[ Thanks to Penfold for this link.
]
“Since plenty of other people will be picking over that
action-packed half-decade, I though I’d do something different: a
look at the history leading up to that launch.“Firefox’s roots go back even further than the Mozilla project,
to the browser Mosaic. This was released in 1993, and was written
by a bunch of academics led by a certain Mark Andreessen at the
National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It was notable in
several important respects.“irst, it was free – not just as in beer, which might have
been expected for a research project, but also as in freedom.
Actually, this wasn’t full free software, since the source code was
only available for “research and education purposes on a request
basis”, but it was a start.”