Biggest Thing in 50 Years!

I was recently asked, “What one thing would you say has had the most profound effect on telecommunications in the past fifty years?”

The general answer around the table was, as one might imagine, “the Internet.” I thought about this for a moment and realized this answer was too simple. Citing the Internet as having the most profound effect on telecommunications is akin to comparing the impact of oxygen to mankind.

Without a doubt, the Internet has had a profound effect, but more specifically I believe it was the introduction of the Mosaic browser, that has had the most profound effect on telecommunications in the past fifty years. On March 14, 1993, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) Software Development Group introduced the Mosaic 0.10 for X-windows. Mosaic was (is) a simple, yet powerful graphical browser that allowed users to essentially travel through the world of electronic information using a point-and-click interface. Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) was developed between 1989 to 1991, but it didn’t really take off until there was a useful browser to display inline images. With the introduction of the Mosaic browser the internet exploded with activity. The browser for the fist time brought the world wide web to the common man. One didn’t have to possess programming knowledge to access information on the internet because the complex methods used to extract the information were hidden within the browser application. What’s more, Mosaic was free for non-commercial use.

Also, about the time Andreessen and Bina were introducing Mosaic to the world, Congressman Rick Boucher authored a law, which allowed the first commercial traffic on the Internet. These two events led to the enormous growth of online business (e-commerce). The Internet provided an unprecedented opportunity on a global basis for businesses to interact with and reach out to customers without limitations such as physical location or time zone. The overwhelming success of e-commerce would not have been possible at that point-in-time without the Mosaic browser. According to the Computer Desktop Encyclopedia, Mosaic was “the app that caused the web to explode.”

Mosaic…the biggest thing to happen to telecommunications in 50 years!