[music] NCSA was, kind of a special place,
right? One of those things that happens
very infrequently where there's lots of
energy, a large amount of resources,
visionary leadership, and a lot of free
space for people to play. Larry recognized
from the beginning and we all loved the
idea that these small little things on the
desktop were really the gateways for
everybody to the big machines in the
background. And that all of this would
turn into one cloud behind the, the
screen, yet we needed to figure out how to
get the user involved in as much as
possible. Initially, our interest was in
synchronous tools when were thinking of
collaboration tools. So, we were building
something called NCSA collage which was a
set of tools that worked and one of the
big deals was that they worked across the
three platforms. The X windows for the
Unix people the Windows environment and
the Mac. And that was one of the things
that was sort of part of the underlying
culture there was he wanted to make them
available to as large a community as
possible. So, started working on
collaborative tools and there was a set of
people and each of the each of those
machines that's working to make it
possible for people to share in real time
images of their data, the spreadsheets of
their data and papers that they had run
across interesting references to with
their colleagues who were remote from them
geographically. So, that's the context in
which Dave Thompson who was one of the
developers, one of the X windows
developers, the lead X windows developer,
I think for the collage tool pulled down.
One of the early web browsers. And I, it
was the one from slack. He went through
the effort of getting it working and
brought it in and showed it to Marc
Andreesen and I. And both of us looked at
the screen. Dave described what he had in
front of us. And we said, we can do better
than that. That's a complicated system and
the interface looks terrible and Dave said
that it was a real pain for it, for him to
get it working, for him to download it,
install it, compile it, and everything.
And it only works on an X Windows box and
wouldn't it be cool if it worked across
all three of the boxes and if there was
something that was just a plug and go like
the rest of our tools. Mark and Eric were
working on that, the first generation of
NCSA Mosaic and this was the next Windows
app and nobody was working yet on the
Windows or the Mac version. And we saw the
first version of that come out, when was
it, early '93, late '92 and it was
probably early '93. And the response, of
course, was fantastic. It's wonderful to
be able to just click on something and see
it right away, and indeed, the combination
of hyperlinks in a document as far as
navigation and retrieval of documents as a
user interface is just great. And a lot of
people got it immediately especially
people that were working with the tools at
NCSA and the companies. I remember an HP
exec coming in one time and Marc and Eric
had written a little filter that took Unix
documentation and made it into HTML and
made all of the references into links. And
they went to, they hit an HP site and the
execs said, where is this coming from,
because he was able to see all of his HP
documentation there in the room at NCSA
and navigate through it real easily. And
he said, well, you've got three or four
folks back there that have put up httpd
servers. You may not know what those are
yet and, he said, I never heard of this,
and said, but this is the kind of thing
that is probably going to be really useful
in the future for people who are trying to
manage documentation in a distributive
fashion yada, yada, yada, right? And went
on with the story like that. And this guy
was bouncing up and down in his seat. And
this was the kind of response that we got
with it. In '93, late '93, early '94,
there's this full suite of mosaics that
work across the X Windows, the Mac, and
the Windows system. And that's the point
at which the guy who was the p resident at
the time of the Internet Association, said
NCSA has fired a shot heard around the
world. Because it's available now across
all these platforms and anybody can use
it. And, we saw, you know, an exponential
growth in the number of HDTV servers and
the amount of traffic yada, yada, yada.
All that stuff went on there. And, Tim of
course, Tim Berners-Lee at this time,
would say, wel, he had seen an exponential
growth from the very beginning and he's
right. We're both right. We had seen it
from the time we brought out the browsers
and they certainly helped with it. But
there was already an underlying
exponential I think that was going on in
people being able to put up their
materials easily with HTML and do all
that. I remember sitting in rooms with
commercial folks that came in and pitched
to us. And I'd bring the whole team in the
whole. Software development group and
said, listen to these guys and, you know,
tell me what you think about this. And we
were, nobody was sure what it was going to
do and there were people who started off
building browsers and just kind of never
got off the ground. It wasn't until the
Netscape effort started up that there was
sufficient energy and sufficient
resources, I think, to really get on and
ride and push and, and, you know, crank up
a group of X hundred developers in a
matter of months and then they were, you
know, quickly overshadowed by the effort
that Microsoft put into it. I remember one
of the Netscape guys saying I came back
from a meeting with some folks up in
Seattle and they said that Microsoft now
had, this is when Netscape was riding at
the top of its form, right, top of the
game. This guy says, Microsoft just told
me that, somebody from Microsoft just said
that they've got like 2,000 developers
working on this. He said, at that point I
realized that we were, you know, going to
have some difficulties. And we, of course,
always felt that there should be more than
one browser and so we wanted to see,
because we were interested in standards
and openness right at the time if one, if
there's only one browser, then that
company is to determine what the standards
are. And there were all kinds of hassles
early on about putting in different
features and the browsers driving the
standards rather than the standards
driving the browsers and all this kind of
stuff. So, we wanted some diversity but,
nobody, I don't think in '93, maybe by
'94, but in '93, we were still amazed with
what we had and amazed at the response,
and just tickled pink, thrilled with the
whole idea of this being something that
was a lot of people were going to find
useful and that we were going to have a
lot of fun playing with. Yet, no real
sense, everybody talked, we talked about
all the possibilities, but we had no real
sense that it would take off and simply
monetize so quickly. If you go back and
you know, ask people who were sitting in
front of machines in 1993, '94, or '95,
alright, and you said, you remember the
first time that you used Mosaic, right? Or
do you remember the first time you used a
browser, if it wasn't Mosaic. And the vast
majority of them that I, that I've run
into say, yeah, I can remember. [music]