Marc Andreessen
Mosaic and Netscape
- During his course of studies he worked at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications of the university and dealt with the open standards for WWW by Tim Berners-Lee.
- Along with Eric Bina he developed a user friendly graphical browser called Mosaic.
- According to Bina they worked for three or four days straight until they were completely exhausted and rested for an entire day.
- In California Andreessen met Jim Clark, the founder of Silicon Graphics, who was aware of the commercial possibilities of Mosaic immediately.
- They founded the Mosaic Communications Corporation together, Andreessen became vice president.
- Since the University of Illinois had a problem with the company name containing the word “Mosaic”, the name was changed to Netscape Communications and their flagship was the Netscape Navigator.
- Due to the success of Netscape, Andreessen became the child prodigy of the internet boom and was on the front cover of People Magazine and some other magazines.
- Microsoft recognized the potential of the WWW, copyrighted the Mosaic source code from Spyclass Inc. (part of the University of Illinois) and “developed” Internet Explorer.
- The resulting competition between Netscape and Microsoft is known as “browser wars”.
- In 1999 Netscape was taken over by AOL for 4.2 billion dollar.
Marc Andreesen
born in 1971 in Iowa
Studied at the University of Illinois
Enterprise Integration Technologies, Netscape, Opsware
