How the Internet Was Tamed

By Philip Elmer-DeWitt

If the Internet lately has seemed more accessible to ordinary mortals, it is largely the result of two inventions: the first is the World Wide Web, an organizing system within the Internet that makes it easy to establish links between computers around the world; the second is a program called Mosaic, a "browser" that presents the information in the Web in the point-and-click format so familiar to Macintosh and Windows users.

What the computer user sees when he fires up Mosaic is a document that looks something like a magazine page. It has nicely formatted text. It has bulleted lists of places and things. It has icons and images. But it also has, hidden within those words and images, links to other locations on the Internet. Certain words on the page are highlighted in blue. When the user clicks on blue words, the program reaches across the Internet, grabs the next page of information -- wherever it happens to be -- and displays it on the screen. Click on the words "World Wide Web," and boom, you're in Geneva, Switzerland, where the Web was developed. Click on "California Yellow Pages," and boom, you're looking at a list of Bay Area companies.

"Mosaic is both the road map and the steering wheel," says Marc Andreessen, the 23-year-old programmer who co-authored the original version of Mosaic while an undergraduate working at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. Because the program was developed with government money, the students gave it away free. It soon spread through the network like a virus. A million copies were downloaded from the NCSA computer system in the first year. Another million were distributed in the next six months. Meanwhile, the number of Web "sites" you can visit with Mosaic has exploded, from a few dozen a year ago to more than 10,000 today. You can find everything on the Web from Hubble Space Telescope images to soft-core porn movies to the latest Rolling Stones hit. Even the Vice President of the U.S. has his own Web site.

Suddenly everybody's looking for a way to cash in on Mosaic's popularity, including Andreessen. In April he teamed up with Jim Clark, former chairman of Silicon Graphics, and started a new company called Mosaic Communications. Clark and Andreessen lured all but one of the original Mosaic team to Silicon Valley for some intense programming sessions. Last week they unveiled the first result: called Mosaic NetScape, it is faster and slicker, and it allows users to pass sensitive information such as credit-card numbers safely over the network.

) For all its effort, Andreessen's team faces stiff competition. It comes both from Mosaic look-alikes, like MCC's MacWeb and Spyglass's Enhanced Mosaic, and from a slew of new programs, like Netcom's NetCruiser and James Gleick's Pipeline, that work almost as well as Mosaic but don't require an elaborate Internet connection. If Mosaic has a weakness, it is that most computer users are not prepared to go through the hoops necessary to get it up and running. To address that problem, O'Reilly & Associates, a publisher based in Sebastopol, California, has introduced a product called Internet in a Box that puts everything a user needs to establish a direct Internet connection in one easy-to-use package. "Mosaic is sort of the VisiCalc of the Internet," says Tim O'Reilly, referring to the original electronic spreadsheet program that kicked off the desktop-computer revolution. "The Lotus 1-2-3 has yet to be invented."

With reporting by David S. Jackson/San Francisco