The folks at Digital Web Magazine have pointed to an article on cnet which celebrates Mosaic's 10th birthday. For you young whippersnappers, Mosaic was the precursor to Netscape. More importantly, as cnet writes, "Mosaic was the first to be widely adopted and introduce the masses to the Internet." Read the article if you like, but you should probably download cnet's four day (registration required) to get the bigger picture.

As those of us who were around (some just from the sidelines) for the Netscape IPO know, life was certainly different in the early days, as this chart from cnet shows:

Alas (she says, kicking herself), I don't have any screen captures of the work I was doing in those early days (I did my first web page in early '94...I can find a link to it, but since the company's been taken over four times and the product retired, it's gone). The earliest I can find is from a presentation that Nick Sabadosh and I did for an STC conference in 1996 to brief technical writers about the visual interface in web page design (amazing how much of this stands up 7 years later). But for fun, check out an example page rendered in early Netscape compared to the same page rendered on Mosaic 2.4. And the CSS folks complain today :).

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