It was 10 years ago today...
Posted 4/14/2003 - 4:32PM, by Ken "Caesar" Fisher  
...that Sgt. Pepper, er, uh, surfed the "world wide web" with the first official release of Mosaic, the forerunner of Netscape, IE, Opera, and every other browser that now seem to be such a large part of our lives. This Newsweek story looks back briefly at the wave that was started in spring of 1993.
 
It changed our relationship to digital information . Before browsers, the traditional on-screen desktop reflected the essentially static state of the computing environment: users and machines locked together in a virtual cubicle. But beginning with Mosaic, the metaphor changed. Using a computer didn?t mean sitting but moving?traveling or ?surfing? on a sea of information that existed beyond your personal horizon. The idea was reflected in the names of the browsers that took the baton from Mosaic. Navigator. Explorer. Spyglass. Safari.
 
Love it or hate it, the 'net is vastly different from what it was like in the fall of 1993 when I started dabbling on-line in a serious manner. Of course, back then the VAX Cluster was far more fun than the very limited, very "This is My Home Page" web, but that changed quickly. While Usenet remained my primary source of on-line interaction until 1998, it was gaming that brought to the web for entertainment rather than information. Perhaps my relative youth is to blame, but it's actually difficult for me to imagine what quotidian life was like before 10 years ago, now that checkin' my mail, reading the news, getting the forecast, checking stocks, chattin' with colleagues, etc., are all things I tend to do on-line rather than off. Here's a Happy Birthday (it's close enough) to NCSA Mosaic: we may only know a few such revolutionary programs in our time.