In my mind, the most overlooked contributor to the rise of the Internet as we know it today is the NCSA, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. The NCSA is a computing research partnership at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Research at the NCSA is the missing link between what Tim Berners-Lee was doing at CERN and Netscape, the early dotcom darling. NCSA opened January 15, 1986.
Popularizing the Internet
NCSA was working on Internet-related stuff even before Tim Berners-Lee was. In 1986, NCSA released NCSA Telnet, a client for connecting remotely to other computers over TCP/IP using a protocol called Telnet. Telnet is obsolete now because it transfers in plaintext with no encryption. But SSH wasn’t invented until 1995. Before SSH, Telnet was what you used to connect to remote systems. And since NCSA Telnet was public domain and distributed with source code, you either used NCSA Telnet or a derivative of it to make those connections.
But the Internet as we know it today is largely based on the World Wide Web, which was Tim Berners-Lee’s invention. Berners-Lee invented HTML, the web browser, and the web server. But his applications only ran on NeXT computers. The Web needed to be cross-platform to really take off.
The web wasn’t exactly a supercomputing application. But in the United States at least, the work to figure out how to bring the web to more platforms fell to the NCSA, for lack of any better place for it. So the hotbed of Internet activity in the United States in the early 1990s was in the middle of Illinois, two hours south of Chicago, three hours northeast of St. Louis, and two hours west of Indianapolis. Al Gore’s infamous claim to have created the Internet partially originated from him funding the NCSA.
NCSA’s web server
NCSA developed an early web server called NCSA HTTPd, which became the basis for a much more famous web server, Apache. This very web site runs on Apache. The process name for Apache is still called httpd, 30 years later. It’s a lot more hip and chic to run Nginx these days, but Apache is still the second leading web server with 31% of the market.
Apache was a fork of NCSA HTTPd that started in early 1995. The two projects coexisted for a time, but Apache quickly became the leading web server.
NCSA’s web browser
Just as importantly in the short term, NCSA developed a pioneering web browser called Mosaic.
NCSA Mosaic was first released for Unix platforms January 23, 1993. Ports to Windows and Mac OS followed in September, and an Amiga port arrived in October. I would have been all over that Amiga port, if only I had known. The first few times I used the Web, I used Mosaic. But it was on whatever Unix workstations were open in the computer lab on campus. Like most tech-savvy students in 1993, I got Internet access as soon as I could and was using e-mail and FTP. Then I heard you could go to one of the labs on campus that had Unix machines and use the Internet in a graphical way. That was Mosaic.
The NCSA’s contribution to the Internet
Don’t get me wrong. If the NCSA hadn’t been writing all of these Internet applications, someone, somewhere would have. But we don’t know when or where. By the fall of 1993, we had all of the elements we needed for the modern Web. We had a good web server that could run on multiple platforms, and we had a web browser that could run on every major platform of the day, including Amiga. Nobody was left out.
By the end of 1993, we could start thinking about things like commercializing the Web and bringing it mainstream, because nobody was left out. In 1994 and 1995, we started getting the first wave of commercialization, and lots of good things happened because of that. But people also started getting left out. Beware of people who say that private industry has all of the answers. The Internet is a prime example of something good we have today that started out as a public-private partnership involving public universities, including but not limited to the University of Illinois, home of NCSA.
Today, when people talk about the history of the Internet, they tend to go straight from Tim Berners-Lee to the browser wars. NCSA Mosaic was the leading browser for a comparatively short time, approximately a year. But it was a crucial missing link. Netscape didn’t contain any NCSA Mosaic code, but several key developers of NCSA Mosaic went to Netscape, where they used what they learned at NCSA to build a better browser. Internet Explorer started out as a somewhat customized version of Spyglass Mosaic, which was a direct descendant of NCSA Mosaic and contained some NCSA Mosaic code. Without Mosaic, we wouldn’t have have had the two leading browsers of the browser wars.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
“The Internet is a prime example of something good we have today that started out as a public-private partnership involving public universities”.
Marina Mazzucato wrote persuasively about the role of the public sector in fostering innovation in “The Entrepreneurial State”, which was the Financial Times book of the year in 2013. In the book she talks about how almost every key feature of the iPhone – internet connectivity, GPS, touch screen, Siri- had its genesis in publicly-funded research.
What’s totally left out of this story is that Marc Andreessen was one of the programmers who stole the work that was made possible by the NCSA to become a billionaire. Judging by Andreessen’s opinions and writings, it would not surprise me at all that he was a sub-mediocre programmer too.
You can’t really say “someone, somewhere would have written those internet applications”. Maybe eventually, but the NCSA provided extremely expensive supercomputing resources with super-highspeed networking to programmers to build the applications of the future, all funded by the government.
Andreessen stole all that, and became the crude and nasty, vicious hardcore right-wing Trump supporting billionaire he is today.
Yeah I debated how much to talk about Andreessen in this one. I’m not a fan for most of the same reasons you mention. What he took with him from NCSA to Netscape would be worth exploring when I revisit this blog post again. I do take the opportunity to dunk on him in a few other blog posts.