[ih] anybody know the history of the group at NCSA that developed Mosaic & HTTPd?

[Steve Bunch]

> 
> On Mar 11, 2018, at 6:56 PM, Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On 12/03/2018 09:37, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
>> On Sat, Mar 10, 2018 at 07:17:16PM -0500,
>> Miles Fidelman <mfidelman at meetinghouse.net> wrote 
>> a message of 25 lines which said:
>> 
>>> Berners-Lee's basic stuff,
>> 
>> It was certainly not basic, it was a real browser and, on some points,
>> he had more features than Mosaic (it was also an authoring environment,
>> not just a reading one).
> 
> The problem was that it only ran on a NeXt, which was a marvellous device
> that failed in the market. But certainly, in the High Energy Physics world
> it was of course the CERN server and client code that was installed and
> used first. On the other hand, Tim immediately saw the advantage of Mosaic
> at that time, when Unix and X-windows were growing like mushrooms. It was
> Tim personally who showed me Mosaic (on my NCD connected to CERNVAX) and
> within a day Jean-Michel Jouanigot had it running on our group server
> (dxcoms.cern.ch for those with long memories).

Mosaic used X Windows, available on any UNIX system of the time.  Eric Bina, who wrote much of Mosaic, worked on our X Windows team at the Motorola Computer Group facility in Champaign-Urbana for a couple of years before going across town to NCSA, and X Windows and graphics were second nature to him.  

We should never underestimate the power of “ease of diffusion” in whether or how fast something gets adopted.  A lot of truly great ideas die on the vine of an exotic plant when it goes extinct, while less-stellar ideas live on because the software was free and easy to port.

Steve

>    Brian
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