Joseph Hardin: NCSA Mosaic

The Web and Internet were transformed from a medium used primarily by academics and researchers to one used by the general public. The Mosaic Web browser helped kick-start this evolution by making it very simple for users to download and install a browser and experience the Web through a simple and elegant interface on their Unix, Windows, or Macintosh computers. Although Mosaic wasn´t the first browser, it was the first that had a primary goal of ease of installation across all major computing platforms. Mosaic came from a culture of building user-friendly networking tools at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 2008, the author met with Joseph Hardin to talk about his role as manager of NCSA´s Software Development Group (SDG) in the early 1990s and the genesis, growth, and impact of the NCSA browser that became Mosaic.