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.