The release of NCSA Mosaic in 1993 is widely treated as the moment the World Wide Web stopped being a tool for scientists and became something ordinary people could use. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois, which built Mosaic, describes it as the browser that took the Web “from the domain of scientists and hackers to a cultural phenomenon that captured the interest of the masses.”
What made the difference was that Mosaic showed pictures. NCSA records that Mosaic was “the first published browser that automatically displayed pictures along with text, as in the pages of a magazine layout or an illustrated book.” Earlier browsers had treated the Web largely as hyperlinked text; Mosaic made it look like a printed page.
The adoption was fast and visible. NCSA reports that by December 1993 over 5,000 copies were being downloaded monthly, that the center was fielding hundreds of thousands of email inquiries each week, and that the New York Times had placed Mosaic on the cover of its business section, calling it “the first ‘killer app’ of network computing.”
This milestone set everything that followed in motion. The same team went on to build Netscape Navigator, and the surge of interest Mosaic created turned the Web into a commercial medium within just a few years.