This week marks the 20th anniversary of the publication of a story in the New York Times titled A Free and Simple Computer Link. This article described a new software application called Mosaic that was developed at the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in Urbana Champaign.
For those who don't remember it, Mosiac was the first multimedia web browser. Mosiac was not the first Internet communication technology, being preceded by email, Gopher, FTP, WAIS, Telnet, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), UNIX Talk, MOOs and MUDs, FTP and the text-only version of the web. But in many ways, Mosaic marked the beginning of the transition of the Internet from an academic and military tool into what we know it to be today. When Mosiac launched the multimedia web, we all started getting on the Internet treadmill.
This article played an important role in my personal journey. In the fall of 1993, I was a senior at the University of Michigan with no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I clipped this article during fall semester finals and over winter break spent many late night hours exploring the Internet. I was fascinated by the idea of hyperlinked knowledge spread across the globe. I knew almost immediately that I had to find a way to turn my newfound fascination into a career.
So on this 20th anniversary, I invite you to read this story and then take a few minutes to reflect on these questions:
- Where were you twenty years ago and what were you doing?
- How much has the Internet changed your life over the last twenty years?
- What might the next twenty years hold in store for all of us?
Wishing you and those in your life a very happy and healthy New Year and 2014.
Randy Horton
Managing Principal, 94 Westbound Consulting
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A Free and Simple Computer Link
December 08, 1993, By JOHN MARKOFF
Think of it as a map to the buried treasures of the Information Age.
A new software program available free to companies and individuals is helping even novice computer users find their way around the global Internet, the network of networks that is rich in information but can be baffling to navigate.
Since its introduction earlier this year, the program, called Mosaic, has grown so popular that its use is causing data traffic jams on the Internet. That worries some computer scientists. But Mosaic's many passionate proponents hail it as the first "killer app" of network computing -- an applications program so different and so obviously useful that it can create a new industry from scratch.
"Mosaic has given me a sense of limitless opportunity, which is the reason that I went into computer science in the first place," said Brian Reid, a computer researcher who is the director of the Digital Equipment Corporation's Network System's Laboratory in Palo Alto, Calif.
Read the rest of this story at the New York Times website: http://www.nytimes.com/1993/12/08/business/business-technology-a-free-and-simple-computer-link.html
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