Andreessen, Marc

1971–

Co-Founder, Netscape

Marc Andreessen is best known for creating the prototype Mosaic, the first graphical browser used for accessing the World Wide Web. Mosaic and its successor, Netscape Navigator, were important innovations in Internet history, and helped popularize the World Wide Web early in its existence.

Andreessen was born in a small town in Wisconsin to parents Pat, a customer-service rep at Lands' End, and Lowell, a sales manager for a seed company. In the fifth grade, Andreessen taught himself computer programming from a book. A year later, he used a computer in his school library to write a calculation program with which to do his math homework; unfortunately, the program was deleted that very night, when the school janitor turned off the power to the building. Soon afterward, his parents bought Andreessen a Commodore 64 computer, and he started programming in earnest.

After high school, Andreessen went on to study computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and took a part-time job writing Unix code for the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) for $6.85 an [Page 9]hour. There, he and another NCSA programmer, Eric Bina, wrote a program designed to make accessing the World Wide Web easy. Until then, using the Web meant typing in arcane lines of UNIX code and textual commands. Andreessen and Bina's program, which they called Mosaic, allowed users to “point and click” on a graphical user interface (GUI), a process most of us take for granted today. The innovative program utilized the hyperlink, which allowed users to access files and documents by clicking on underlined, colored links rather than typing in reference numbers, and it enabled image files to be incorporated into the Web page itself. The program was a huge success; when NCSA made the free Mosaic browser available in January 1993, it logged two million downloads within its first year.

Mosaic was written in about six weeks, on weekends and at night. However, because Andreessen and Bina were university employees when they wrote the program, Mosaic was the property of the University of Illinois. When Andreessen graduated in 1994 with a B.S. in computer science, he left the Midwest and headed out to Silicon Valley, where a healthy computer culture was in full swing. He was in the area for only a few weeks before he received an email from Silicon Graphics, Inc., founder Jim Clark regarding the possibility of starting a technology company. Clark's original idea was to use the browser as an interface for an inexpensive interactive TV system, but Andreessen convinced Clark that the Internet, with its millions of potential users, was a more lucrative opportunity.

The two recruited Bina and a few other programmers from NSCA, and with Jim Barksdale on board as CEO, they founded Mosaic Communication Corporation in 1994. Their goal was to build a better, more secure version of Mosaic, to be distributed free of charge and thus create a large user base. The program had to be rewritten from the bottom up; no code created at NSCA could be re-used. Even so, the University of Illinois charged them with stealing the product. The company changed its name to Netscape Communications Corporation, and reached a financial settlement with the university.

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