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A decade of web browsing
By Anand Parthasarathy
On March 14, 1993, Marc Andreessen, a 21-year-old student at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, United States, gave a final tweak to the browsing software that he and six others had been working on for months — the first product ever, that enabled users of the nascent Internet to simultaneously "look" at both text and pictures on Web pages. He uploaded the browser on to the website of the National Centre for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), an institution that made its home within the university, and in a far-reaching decision, made the browser freely downloadable by anyone, anywhere, for personal use. It was called "Mosaic" and it exploded the reach of the Internet as we know it today.
Starting with a few thousand computers linked to the original ARPANET, the network bequeathed to the academic community by the U.S. Defence Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), Net usage has surpassed every single prediction made and the world's web-enabled are currently estimated to be about 700 million.
A year after the NCSA Mosaic was launched, Andreessen left the university to co-found a small start-up with James Barksdale and Jim Clark, taking most of the original browser team from Illinois with them. They bought back the source code of their own Mosaic work from NCSA for $2 million and used it to create Netscape Navigator, the first commercially marketed web browser — and many would say still the best.
However, in one of the greatest ironies of Internet history, Netscape's deal with NCSA was non-exclusive and a few years later, Microsoft tapped the same source code to create Internet Explorer (IE), then gave it away free, bundled with its Windows operating system for the desktop PC. It was a commercial masterstroke that almost decimated Netscape as well as most other priced browser products.
Today IE is to be found on eight out of 10 PCs. Netscape, which is now in its 7th edition, was acquired in 1999 by the world's largest Internet Service Provider (ISP), America On Line (AOL), for $10 million.
India on the Net
Thanks to early action by the National Informatics Centre (NIC) and what was then the Department of Electronics (DoE), India latched itself to the global Web quite early. NIC created the first link to 160 other Internet-connected countries on September 20 1994. The first Indian Net was the DoE's ERNET for the Educational and Research sector.
However, this remained the exclusive preserve of some 20-30 higher educational institutions and government departments. The average Indian was "e-nabled" only after the public sector Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd
(VSNL) launched Internet services in the major metros almost a year later, on August 14, 1995. It remained the sole provider till November 1998 when Satyam Infoway opened the doors to private services. Today, just over 200 public and private ISPs serve a customer base of 40 lakh subscribers and since connections are traditionally shared in this country by at least five others, the number of Internet-enabled is estimated at 200 lakhs or one out of every 50 Indians. A few lakh more are served by the approximately 12,000 Internet cafes and `cyber dhabas' that have come up largely through private initiative to provide access to the Net at around Rs. 20-25 an hour, the cheapest rates anywhere in the world.
Just about everybody takes for granted that at any such facility, one can click open a Netscape or an Explorer window and reach out within seconds to the wider world of text, graphics, photos video and sound. Andreessen, Clark and Barksdale, moved in different directions after Netscape's demise as a separate company and many of their subsequent ventures were victims of the dotcom bust.
But this week, a decade after their pioneering venture, the media has caught up with all three, getting them to relive those exciting days when they helped create yet another, in a long line of tools, including
E-mail, Hypertext language, MP3 music formats and Wireless-enabled protocols that continue to refine and enhance the communication wonder of the century.
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