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b r o w s i n g

This was in total contrast to any of the other student developers. Marc was not so much interested in just making the program work as in having his browser used by as many people as possible. The was, of course, what the Web needed.

The resulting browser was called Mosaic. In February 1993 NCSA made the first version available over the Web. I tried it at CERN. It was easy to download and install, and required very little learning before I had point-and-click access to the Web. Because of these traits, Mosaic was soon picked up more rapidly than the other browsers. Mosaic was much more of a product.

It troubled me in a way that NCSA was always talking about Mosaic, often with hardly a mention of the World Wide Web. Perhaps it was just pure enthusiasm.

I was scheduled to give a presentation to the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Chicago in March, which had put up a server as SLAC had done. I decided I would visit NCSA as well, since it was only a few hours' drive away.

While in Chicago I met Tom Bruce, a stage manager turned systems administrator turned programmer who had recently cofounded the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University, to provide online legal information and law findings. He thought the Web was just what the institute needed to distribute this information to the legal community. He had realized that most lawyers used IBM PCs or compatibles, which ran the Windows operating system, and would need a browser. So he had written Cello, a point-and-click browser for Windows. It was at alpha release (an early test version) in March, and he had come to Chicago to give a talk to the legal community about it. For the first time, people could see the Web in its multicolor, multifont glory on the world's most widespread computing platform.

I found Tom in an auditorium just after he had finished his talk. His laptop computer was still on, with its screen projected onto a big movie screen at the head of the room. There he demonstrated Cello to me, the two of us sitting alone in this big