Mosaic, We Knew You Well
We’re reminded by the nice folks at Vanity Fair (How the Web Was Won) that, among other Internet-related notable anniversaries, this year marks the 15th year since the Mosaic browser made its appearance.
Not coincidentally, this summer also marks the 14th summer since we first discovered the Web. (It took a year for the Windows port to reach us here in River City.) Anybody who has anything to do with Web work probably has a story about their First Time, and there’s nothing especially remarkable about ours. But it is a fond memory, and we’re finding that we’ve reached an age group whose members do like our little reminiscences.
The local independent bookseller (now long since absorbed by Borders, sadly) was running a sale on a funny thing called Internet in a Box, which turned out to be a relatively inexpensive way to get Mosaic and a workable TCP/IP stack on one’s Windows 3.1 box, and to get hooked up with an ISP. (This was also back in the good old days when disk compression software let you expand your available hard drive space by almost a factor of 2—Oh! the fun we had with those extra 40 megs!)
So, we bought the Box, loaded the browser and the stack, signed up with the local ISP (which hasn’t, remarkably, been absorbed by anybody—still local, still independent, and still our bandwidth supplier of choice) for a dial-up connection, and revved it all up.
Can’t remember where we started our browsing adventure, nor how it was that we got to an Australian academic site. What sticks in the memory is the mind-blowing (at the time) realization that this document, this “paper” that was slowly downloading and rendering on our little Windows machine in our tiny attic apartment—that this was a document that by rights “lived” in Australia, on the other side of the world. And there it was, appearing right before our eyes.
Of course, it wasn’t too long before we found our way to other wonders—the Cambridge Coffee Pot is especially memorable—but it was that first realization that this Web thing could teleport information from the other side of the Earth, on demand that drew us into a technological love affair that hasn’t ever ended.