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[music] NCSA was, kind of a special place,
right? One of those things that happens

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very infrequently where there's lots of
energy, a large amount of resources,

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visionary leadership, and a lot of free
space for people to play. Larry recognized

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from the beginning and we all loved the
idea that these small little things on the

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desktop were really the gateways for
everybody to the big machines in the

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background. And that all of this would
turn into one cloud behind the, the

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screen, yet we needed to figure out how to
get the user involved in as much as

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possible. Initially, our interest was in
synchronous tools when were thinking of

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collaboration tools. So, we were building
something called NCSA collage which was a

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set of tools that worked and one of the
big deals was that they worked across the

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three platforms. The X windows for the
Unix people the Windows environment and

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the Mac. And that was one of the things
that was sort of part of the underlying

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culture there was he wanted to make them
available to as large a community as

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possible. So, started working on
collaborative tools and there was a set of

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people and each of the each of those
machines that's working to make it

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possible for people to share in real time
images of their data, the spreadsheets of

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their data and papers that they had run
across interesting references to with

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their colleagues who were remote from them
geographically. So, that's the context in

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which Dave Thompson who was one of the
developers, one of the X windows

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developers, the lead X windows developer,
I think for the collage tool pulled down.

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One of the early web browsers. And I, it
was the one from slack. He went through

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the effort of getting it working and
brought it in and showed it to Marc

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Andreesen and I. And both of us looked at
the screen. Dave described what he had in

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front of us. And we said, we can do better
than that. That's a complicated system and

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the interface looks terrible and Dave said
that it was a real pain for it, for him to

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get it working, for him to download it,
install it, compile it, and everything.

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And it only works on an X Windows box and
wouldn't it be cool if it worked across

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all three of the boxes and if there was
something that was just a plug and go like

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the rest of our tools. Mark and Eric were
working on that, the first generation of

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NCSA Mosaic and this was the next Windows
app and nobody was working yet on the

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Windows or the Mac version. And we saw the
first version of that come out, when was

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it, early '93, late '92 and it was
probably early '93. And the response, of

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course, was fantastic. It's wonderful to
be able to just click on something and see

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it right away, and indeed, the combination
of hyperlinks in a document as far as

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navigation and retrieval of documents as a
user interface is just great. And a lot of

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people got it immediately especially
people that were working with the tools at

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NCSA and the companies. I remember an HP
exec coming in one time and Marc and Eric

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had written a little filter that took Unix
documentation and made it into HTML and

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made all of the references into links. And
they went to, they hit an HP site and the

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execs said, where is this coming from,
because he was able to see all of his HP

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documentation there in the room at NCSA
and navigate through it real easily. And

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he said, well, you've got three or four
folks back there that have put up httpd

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servers. You may not know what those are
yet and, he said, I never heard of this,

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and said, but this is the kind of thing
that is probably going to be really useful

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in the future for people who are trying to
manage documentation in a distributive

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fashion yada, yada, yada, right? And went
on with the story like that. And this guy

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was bouncing up and down in his seat. And
this was the kind of response that we got

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with it. In '93, late '93, early '94,
there's this full suite of mosaics that

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work across the X Windows, the Mac, and
the Windows system. And that's the point

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at which the guy who was the p resident at
the time of the Internet Association, said

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NCSA has fired a shot heard around the
world. Because it's available now across

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all these platforms and anybody can use
it. And, we saw, you know, an exponential

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growth in the number of HDTV servers and
the amount of traffic yada, yada, yada.

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All that stuff went on there. And, Tim of
course, Tim Berners-Lee at this time,

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would say, wel, he had seen an exponential
growth from the very beginning and he's

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right. We're both right. We had seen it
from the time we brought out the browsers

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and they certainly helped with it. But
there was already an underlying

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exponential I think that was going on in
people being able to put up their

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materials easily with HTML and do all
that. I remember sitting in rooms with

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commercial folks that came in and pitched
to us. And I'd bring the whole team in the

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whole. Software development group and
said, listen to these guys and, you know,

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tell me what you think about this. And we
were, nobody was sure what it was going to

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do and there were people who started off
building browsers and just kind of never

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got off the ground. It wasn't until the
Netscape effort started up that there was

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sufficient energy and sufficient
resources, I think, to really get on and

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ride and push and, and, you know, crank up
a group of X hundred developers in a

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matter of months and then they were, you
know, quickly overshadowed by the effort

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that Microsoft put into it. I remember one
of the Netscape guys saying I came back

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from a meeting with some folks up in
Seattle and they said that Microsoft now

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had, this is when Netscape was riding at
the top of its form, right, top of the

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game. This guy says, Microsoft just told
me that, somebody from Microsoft just said

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that they've got like 2,000 developers
working on this. He said, at that point I

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realized that we were, you know, going to
have some difficulties. And we, of course,

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always felt that there should be more than
one browser and so we wanted to see,

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because we were interested in standards
and openness right at the time if one, if

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there's only one browser, then that
company is to determine what the standards

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are. And there were all kinds of hassles
early on about putting in different

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features and the browsers driving the
standards rather than the standards

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driving the browsers and all this kind of
stuff. So, we wanted some diversity but,

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nobody, I don't think in '93, maybe by
'94, but in '93, we were still amazed with

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what we had and amazed at the response,
and just tickled pink, thrilled with the

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whole idea of this being something that
was a lot of people were going to find

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useful and that we were going to have a
lot of fun playing with. Yet, no real

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sense, everybody talked, we talked about
all the possibilities, but we had no real

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sense that it would take off and simply
monetize so quickly. If you go back and

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you know, ask people who were sitting in
front of machines in 1993, '94, or '95,

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alright, and you said, you remember the
first time that you used Mosaic, right? Or

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do you remember the first time you used a
browser, if it wasn't Mosaic. And the vast

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majority of them that I, that I've run
into say, yeah, I can remember. [music]