The Netscape Story: From Mosaic to Mozilla

[ Thanks to e5rebel
for this link. ]

“It seems appropriate that on the last day of the year I should
be writing about the end of an era. The news that AOL is ceasing to
support its Netscape browsers is not only that, it is the end of a
story that encompassed just about every major trend in the rise of
the Internet as a mass medium, and that was crucially important for
free software.

“Netscape Navigator was originally called Mosaic Netscape, a
reference to the first popular browser, Mosaic, which came from
National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. That had been written by
a group of coders led by Marc Andreessen, who later teamed up with
one of the founders of Silicon Graphics, Jim Barksdale, to set up
Mosaic Communications. Not surprisingly, this name didn’t go down
to well with the University of Illinois, who threatened the company
with legal action. The latter backed down, and changed its name, as
well as that of its browser…”

Complete Story