1993 was a very good year for computer geeks.
Grunge was fashionable. Version 1.0 of the Linux kernel was about ready to make its debut. Intel"s snappy new 66-MHz Pentium processor had just been introduced.
Bands of space marines were happily stalking and killing vile spawn from hell on their own computers, compliments of the groundbreaking PC game, Doom, which had just been released. The Internet was nearing its 25th anniversary. The economy was slowly staggering back to its feet again after a two-year recession.
And everyone was going to be making a whole lot of money real soon -- businesses were just starting to take notice of the Internet, sparked by the April 1993 release of a Web browser named Mosaic.
Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina led the Mosaic team at the University of Illinois" National Center for Supercomputing Applications. NCSA released beta copies of Mosaic in February of 1993. Version 1.0 was released a month later, on April 23.
To mark the occasion, NCSA had a birthday bash for Mosaic Tuesday night at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Illustrious guests including Dan Reed, director of NCSA; Ray Ozzie, founder of Groove Networks; Vinton Cerf, co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols on which the Internet is based; and Rick Rashid, senior vice president for research at Microsoft, discussed the past and probable future of the Internet.