I guess I started using Firefox when it was called NCSA Mosaic. A friend showed it to me at Apple in 1993, but I didn’t get what the web was good for then. (To be sure, there wasn’t much there yet.) By 1994 I was working at SGI, and marketing was exploring whether there was a product there for us, so I installed it, started using it, followed NCSA’s daily roundup of new web sites for a while. It was mind boggling – hundreds of sites, and three or four new ones every day! (Yes, those are global totals.)
By late 1994, Mosaic Communications (later renamed to Netscape, then Mozilla) was poaching employees from SGI, including quite a few people I knew.
By 1995, my girlfriend (now wife) was shocked to see a URL on the side of a bus. That was our proof that the web had gone mainstream.
Internet Explorer and Chrome didn’t exist yet, of course.
I hope I won’t come off as patronizing to someone who actually worked at SGI back in the day, but there was no relation between the Mosaic browser and Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox. Netscape was made from scratch (albeit by some of the same people who had worked on Mosaic), while Mosaic was bought by Microsoft and became Internet Explorer.
I guess I started using Firefox when it was called NCSA Mosaic. A friend showed it to me at Apple in 1993, but I didn’t get what the web was good for then. (To be sure, there wasn’t much there yet.) By 1994 I was working at SGI, and marketing was exploring whether there was a product there for us, so I installed it, started using it, followed NCSA’s daily roundup of new web sites for a while. It was mind boggling – hundreds of sites, and three or four new ones every day! (Yes, those are global totals.)
By late 1994, Mosaic Communications (later renamed to Netscape, then Mozilla) was poaching employees from SGI, including quite a few people I knew.
By 1995, my girlfriend (now wife) was shocked to see a URL on the side of a bus. That was our proof that the web had gone mainstream.
Internet Explorer and Chrome didn’t exist yet, of course.
I hope I won’t come off as patronizing to someone who actually worked at SGI back in the day, but there was no relation between the Mosaic browser and Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox. Netscape was made from scratch (albeit by some of the same people who had worked on Mosaic), while Mosaic was bought by Microsoft and became Internet Explorer.