led to the
commercialization of the WWW.
The WWW got off to a slow start. Its distinctive feature, the ability to jump
to different resources through hyperlinks, was of little use until there were
at least a few other places besides CERN that supported it. Until editing soft-
ware was written, users had to construct the links in a document by hand,
a very tedious process. To view Web materials, one used a program called a
browser (the term may have originated with Apple's HyperCard). Early Web
browsers (including two called Lynx and Viola) presented screens that were
similar to Gopher's, with a list of menu selections.
Around the fall of 1992, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina began discuss-
ing ways of making it easier to navigate the Web. While still a student at the
University of Illinois, Andreessen took a job programming for the National
Center for Supercomputing Applications, a center set up with NSF that was
also the impetus for the original ARPANET. By January 1993, Andreessen and
Bina had written an early version of a browser they would later call Mosaic,
and they released a version of it over the Internet. Mosaic married the ease of
use of Hypercard with the full hypertext capabilities of the WWW. To select
items, one used a mouse (thus circling back to Doug Engelbart, who invented
it for that purpose). One knew an item had a hyperlink by its different color.
A second feature of Mosaic, the one that most impressed the people who first
used it, was its seamless integration of text and images. With the help of oth-
ers at NCSA, Mosaic was rewritten to run on Windows-based machines and
Macintoshes as well as workstations. As a product of a government-funded
laboratory, Mosaic was made available free or for a nominal charge.