The Mosaic browser

Marc Andreessen wrote the first version of X-mosaic at NCSA(National Center for Supercomputer Applications) over the christmas break in 1992. Throughout 1993 and 1994 it grew explosively in popularity as the World Wide Web became well known in the computer world. Mosaic's introduction of inline images (the "img" tag) is widely considered to be a critical step in the evolution of the World Wide Web. It was in 1994 or so that the World Wide Web, and the Internet, began to become household words. In large, mainly due to the mosaic browser.

Several of the mosaic developers (including Andreessen) left NCSA, and in mid-1994 formed Mosaic Communications Corporation. As part of an agreement with the University of Illinois, which owns a trademark on the name "Mosaic", the company was later that year renamed to Netscape Communications Corporation, perhaps you have heard about them.

Development and innovations with NCSA mosaic continued, and NCSA continued actively participating in the development of various web-related standards such as HTML and HTTP through the end of 1996. the Windows version of the browser had the strongest development team in those days. You'll never hear it acknowledged by Microsoft or Netscape, but the first really good implementation of tables was done in mosaic for windows in late 1994. there are many other features of NCSA mosaic for windows that have never been equalled in other browsers to this day.

By the end of 1996, web browser development was clearly outside the scope of NCSA's research mission, having moved so far into the commercial world. The project was officially closed in January 1997.