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Key Points
The browser-based Internet was “invented” by Tim Berners-Lee.
Marc Andreessen created the first widely used “browser” which eventually became Netscape.
The Internet Explorer (IE) was a “copy-cat” Microsoft product that eventually eclipsed Netscape.
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The “invention” of the Internet browser is assigned to various individuals depending on who one reads, but true credit belongs to Tim Berners-Lee at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, commonly known as CERN. Written at the end of 1990, the first browser was released in early 1991 and spread through the high-energy physics community (the people who interacted with CERN) as a communication tool for the Internet which had previously relied on a so-called “command line” interface (Fig. 6-1).
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Berners-Lee’s browser was written for the NeXT operating system (NeXT was a company run by Steve Jobs in the 1990s) and other browsers were subsequently written for Unix and Macintosh systems. However, it was the 1994 release of the Mosaic/Netscape browser that marked the beginning of the Internet age.
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While at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Marc Andreessen wrote the Mosaic browser for Unix in 1993. This browser was subsequently licensed to Netscape Inc., founded by Andreessen and Silicon Graphics founder Jim Clark, which went public with beta releases of the Netscape browser in 1994. Netscape had a graphical user interface (GUI) and relied on the hypertext markup language (HTML) to communicate from a client (the user’s computer) to a server (i.e., Yahoo) computer over the Internet (Fig. 6-2).
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Netscape’s stock soared on the day it was released and many assign the start of Internet boom to that date. Microsoft was slow to react to the release of Netscape, and Bill Gates initially viewed the Internet as a short-lived phenomenon. However, the company subsequently developed internet explorer (IE), which it released as a free component of its Windows 95 operating system (in 1995). Netscape led the innovation in browser features during a series of rapid paced releases of new browser versions during the mid-1990s. Some of its breakthrough features included frames (the “windowpanes” in current generation browsers), incorporation of Java and Javascript (industry standard browser programming tools) into the functions of the browser, and the development of the “plug-in” paradigm (by which information such as files, video, animation, and sound are handled directly through the browser rather than a separate program) (Fig. 6-3).
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